Letters archive

In considering how life can influence its own evolutionary path (12 October, p 32) , Bob Holmes is overly conservative. If our understanding of evolution and organic chemistry is correct, then a complex molecule – DNA – has, by evolving the code necessary to make a human brain, become capable of looking down on itself …

Your call for caution in the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as a research tool for assessing and explaining brain function was timely (19 October, p 32) , particularly as it is widely used to pinpoint male-female differences in cognitive abilities and performance. Such work has raised a variety of ethical and research-quality …

Neuroscience is not in crisis (p 3) . Neuroimaging, a small part of neuroscience, is a fast-evolving approach in which methodological practice is advancing in leaps and bounds. There are still many challenges, and it is true that ensuring sufficient statistical power to produce reliable results is one of them. Another challenge is confronting the …

Quentin de la Bédoyère (19 October, p 30) wonders how atheists square moral obligation with a wholly materialistic universe. The answer from this atheist is: ethics, compassion and self-respect. London, UK

Talk of the end of dollar supremacy is about a century too soon, despite the possibility of US government debt default and financial crisis (19 October, p 4) . As your report pointed out, the British pound was only overtaken by the dollar as the world's reserve currency in the 1970s. What was not mentioned …

It was witty to print Albert Lightfoot's letter disputing the conjecture that observatories were built for religious reasons, – and then follow it with one from Steve Blyth suggesting that agriculture may also have been the result of religious congregations (12 October, p 30) . Raymond Tallis uses the term "Darwinitis" for the misuse of …

Biologist Steven Rose highlights a recent genome-wide association study seeking genes associated with educational attainment ( Science , vol 340, p 1467). He says the genes found accounted for a mere 0.02 per cent of the difference (26 October, p 28) . That figure applies only to the single most significant gene located by the …

The good news in the article on reducing airline greenhouse gas emissions (12 October, p 6) relates exclusively to commercial air transport. Unless its impact is negligible, which I doubt, military air transport must be included in the equation. NATO usage is heavy, and war zones must also be causing damage. Brentwood, Essex, UK

What is paradoxical, if not contradictory, in Derek Suchard's hypothesis – that socialised healthcare undermines belief (19 October, p 30) – is that the history of social care has religious roots, yet seems to encourage the very secularisation that corrodes those roots. Manchester, UK