Letters archive

I was intrigued by your claim that science is not a belief system (4 April, p 5) . Surely what it is not is a faith system. Science is belief based on evidence: faith, on the other hand, is belief irrespective of evidence. Science gives rise to beliefs that fit the existing evidence, allowing for …

The article "We are what we vote" may have missed a disturbing aspect of populist politics (4 April, p 24) . Brain scans appear to show very clear differences between psychopaths and people who feel empathy. But when normal people were led to believe that they were observing a person suffering and that this person …

The negativity bias associated with voting may also explain why two-party politics in the UK has declined over several decades. The Politician's Dilemma, as I call it, is that negative campaigning is effective in the short term but counterproductive in the long term. When party A attacks party B, B has to retaliate to reduce …

"If there's one thing I look for in champagne it's the taste of wet hair!" Toby Hawkins on Facebook on a tasting of bubbly preserved undersea for 170 years (25 April, p 20)

Stuart Leslie's letter makes several correct statements about the butterfly effect (4 April) . But it is more informative to understand the sense in which this metaphor is true, instead of demolishing one interpretation in which it is false. It is not true that events of the magnitude of a butterfly flapping its wings do …

Leslie's letter on the butterfly effect also implies a question on the efficacy of those butterflies. If one assumes a billion butterflies (that's just 50,000 per species) flapping their little wings three times a second for a couple of hours a day during a hurricane season of 100 days, and all we see is 100 …

New Scientist has often presented arguments that free will is an illusion. So why is the belief that "your thoughts are not fully under your control" listed as a delusion (4 April, p 28) ? Perhaps the deluded ones are the 66.4 per cent who believe that they have full control. Paradoxically, my writing of …

I have delusion-like beliefs. If I were to be asked if I was in control of all of my actions, or all of my thoughts, I would answer "no". My argument would be that I am clearly not in control of my actions – for example, when I respond to pain. I am not in …

If your belief system is, even in part, the outcome of evolutionary forces, then it is not a delusion to believe that you are not fully in control of your thoughts. Kitchener, Ontario, Canada

As a very old geologist, I could not agree more with Bill McGuire's warning of the inevitability of catastrophic volcanic eruptions (28 March, p 26) . We in California face a similar catastrophic natural event – a great quake along the San Andreas fault. In 1964, before the plate tectonics revolution led to understanding of …

McGuire both makes a point about the impact of disasters such as volcanic eruptions and misses the size of the question about human preparedness. In The Collapse of Western Civilization , historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, imagine "The Great Collapse of 2093", caused by disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet. They …

A bar graph with your article on growing cancers compares five-year survival rates for a variety of cancers from the 1970s against those of the 2000s (28 March, p 42) . But since "five-year survival" starts from the date of diagnosis rather than the cancer's inception, it reflects timing of detection as much as patient …

Douglas Heaven asserts that "sexting is as common among teens as texting a decade ago" (28 March, p 46) . Really? I suspect that most teens are too sensible. Edinburgh, UK

• Surveys report that about a third of US kids in their upper teens have sexted.

• We meant to write that the 103 gigawatts of electricity generating capacity added by renewables worldwide equals the capacity provided by nuclear power plant reactors in the US (4 April, p 7) . • We failed to react to an invasive meme. Macrophages are immune cells, not molecules (18 April, p 32) .