Letters archive

In his letter, Peter Silverman states that the purpose of the brain is to "make decisions with the objective of maximising the chance of passing on... genes" (25 April) . This is not really true for humans. The brain can choose to commit suicide for a cause or over lost love. It can choose to …

Trickle-down theory is rather older than Ha-Joon Chang mentions (25 April, p 28) . It was defined, adopted and then rejected as a failure by Imperial Rome some two millennia ago. And 2600 years ago, Solon noted that the root cause of the economic problems of ancient Athens was that the hyper-rich were grabbing all …

It would please everybody if the super-rich were taxed at, for example, 70 per cent but given a big discount for investing in projects that aim to counter climate change, say to a 30 per cent rate. This would really boost the economy in the areas that will help the world survive. Bath, UK

"If built around a personality it probably has nothing to do with actual thinking" Justin Harrison Tweets about Bjørn Lomborg's proposed think tank in Australia (16 May, p 7 )

The article on digital democracy listed four flavours of democracy, and said that "direct democracy" in ancient Athens allowed all citizens to vote on policy (25 April, p 38) . There were occasions when all citizens were required to vote, but this was too cumbersome for all decisions, so mostly a subset of office holders …

A better way of obtaining people's opinions is indeed required, and at a higher frequency than every five years. A basic requirement is good information. The recent UK election was dogged by innuendo, half truths and dubious statistics. What is our actual national debt? How many hospitals work well and within budget? We need a …

Niall Firth states that the secret ballot is one of the bedrocks of modern democracy. In the UK, each voter has a number on the register of electors and at the polling station an official writes it on your voting slip. So anyone seriously interested in finding out how I voted could do so. Horwich, …

• We believe it is illegal to trace votes in the UK, except for reasons such as fraud detection. So it is a secret ballot in principle.

The conversion of St Paul on the road to Damascus might well have been triggered by the sight of a meteoric fireball (25 April, p 8) . However, he was also supposed to have heard the name of Jesus, which in Hebrew is Yeshua and in Aramaic Eosha. Do meteorites make such a whooshing sound? …

The three accounts of Paul's experience in Luke's Acts of the Apostles all seem to me more like a migraine episode. In only one (Acts 22:3-21) does Paul state the men with him "saw the light" – and only Paul was blinded. It is hard to describe if you haven't experienced it, but Paul's report …

That was the 1st century. It was believed that strange and wonderful astronomical events happened when great men were born or died. So people naturally assumed that one must have happened when Jesus was born, just as when he died, so one was put into the Gospel stories. Were Paul a 21st-century man he might …

Christianity's rise was hardly meteoric: it was insignificant until well after the emperor Constantine's conversion in AD 313. The descriptions of Paul's conversion in Acts were written in about AD 100, long after the event, and show every sign of being imaginative fiction rather than serious history writing. Maybe Paul just hallucinated or, wily cult …

It is exciting that there is now evidence that brown fat can be useful in treating obesity in adult humans, and that it can be activated by cold exposure or a drug like mirabegron (18 April, p 32) . Studies using cold exposure to treat obesity have not been very successful, though. Perhaps they have …

Your article "Werewolf plant waits for full moon" states that Ephedra foeminea is "the first plant ever discovered to sync its activity to the lunar cycle" (11 April, p 16) . It has long been known, however, that other species do this. Marine algae of the order Dictyotales synchronise their reproductive development with moonlight. Geneva, …

Marc Goodman says we must marshal resources on the scale of the Manhattan Project to counter the growing threat of cybercrime (11 April, p 26) . In the UK at least, cybercrime is not a separate category of "recorded crime". So there is no way to determine the scale of the problem, or changes from …

Those who study paradoxes thrown up by quantum theory always seem to assume that there are multiple observers in the universe, and Anil Ananthaswamy does so explicitly (11 April, p 34) . But if you think of a universe with one observer but multiple points of observation – think of them as its "eyes and …

I was surprised to read an article on the evolution of human values that didn't have anything at all to say about race, gender or birth control (18 April, p 28) . It is impossible to have an egalitarian world without birth control, and this technology, along with improved natal outcomes, has been pivotal in …

I enjoyed your new Letters page cartoon (11 April) and it reminded me of one I saw online not long ago: "Ah, Mr Schrödinger... About your cat. Well, there's good news and bad news..." Sidcup, Kent, UK

• We should have described the organisation RenewableUK as representing wind and marine energy producers (16 May, p 6) .