Letters: Aberrant anatomy
I always find your articles very interesting and, being a doctor in
a rural practice, I use your publication as a postgraduate journal.
The article on the portable pump to support failing hearts (Technology,
22 June) has brought home how intellectual isolation can lead to a deterioration
of cerebral function.
For several years now I have been treating my patients as if blood from
the left side of the heart travelled through the aorta and blood from the
right side passed through the pulmonary artery. I am sure you can appreciate
how stunned I was when I read the truth in your article.
To further complicate matters, I have discovered that many of my patients
suffer from the aberrant anatomy in which I believed.
I am currently carrying out surgical correction of all my patients with
this abnormality, but so far my results are rather poor.
Sean Murray-Smith Bedside Manor, Charters Towers Queensland, Australia
Letters: Is British best?
You were generous in allowing Jim Baggott and Harry Kroto nearly a full
page to present the certainly unprovable and probably untenable thesis that
with more funding, the discovery of fullerenes would have happened in Britain
(Forum, 6 July).
I have been reading your magazine long enough to know that I am expected
to assume that university research, especially in Britain, is underfunded.
But even with the clarity of Baggott’s hindsight, I am unable to agree that
any particular laboratory or project was due more funding, or that this
would have ensured success.
Baggott’s article maintains another annoying New 杏吧原创 habit: that
of assuming that British science has particular virtue, simply for being
British. Yes, under different circumstances, the fullerene discovery could
have happened in Britain. Or Nepal. Or even Canada. But honestly, who gives
a damn? Let’s celebrate the achievement as part of the larger scientific
enterprise, and avoid this rather pathetic ethnocentric whining.
Nicholas Darby Dow Chemical Canada Sarnia, Ontario
Letters: Zoo story
The impression given by your article (This Week, 20 July) on the proposed
European Community legislation on zoos is somewhat misleading for it implies
all zoos are against this proposal, which is not so.
This is supported by the fact that this legislation has been enthusiastically
supported by the European Community Association of Zoos & Aquaria (ECAZA)
to which all the major zoos of the Community belong. The legislation will
specify minimum standards for zoos, a principle supported by ECAZA and all
progressive zoos, for we see this as a positive step towards greater recognition
of the valuable conservation and educational work already being done by
most zoos. The animal welfare groups have had little direct input into the
preparation of these proposals and I do take issue with Carlo Ripa di Meana
who suggests otherwise. Let’s give credit where it is due, for whilst I
am not naive enough to suggest all zoos are perfect, at least we have taken
steps to see that our own house is put in order.
Peter Stevens Paignton Zoological & Botanical Gardens Paignton,
Devon
Letters: Gut-busting issue
I suggest that next time your correspondent Andrew Nichols, of Tasmania
(Letters, 20 July), gets into a discussion on ‘creation science’ he should
bring up the question of hernias. Having suffered from this boring and painful
weakness for a number of years and having finally just had the operation,
I have found in conversations with other men recently that almost every
male has suffered from a hernia in his life or is suffering now. I had no
idea how common it is.
There is no doubt in my mind that the tendency to hernias in the human
race is a quite serious inherited fault in the design of the human body
and by no stretch of sophistry could it be described as part and parcel
of a perfect act of creation performed by God to populate the Garden of
Eden.
So Mr Nichols could ask his interlocutor whether hernias are an original
part of some perfect creation (which no sufferer is likely to agree with),
or due to Man’s fall through sin from some state of original perfection,
or whether it isn’t more plausibly due to our inheritance and descent from
ape-like creatures with a much less upright posture, as he and presumably
most of your readers would agree.
Alec Vans Newnham, Glos
Letters: Gut-busting issue
I would say to a creationist: It is quite understandable why you think
your beliefs are threatened by the theory of evolution, but it is not so.
Imaginatively interpreted, this modern theory shows an elegant (maybe God’s
labour-saving) plan of continuing creation. The great majority of people
believe in God and in evolution. The fact is that man is no less the wonder
of creation for his having being indirectly fashioned.
G. H. Ellis London
Letters: Gut-busting issue
Andrew Nichols pleads for someone to come up with a ‘simple, concise,
logical and brilliantly worded’ defence of evolution. Perhaps he might reflect
on the fact that if in the 130 years or so since Darwin published his On
the Origin of Species, neither he, nor any of the subsequent great scientific
minds have been able to produce such a statement, it would be reasonable
to draw the conclusion that such a statement is impossible to produce because
the facts do not support the theory.
If he wants a ‘simple, concise, logical and brilliantly worded’ statement
to give an answer to existence, he can do no better than ‘In the beginning
God created the heavens and the earth’.
Philip Loose Danbury, Essex
Letters: Well stacked
Ian Stewart’s article ‘How to succeed in stacking’ (13 July) certainly
supports his statement that classical geometry is an ‘outdated branch of
mathematics’. Fortunately, materials scientists still do study crystallography
and therefore know that there are in fact two close packed space lattices.
These are the fcc (or ccp, cubic close packed) lattice correctly described
by Stewart and also the hcp (hexagonal close packed) lattice, which has
the identical packing density to fcc (0.7404) and which is formed by stacking
2D hexagonal close packed sheets of spheres in the sequence ABABAB. This
hcp structure is actually illustrated in figure 5a of the article but Stewart
incorrectly states that this arrangement leads to non-lattice packing.
Stewart’s final paragraph is also somewhat misleading. The crystal structures
of elements contain only one type of atom but many elements (for example
carbon) have non-close packed structures as the directionality of their
inter-atomic bonding means that more open arrangements of the atoms have
a lower energy.
Jane E. Shemilt Ruislip, Middlesex
Musical mountains
For musical culture, piece of music, and musical perception read camera,
mountain and picture, and Ian Cross’s argument in ‘The mystery of the musical
box’ (Forum, 29 June) looks roughly like this: different cameras take different
pictures of the same mountain, and some cameras (such as those not positioned
in a place from which the mountain can be seen or those out of focus) do
not show anything recognisable as a mountain when pointed in the direction
of a mountain at all. Therefore mountains do not really exist ‘out there’.
However, mountains do exist. Similarly, it could be that in some abstract
sense individual pieces of music really do exist (as presumably do mathematical
theorems) and merely await a composer’s realisation of their existence in
acoustic form in some particular culture.
Good theories of vision were not produced (and neither can linguistic
phenomena be fully understood) without detailed attention to the nature
of the final product of the perceptual process. In the same way, one cannot
expect to derive adequate theories of musical perception without attention
to the nature and significance of the final product.
For a long time, psychologists resisted putting into their models mental
mechanisms of any kind. It seems that musical psychologists are now busily
repeating that form of error by regarding perception of music as simply
an exercise in pattern recognition.
Letters: Whole person
I write in order to express my dismay on having read the article ‘Have
you got what it takes?’ (Forum, 8 June) in which Marc Nicholls discussed
various aspects of scientific genius. I feel that his references to me were
uninformed and insulting.
I object to his description of me as ‘last year’s offering’. I think
that I can be regarded as a whole person, and not simply as the subject
for misguided journalism.
I did not ‘delight the newspapers’ or even one newspaper. A single article
concerning me appeared in The Times, and I was mentioned in a subsequent
letter. To my knowledge, I have appeared in no other newspapers.
Nicholls’s description of me as not seeming to conform to the ‘risk-taking,
go-getter’ type, interested me. He has not met me, and I have not been evaluated
to be this way by The Times, so how Mr Nicholls achieved this psychological
assessment is beyond me. I was described in The Times as being self-motivated.
The quote referring to trees and apes was intended to be light-hearted.
The line stating that I did not understand the performance of slightly dangerous
tasks was meant to refer to such activities as tree-climbing as a child.
This opinion certainly should not be stretched to breaking point in order
to indicate that I would not take any risks in adult life.
Mr Nicholls asks whether I feel revulsion at having non-genius parents.
That one should feel revulsion at one’s parents is disturbing. I am sure
that anyone who has read the article in The Times will be able to discern
the general form of my relationship with my parents. In short, it is perfectly
normal – it is a close and caring one.
Stuart McDonald Southampton, Hampshire
Letters: Facts and faith
Donald Gould cheerfully admits he has never heard of Gauquelin, but
he still feels justified in rubbishing the man’s research (Forum, 20 July).
If Gould had read any of Gauquelin’s books, he would have discovered that
his findings actually run counter to nearly all traditional astrology (sun
signs, for example), and the planetary effects he found were unexpected.
People such as Hans Eysenck who have checked Gauquelin’s methods and
results mostly agree that there is something there that needs explaining.
Gould’s scoffing about people desiring to ‘believe the unbelievable’ is
beside the point; these are facts to be explained, not ideas to be ‘believed
in’.
R. J. Downham Falmouth, Cornwall
Letters: Facts and faith
Donald Gould was irked at the thought of someone of soundly scientific
mind giving credence to astrology et al. I see his point. But as long as
it remains clear what is real science and what is not, I am happy to see
both scientists and non-scientists keeping their minds open a little to
the ‘unproven’ disciplines.
My worry is that the distinction between real and ‘unproven’ science
gets more fuzzy with the release of each new pseudo/maybe/nearly science
magazine, which now outnumber real science publications on our bookstalls.
Paper-shop keepers, including the major outlets, are most guilty of
blurring the line. If Donald Gould gets his New 杏吧原创 by subscription,
then he will be spared the ignominy of visiting his favourite paper shop
to select his New 杏吧原创 magazine from behind Prediction, Horoscope,
Lifesigns and Fortean Times.
Colin S. Pearson Weston-Super-Mare, Avon
Letters: Facts and faith
It seems clear from the picture accompanying Donald Gould’s article
that you do not know your Saturn from Uranus.
John Woodruff Morden, Surrey
Letters: Are we inside out?
I note with interest John Gribbin’s reply to the question put by Michael
Jarman concerning black holes (Letters, 6 July).
If it is, in fact, the case that we are on the inside of an enormous
black hole, then what is on the outside? And is this an astronomical, philosophical
or moot point?
Zofia Jaszek Poole, Dorset
Letters: Dim chimps
Your article on Jared Diamond (‘A very cultured chimpanzee’, 13 July)
made me wonder whether he has himself ever worked on the cognitive abilities
of the chimpanzee. When we studied seven unselected Pan troglodytes at the
Institute of Psychiatry, London, in the period 1974-1980, we published very
different conclusions. We found cognitive differences between the rhesus
monkey and the common chimpanzee in only one (sorting capacity) of many
abilities we tested; whereas human children were vastly superior to both
of these non-human primates.
I have only read about the claimed abilities of Pan pannicus. As yet
no comparative study has been done with unselected subjects that shows that
the pygmy chimpanzee is, in general, superior to the common chimpanzee.
The danger of drawing conclusions from selected subjects is well known,
and yet reputable scientists continue to generalise from one or two individuals
to the species. If only the editors of journals were more willing to publish
negative findings in this important area of biology!
George Ettinger Twyford, Berks
Letters: Neologiz'd
Like Feedback, I was upset when I first saw ‘ruggedised’ (6 July) in
an advertisement for an ohmmeter in the US journal Electronics in 1952 or
1953.
Until, that is, I saw Two Gentlemen of Verona at the RSC last month
and, hearing the seventh line of the play*, had to accept that the kind
of neologism that was good enough for William should be good enough for
us.
*’ . . . living dully sluggardiz’d at home . . . ‘
A. H. Duncan Emsworth, Hampshire
Letters: Almost right
After reading your magazine I noticed a mistake in ‘Life, the Universe
and (almost) Everything’ (20 July). The so-called Stegosaurus is really
a Triceratops.
Ben Baxter (8 years old) Whitely Bay Tyne and Wear