Lay off the booze
The feature “Geroff my tail!” describes the study of alcoholism using the
monkeys of St Kitts (31 July, p 46). We were disturbed to see that experiments
such as these, which clearly caused considerable stress to our closest
relatives, were reported in such a light-hearted manner.
It is difficult to justify alcohol experiments on animals for many reasons,
not least because clinical research involving human volunteers would be much
more appropriate and relevant. The fact that certain monkeys will drink alcohol
voluntarily should not be used as an excuse to subject them to unnecessary,
crude and distressing experiments.
Love bites
It seems to me that what the feature “Love sick” calls love, and what love
may really be, are two very different things (31 July, p 42). The biological
drive, which sends us insane and keeps us there long enough to get the
biological job done, not only needs another name, but has also been given one
that deserves wider currency.
Its inspired onomatopoeia is the coinage of family therapist Jules Older of
the Otago School of Medical Sciences, Dunedin, New Zealand. Writing in The
New England Journal of Medicine, he offers the word “boinng” to describe
“the ecstasy and oppression, the torment and delight” which one person can
inspire in another. The notion that one partner has fallen in love with someone
else, he says, can be threatening and devastating to most marriages. But when he
asks a patient if he or she is “falling in boinng鈥hey usually respond
with a sigh of relief, both that their condition can be named and that the
implications are not as awful as they would be if they were falling in
love.”
Boinng, says Older, is not nearly “so threatening or committing or
lasting-sounding as love, and unlike love, it carries in its sound pattern and
springy associations the assumption that it may eventually cease of its own
accord.”
What is more, it can convey how severely the person is suffering simply by
adding another “n”. Says Older: “When you’re in boinnng, you see stars and hear
heavenly choirs. Boinnnng is so overwhelming that it may require
hospitalisation.”
Love itself is not to be found in the reductionist domain of the scientist or
systematic thinker鈥攖hough certainly, in their early stages, love and
boinng are often indistinguishable.
Letter
So falling in love is just the same as obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)?
Kathryn Brown’s feature doesn’t do much for the conventional image of scientists
as people who aren’t in touch with their feelings.
As anyone who has fallen in love once or twice knows, when you are in that
blissful state, you feel “as one” with your beloved; your egos have merged. This
produces feelings of joy quite different from the kind of despair felt by OCD
sufferers. This merging may indeed cause frequent bouts of thoughtful fixation
but there is more to it than obsession.
Roots of red hair
If your correspondent Peter Musk’s idea that the pale skin of Europeans is a
Neanderthal trait is correct (31 July, p 69), what other traits survive? I
suspect that the red hair and blonde hair of Europeans is Neanderthal, as it is
unique to Europe, and the red-haired Celts and blonde Scandinavians do seem to
have come from the areas suggested for the two Neanderthal populations
(19 June, p 42).
Modern humans from these areas also seem hairier than the norm. Perhaps the
big, bearded, red-haired Highlander or Viking warrior is merely more closely
related to our Neanderthal ancestors. So much for ideas of an Aryan master race
and white supremacy. A DNA comparison of different groups of Europeans may prove
interesting.
Rabbits and rats
Your correspondent Jason Ramsey describes the supposedly unfortunate
consequences of the New Zealand government’s rabbit control operations (31 July,
p 68), but gets his facts badly wrong. Yes, New Zealand has controlled European
rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus) with poisoned oats and carrots
since 1950, but this has nothing to do with infection of New Zealand rabbits
by myxomatosis. Although myxomatosis became established in Australia, it failed
to do so in New Zealand, presumably because a vector, the rabbit flea, was also
absent.
But the main myth is the story that unnamed indigenous New Zealand birds were
badly affected because they came to feed on fallen tree fruits in the absence of
rabbits. There they fell prey to rats.
The only grain of truth in all this is that there is ample evidence from New
Zealand’s offshore islands with and without the introduced ship (or black) rat
(Rattus rattus) that this little mammal is death to many native New
Zealand birds. But the adverse impact is through competition for food and taking
nest contents, not the killing of adult birds.
What is more, the rats and birds interact mainly in what’s left of New
Zealand’s forests, not in the dry agricultural land created by European
settlers, where the rabbit is a problem. The rabbit eats very little tree fruit,
its main diet being grasses, herbs and their seeds. Most of the bird species
declined about a hundred years ago, very long before the coordinated rabbit
poisoning campaigns by “rabbit boards” in the past fifty years.
Letter
Alien or introduced species are a serious threat to a large number of
ecosystems worldwide. To argue in favour of protecting them even though they are
known to be destructive is dangerous and must be counterproductive.
Ramsey has just given succour to all the rats, mice, rabbits, goats and
plants that, with our assistance, have already ruined large areas of the globe
and are continuing to damage some of our most precious and unique habitats.
Risen again
I read with interest that the number of procedures conducted on animals in
Britain rose in 1998 for the first time since 1976 (31 July, p 5).
That’ll be apart from 1996 (2 709 631 in 1995; 2 716 587 in 1996), 1994 (2
827 745 in 1993; 2 842 361 in 1994) and 1991 (3 207 094 in 1990; 3 242 449 in
1991), I suppose.
Itching to propagate
Bryant Furlow was too sanguine about the relative lack of parasitic
manipulation in humans (24 July, p 42). Most of us (including myself) have at
some time suffered from the widespread human parasite Enterobius
vermicularis, also known as pinworm.
This unpleasant little beast goes through most of its reproductive cycle
within our intestinal tracts. The female then emerges at night and, as her dying
act, bites the perianal skin, causing intense itching. We, the somnolent and
hapless hosts, reflexively scratch the itch, thereby storing some of their
microscopic eggs under our fingernails. From there the eggs may well find their
way into our food. Children (without treatment) are thus manipulated into
increasing their infestations and infecting the entire household as well as
their playmates.
Millennial hedge
In case readers are misled into believing that next-door’s leylandii cypress
hedge is pre-Norman conquest, Kate Charlesworth (31 July, p 67) should have said
that to date a hedge, it is the number of woody plant species which are counted,
not all plants, and certainly not insects, spiders, sparrows and so on.
Bite and spin
The conger eel seems to exhibit the same postmortem aggression as the
rattlesnake (24 July, p 59).
The severed head of a conger eel will bite anything placed in its mouth. The
consequences are not serious as it has no teeth, only serrated jaws, and its
usual method is to bite and spin, detaching the bitten flesh. This is difficult
without a body.
Any portion of the body length will retain muscular responses for many hours
after division, and the results can be spectacular if your wife is casually
invited to prepare the piece of fish you’ve brought home for dinner.
The only way to deal with a live conger bite is to hold the fish up, hanging
clear of anything that would give it purchase to start spinning, and cut off its
tail.
Foolproof food?
Congratulations on a major scientific breakthrough (31 July, p 50). After 33
years, I have a physicist in the kitchen.
We dined tonight on your superb salmon menu. May I request this as a weekly
feature? I volunteer my husband as trial chef.
Letter
Foolproof recipes? Don’t make me laugh! Most of the world’s interesting
cuisine comes from interesting mistakes. Marco Pierre White’s vast chef’s ego
does not come from having never made a mistake, but rather from having made
nearly every possible one at some time or another.
Cooking may have its scientific aspects鈥攚hat activity does
not?鈥攂ut it is not a science, and I, for one, am grateful for that.
Letter
I am intrigued by the several references to “tin foil” for wrapping the food
in. Since I have only ever seen tin foil in a laboratory, I wondered whether our
rocket scientist could have confused tin foil with aluminium foil, which is
commonly used for wrapping food.
Presumably in such robust recipes as these, the mix up would have little
consequence. However, I wondered what the effect of specifying tin foil instead
of aluminium foil would be on a rocket.
Plodding pun
In the 31 July Feedback you pass on the information that the mascot of the
Australian Federal Police is the platypus.
As editor of the first two issues of the force’s in-house publication I,
together with the then police commissioner, Colin Woods, and his director of
information, coined the name “Platypus” which was copyright registered to the
AFP.
Platypus is broadly translated from the Greek platus, meaning broad,
wide, flat, and pous, meaning foot, forming the term of endearment
given to English police, “Flatfoot”.