Without a trace
Chris Jack suggests that “self-destructing” e-mails intended to prevent
messages being used as legal evidence against the sender could be bypassed by
taking screen snapshots of the original
(11 September, p 56).
I doubt that a screen print would be accepted as evidence in a court case. A
screen print is a picture, and centuries of art have proved that pictures of
virtually anything can be created. If I were feeling creative I could produce
“evidence”, by Jack’s criterion, of my boss embezzling the company I work for,
of Tony Blair buying heroin and of Elvis’s tryst with Lord Lucan. Can any
readers who are lawyers comment on this, beyond reiterating the impossibility of
recovering evidence of things which absolutely didn’t happen?
Unfreudian
John Horgan says Freud’s theories persist because no one else has produced a
more powerful paradigm
(18 September, p 48).
This argument rests on the fallacy
that there should be some conceptual scheme that embraces the full complexity of
the mind.
As for neuroscientist Eric Kandel having a “liking for Freud”, in a recent
article he wrote that “we have, for the first time, the neural basis for a set
of unconscious mental processes. Yet this unconscious bears no resemblance to
Freud’s unconscious”. Susan Greenfield may find Freud “inspirational”, but her
contribution to Melvin Bragg’s recent On Giants’ Shoulders reveals that
she has little knowledge of the new wave of critical literature on Freud.
Horgan’s article also failed to address these critiques.
Letter
Has no one ever pointed out to John Horgan that the inability to understand
something now in no way precludes the possibility of understanding later? The
notion that we have to embrace the opinionated nonsense of Freud because our
current understanding of the mind is sketchy is indeed the classic justification
for all pseudoscience, and one which should not be given the endorsement which
your presentation gives it.
Glaring danger
Contrary to what D. V. Blaylock says in her letter
(11 September, p 57), the
dangers of looking at the Sun were perfectly well known at the time of the
Second World War. This is yet another case of a danger being known, but the
knowledge not being available to the people in danger.
Take, for example, this unnamed 1687 pamphleteer quoted in Dava Sobel’s
Longitude: “Before the Back-Quadrants were Invented, when the Forestaff was
most in use, there was not one Old Master of a Ship amongst Twenty, but what a
Blind in one Eye by daily staring in the Sun to find his Way.” The English
navigator and explorer John Davis introduced the “backstaff”, or back-quadrant,
in 1595.
When will we ever learn?
Double trouble
You report that Chinese astronomers have interpreted an ancient reference to
a “double dawn” as a solar eclipse
(11 September, p 16).
It’s just as likely that what they really saw is an example of the phenomenon
known as “false dawn”, which is described in the book Lightning, Auroras,
Nocturnal Lights and Related Luminous Phenomena by William R. Corliss as “a
transient brightening of the eastern sky one to two hours before the true dawn”.
Corliss gives two examples, including one in England on 7 January 1933 at about
5 am. It had absolutely no connection with a solar eclipse.
In a paper he called “Omar Khayyam and The Zodiacal Light”, published in 1930
in the British Astronomical Association Journal (vol 40, p 336), John
Bird identified the false dawn with the zodiacal light produced by dust in the
plane of the Solar System. It might also be an atmospheric phenomenon. Either
way, scepticism about the solar eclipse explanation seems to be called for.
The chips are down
The article on gambling addiction
(4 September, p 7) made me furious,
particularly the generalisation: “Even pathological gamblers would not go
homeless or hungry for another bet.” This may be true for some or even the
majority of gamblers, but let’s remember those who do go hungry or have their
homes repossessed.
Nancy Petry should try giving the gamblers she questioned the $60 and
let them spend a day in a casino, bookmakers or wherever. Tell them to retain a
certain amount for a meal and a bed for the night. I wonder how many would have
enough money left, if any. We all know that what we say and what we do can
differ.
Free will
Kathryn Brown suggests that research showing how poorly we predict our emotions
(4 September, p 36)
could leave doctors in a quandary as to whether to
resuscitate patients who are incapable of communicating their wishes. “Should
they accept patients’ earlier decisions…based on a wrong assessment of how
unhappy they thought a disease or disability would make them?” she asks. “Or
should they ignore living wills that were written specifically to ensure
patients’ views are taken into account in such circumstances?”
The answer to the second question is no. In Britain, they are obliged under
common law to respect living wills. The British Medical Association requires
that “doctors with a conscientious objection [to the contents of a living will]
must be ready to step aside”. The Crown Prosecution Service told the 1984 House
of Lords Select Committee on Medical Ethics that “doctors must abide by the
terms of [a] previous expression of intention or wish”.
Boning up
The remains found on the Scottish island of Skye are unlikely to be those of
the earliest-known “stegosaurus” as you report
(11 September, p 22).
Stegosaurus is a genus of stegosaur from the Late Jurassic of North
America. I suspect you actually meant “stegosaur”, the correct term for the
wider group of dinosaurs to which Stegosaurus, and perhaps the Skye
material, belong.
As noted in the article, the material is highly fragmentary and could belong
to either an ankylosaur or a stegosaur. It would be unwise to base far-reaching
biogeographic conclusions on it. There is good material from very slightly
younger rocks, which gives a much clearer insight into the distribution and
evolutionary relationships of both stegosaurs and ankylosaurs. Furthermore,
stegosaur material has been reported from older Jurassic deposits in Dorset and
China.
British blues
You quote the leader of a team of woad researchers as saying “the idea of a
dye that’s indigenous to the Anglo-Saxon culture is hopefully something people
can pick up on”
(18 September, p 20).
The best-known examples of the use of woad
involved the ancient Britons, as you acknowledged with your mention of Queen
Boudicca, not the Anglo-Saxons.
The inability of many well-educated English people to distinguish between
British and English culture is one of the best arguments the Scots and the Welsh
have for devolution.
Slave selection
So all Dolly’s mitochondria come from the egg to which the udder cell nucleus
was added, and not from the udder cell
(4 September, p 5). The selective
disappearance of donated mitochondria is not such a great surprise. We know from
work using chimeric mice, whose bodies are made up of tissues with different
genotypes that some forms of mitochondria will preferentially persist in some
tissues while others disappear.
The rapidly mutating mitochondria rely heavily on nuclear-encoded genes for
much of their function. There is a need for close concordance between nuclear
and mitochondrial genes. This means that each cell is unlikely to tolerate
having more than one sort of mitochondria in its cytoplasm, and helps to explain
why organisms inherit mitochondria from only one parent, generally the
mother.
As an analogy, mitochondria are slave organelles carrying out the dirty and
dangerous business of energy production. No sensible master will tolerate
democracy among their slaves. As the egg’s mitochondria have been carefully
groomed to support embryonic development, it is not surprising that the
interlopers were cast out.