It's the cultural differences that count
Anil Ananthaswamy surely drives a few more nails into the coffin of the idea that Homo sapiens sapiens is made up of biological “races” (20 April, p 34). Even some anthropologists have the wit to recognise that there are no races, only clines of geographic variations of adaptive traits, measured in infinitesimal increments across long distances.
But medical researchers may not be wrong to look for racial differences in matters of health, if “racial” is taken to be shorthand for “cultural”. In the US, African-Americans, Native Americans and Americans of European ancestry differ markedly in the incidence of high blood pressure, prostate cancer, female osteoporosis and myriad other disease entities. Health researchers know that those groups also differ markedly in the incidence of obesity, levels of education and income, and in their attitudes toward healthcare authorities.
When such culturally influenced factors as obesity and education are equalised, some differences in health outcomes among America’s races diminish dramatically, or even disappear. Obesity, for example, is a causal factor in many cancers, adult-onset diabetes, high blood pressure and other circulatory ailments, but may actually diminish osteoporosis by the bone-strengthening effects of carrying additional weight. There are statistically eye-popping differences among American racial groups in obesity, smoking and alcohol consumption, among many others.
It is unfortunate that much medical research in the US is funded by the National Institutes of Health with the expectation that racial differences will be found. Too often the government and the mass media overlook researchers’ failure to control for such well-known group differences as smoking, education, obesity, attitudes toward medical care, and so on.
Who decides?
I applaud your decision to examine globalisation, but I doubt that New 杏吧原创 is the right forum for this debate (27 April, p 27).
杏吧原创s make the discoveries that enable, for example, global capital movement. But it is business people who decide which discoveries to exploit and how to do so.
Politicians set the environment for business people, or through lack of action allow business people to do whatever they wish. It is, therefore, the politicians who need to be involved in this debate.
Letter
So scientists in the West have created a radio-controlled rat (4 May, p 5 and p 6). As your editorial asks, should we really celebrate this? Later on in the same issue, as part of your series on globalisation, we hear from a woman in India that science has no cure for mosquitoes or malaria. It is clear from these two stories where the priority of Western science lies: with profit not people.
Congratulations on an illuminating series that makes us in the West realise that science is not always about laboratories and funding wars. While we might appear to have all of the equipment and know-how, your series on globalisation helps us to understand that science and technology are issues for the entire world, not just the wealthy West.
Natural objection
Judging by your report on the debate “What is ‘natural’?”, the upshot might have been more constructive if a philosopher had been invited to participate (27 April, p 56).
Large philosophical questions (is Dawkins reinventing the soul?), technical questions (can biodiversity be preserved by splicing genes?), ethical questions (are we responsible for nature?) and many others seem to have been mired in a pointless verbal dispute about what is natural.
Any philosopher would have told you that “nature” and its cognates such as “natural” are multiply ambiguous. Simply noting some of their different senses (a bit of conceptual clarification) would have been a sensible step to take before trying to engage with the other more substantive issues. The debate might not then have merited Fred Pearce’s comment, “interestingly inconclusive”.
A good place to start (though not to finish) this sorting out is John Stuart Mill’s essay “Nature”, published in 1874.
Military wind farms
I’m afraid the British Ministry of Defence’s attitude to wind farms is nothing new (27 April, p 8). Over the years the MoD has, as a matter of course and apparent policy, consistently raised objections to onshore wind farms throughout Britain. It has become a standing joke within the wind industry that if the radar-jamming properties of wind turbines make them such effective military machines then they are wasted as mere renewable energy sources.
Am I the only one who thinks there is something laughable about the concept of an enemy bomber “hiding” within a fixed 500 by 100-metre radar shadow?
If the government is to meet its renewable energy target it should require the MoD to provide a reasoned assessment for any objections to wind farm developments, and define appropriate mitigation measures to overcome any objective difficulties. The government should not permit what appears to be a blanket objection.
Other countries have overcome any radar difficulties associated with wind turbines. Is our MoD so inefficient that it cannot follow suit? If so, then perhaps we need to ask whether or not they can be trusted with atomic munitions.
Letter
It is a little unfair to blame the MoD for forcing wind farm developers to show that the impacts of their proposed developments on local radars are acceptable.
The MoD’s concerns seem to arise from the conclusions of a report into the effects of wind farms on radar that was commissioned by the Department of Trade and Industry and published in 1995. That report quotes possible adverse impacts that would keep any radar designer awake at night, but it does stress that the assumed conditions are worst- case and therefore pessimistic. The report’s major failing is that it gives no indication as to how rapidly and dramatically the situation improves as one moves away from this worst-case set of assumptions.
Wired library
James Kingsland says in his review of Oxford Reference Online that it is a replacement for reference librarians鈥攂ut he also points out that it is mostly available via libraries.
He should be aware that this resource is another tool that librarians can make available to help speed up their patrons’ reference needs, while making them less dependent on the physical location of the library.
All in the node
As much as I enjoyed David Cohen’s article on scale-free networks, I couldn’t help noticing something missing from the whole scale-free argument (13 April, p 24). Cohen writes: “For some scale-free networks, the preferences at work are not clear. It’s absurd, for example, to think that prey species choose to be eaten by a predator with a particularly varied diet.” This made me realise that you could split scale-free networks into at least two categories: those with “good” and “bad” nodes.
In a “good” scale-free network, such as the Internet and the actors’ network, the nodes want and need to be linked to the hub, because it benefits them. However, in a “bad” one, such as food webs and HIV networks, the nodes don’t want or need to be part of the network and it is the hubs that actively seek the nodes. (I’m not saying anyone who is HIV positive wants to give others the virus; in this case both parties are probably just unaware of the situation.)
Perhaps it would be a sensible idea to turn the “links” in the diagram on p 26 into arrows to define which kind of scale-free network it is. In a good network, the arrows would go from the nodes to the hubs鈥攁nd vice versa in a bad one.
Raptor analysis
Feedback asks whether anyone can produce the psychological profile of an adult female velociraptor (27 April). It does seem a stiff challenge, but palaeontologist Bob Bakker had a stab at the problem in his 1995 novel Raptor Red about the life of a female Utahraptor.
The blurb on the Bantam edition gushes that the novel “combines fact and fiction to capture, for the first time, the thoughts, emotions, and behaviours of one of the most magnificent, enigmatic creatures ever to walk the face of the earth.”
It’s a fairly good read, I recall, even if the psychological profile is conveniently hard to prove, or disprove for that matter.
Does it or doesn't it?
Francis Fukuyama’s essay seems to have some contradictory arguments in it (20 April, p 42). On the one hand, he claims (p 45) that “there are good evolutionary reasons why鈥� emotions exist”, while on the other hand he states (p 44) that “the bizarre outcome of our evolution is that what is most important to us as human beings has no apparent purpose in the material scheme of things by which we became human. For it is the distinctive human gamut of emotions that鈥� is the source of human values.”
So, does evolution serve as a rationalisation for the importance of our human emotions, or doesn’t it?
Evict cybersquatters
Companies registering domain names such as “yourcompanysucks.com” to prevent other people doing so is no surprise (27 April, p 61). However, does this not amount to cybersquatting? Can we look forward to the day when some satirist takes a multinational to court for squatting in this manner? I certainly hope so.
Letter
Those of us who try to commute to work by rail in the north of England can vent our spleen against the privatised train operating company at Many people do.
Weekly superposition
Ian Sample says the largest object ever to be in superposition was a buckyball (20 April, p 7). However, for some years I have been in a state of superposition every weekend. Until I check the lottery numbers on Sunday morning I am either a millionaire or not a millionaire. Only the external influence of the turning on of the television resolves that state鈥攖hus far, unfortunately, in one direction only.
Correction
In our article on banks and Internet security, we stated that for its online service Barclays Capital used encryption keys of 512 bits, which have recently become vulnerable to determined hackers (27 April, p 7). In fact, Barclays Capital uses these 512-bit keys only to protect sites providing company information. All customer-specific information and transactions are guarded by stronger, 1024-bit keys. We apologise for any misunderstanding that this error may have caused.
Poet with peas?
Not only can truncated email subject lines produce curious results (Feedback, 20 April), so can truncated file names. A few minutes ago I downloaded an MP3 file of a famous orchestral work by Franz von Supp茅, and as I play it now I notice it’s called “Overture to Poet and Peas”.