Kiss or kill
Lee Dugatkin’s article on conflict resolution in animals was interesting, but we should not assume that studying how hyenas, chimps or macaques kiss and make up will yield any insights that will be useful for resolving large-scale human conflicts (7 May, p 35).
The examples of animal conflict resolution that he describes all relate to conflicts within groups. I would suggest that humans are already pretty good at resolving conflict at this level. Most of us experience occasional rows with family or friends that quickly blow over.
Where separate groups of animals come into conflict, for example over territory, the outcomes may be a stand-off across territorial boundaries or one group conquering the other (in the case of chimps, at least, with great violence). It is rarely a case of making friends and agreeing to share. The lessons from this for international conflict resolution are sadly not encouraging.
Accidental orgasms
Since you refer to Stephen Jay Gould in your review of Elisabeth Lloyd’s book on female orgasm, you should be aware of his dictum that current utility is not necessarily original cause (14 May, p 52). For example, the bones in the ear, currently useful for hearing, had an original use as jawbones.
The female orgasm may have originated as an unintended side effect of the male orgasm. But that original cause neither proves nor disproves any assertion about the adaptive aspects of its current use. If it happened that an accidentally derived female orgasm actually did increase reproductive success, evolution would act to maximise that success.
Selective miscarriages
It is intriguing that the sex ratio at birth of human populations might be affected by psychological stress, but I find Ralph Catalano’s evolutionary interpretation hard to swallow (30 April, p 19).
The study demonstrated a statistically significant increase in pre-term mortality of male fetuses in California following the 11 September attacks. Catalano is quoted as suggesting that this might be an evolved mechanism for culling weak males “in the interests of the herd”.
For very good reasons, “group selection” explanations have fallen drastically out of favour among evolutionary biologists since the 1960s, and have been replaced by theories working at the level of individual or gene selection. A strategy of selective miscarriage might evolve if it pays mothers to produce strong, healthy sons, or if mothers carrying male fetuses are more likely to suffer in times of stress.
Suppressing hunger
I was rather perplexed by your editorial on appetite-modifying therapies (21 May, p 5). The implication that this is a novel approach is quite incorrect.
Sibutramine, one of the two drugs licensed in the UK at the moment as aids to weight loss, is certainly an appetite suppressant, though it has moderate rather than spectacular efficacy. But the history of appetite-reducing drugs goes back many decades. Amphetamine and related stimulants such as phentermine and ephedrine were used in the 1950s and still are, though often without medical approval because of their addictive potential and other side effects.
More recently compounds have been used for the same purpose, targeting the brain’s serotonin systems. These drugs, fenfluramine and dexfenfluramine, were found to cause a different set of problems, including damage to heart valves.
Anti-ghrelin vaccines and endocannabinoid receptor blockers are simply the latest items in a long sequence. One must hope that they prove more successful than their predecessors.
Flying doctors
Those of us old enough to remember the 1950s, when air travel was a luxury and sea travel was the economical way to cross the oceans, have noticed that the Airbus A380 will carry a similar number of passengers (600 to 800) to the ocean liners of the 20th century (21 May, p 8).
Every one of those ocean liners had a ship’s hospital with a ship’s doctor and nurse. So why shouldn’t the Airbus have at least a paramedic on every flight?
On another flight-related issue, I enjoyed the article about Nate Saint suspending a stationary load 鈥� in his case, a basket of gifts 鈥� from a plane flying in tight circles (30 April, p 35).
In a photo caption, you mention that Saint was killed by the tribe to which he was delivering gifts. Readers may be interested to know that Nate’s son Steve, who was 5 years old when his father died, subsequently lived with the tribe for many years as a Christian missionary and became a close friend of his father’s killer.
He founded the Indigenous People’s Technology and Education Center (I-TEC) to help the tribe become self-reliant and resist the “development” agendas of less altruistic outsiders who have designs on the tribe’s territory. One I-TEC development is a portable dentist’s chair, with battery-powered drill, that folds into a backpack (see ).
Penile glory
I am pleased that our paper on whale penises possibly being mistaken for sea serpents got a mention in Feedback (21 May), but I should share the glory, or blame, with my co-authors Sharon Hedley and Erik Knatterud, who were not even an “et al”.
Lucky red line
If the idea that red is the colour of winning is correct (21 May, p 16), then the British army used to have somewhat of an advantage against the French.
What's in a name?
Feedback is apologetic over not having been able to name a category that Mike Trier suggested 鈥� “The category of [named] categories of interesting names” (16 April).
In the interests of full disclosure and the safety warnings that so intrigue you, you should have alerted your readers not to try to name “The category of un-named categories of interesting names”.
Bertrand Russell became almost suicidal about whether such a category would contain itself. Let not this problem spread beyond UK shores, by modern means of meta-categorisation.
For the record
鈥� Our special report about the Large Hadron Collider (21 May, p 10) wrongly stated that superconducting magnets will accelerate the protons. In fact, the protons will be accelerated inside radio-frequency cavities. The magnets will curve and focus the protons as they circle within the accelerator.
Cytokine citations
It was pleasing to read Kevin Tracey’s lucid account of the cytokine nature of sepsis, in particular his recent valuable and original contributions of the roles of the protein HMGB1, and acetylcholine from the vagus nerve (2 April, p 38).
While at the Rockefeller, Tracey may well have wondered whether TNF could be one of the mysterious toxins of severe systemic diseases caused by bacteria and protozoans, but it is on record that this concept had occurred to other scientists, who worked on the idea and published it, in collaboration with Lloyd Old’s lab, several years earlier. Interested readers can consult Infection and Immunity, vol 32, p 1058 (1981) and Klinische Wochenschrift, vol 60, p 756 (1982), or Pharmacology and Therapeutics, 99, 221 (2003) for a more recent fuller account of the origins of the cytokine theory of disease.
Researchers were working on TNF and set the cytokine-disease ball rolling some years before the Rockefeller lab realised that their protein, cachectin, was the same molecule, and thus joined the field. This realisation was 10 years, after Lloyd Old’s team across the street published their original TNF paper. Placing their original PNAS publication vaguely in the 1980s, rather than 1975, has obscured this.
Green by order
The problem of energy supply cannot be left to the market (14 May, p 3). It requires strong and determined government action.
A start could be to change the building regulations so that all new buildings have to be adequately insulated, have photovoltaic generation and solar hot water built-in, and be equipped with domestic-scale wind turbines. The complaints from the building industry about cost must be ignored, and energy supply companies must be required to allow surplus domestic electricity to be sold to the grid.
Once all new buildings are compliant, a steady programme should be rolled out, compulsorily if necessary, to bring existing buildings to these specifications wherever physically possible.
This is serious investment for the future, just as building new power stations would be. Additional national-scale electricity generation from renewables should of course be added into the equation.
A framework of rationing for transportation energy should be introduced, with a state-controlled system of trading carbon credits covering cars, motor cycles, aeroplanes, boats, buses and trains. This needs to be accompanied by massive investment in public transport. This combination would change our travelling habits and priorities, and reduce energy use.
These measures would make a significant impact. They require only a government with firm enough purpose and the kind of multimillion pound advertising budget that is more normally used to persuade us to buy energy-hungry consumer goods that we don’t need.
From Ian Hore-Lacy, World Nuclear Association
Your editorial replays the usual pot-pourri of prejudice on nuclear power.
You say that no one has solved the engineering problem of disposing of high-level waste. That will be news to many specialists in several countries. No one concerned would rate it as a huge problem in the first place. And why make a big deal out of something so straightforward and well funded, relative to the other 99 per cent of toxic industrial wastes?
As for costs, there have been a raft of reports in the past couple of years all showing nuclear energy as competitive in many contexts. But surely that judgement should be left to those paying for the new nuclear plants with a view to running them profitably, not sceptics on the sidelines. Ask TVO in Finland for starters. Outside the UK at least, back-end costs are well controlled, quantified and internalised.
If wind is so competitive, put it on a level playing field next to new nuclear and see what happens.
The security problem is not as you represent it. North Korea has not diverted civil nuclear fuel to make weapons; it has never had any nuclear fuel of the kind relevant to your comments. In fact it used a Russian “experimental reactor” akin to some research reactors to make weapons-grade plutonium from natural uranium fuel. And it was the safeguards procedures you deride that exposed this. Such problems will not be solved or averted by the developed world turning away from nuclear power.
A new generation of nuclear power reactors in the UK, using currently available technology, could produce reliable base-load electricity cost competitively and safely, without any impact of wastes on the environment. More information is available at .
London, UK
From Gregory Tingey
On almost every river in the British Isles there are many dams which were formerly used to provide a constant head of water for various watermills. If these were gradually restored, with standardised turbines installed at every weir, they could generate a worthwhile amount of power.
With modern electronics, the control of the frequency and phase of their output could easily be synchronised to the needs of the grid. This diverse range of power sources would be very widely distributed, and the temporary loss of any one turbine for any reason would not significantly affect the overall power supply. The power distribution lines would not need to be intrusive, and because the technology used would be widespread and standardised, maintenance costs would be low.
Why is everyone chasing complex mega-project solutions, including giant wind farms, rather than a simple, distributed, robust and reliable possibility, such as this?
London, UK
From R. C. Giraud-Saunders
Hooray! At last a mention of the role that hydro can play in the alternative energy mix. I’ve read several articles since the UK government announced its stance on nuclear power, but your editorial is the first I’ve seen that mentions hydro power. I know of two places in southern England (Ringwood and Salisbury) that used to have their own hydro plants, and I’m sure there are many more around the UK. With modern turbine technology and modern energy management systems, it seems to me that there has to be a place in the scheme of things for hydro. Inevitably, There will be environmental issues, but compared to the problems presented by the nuclear option they pale into insignificance. Global environmental issues must be the ones given priority, so not too much NIMBY please, or there won’t be any back yards.
Offenbach am Main, Germany