Splitting hares
Although not mentioning either councils or parliaments (27 August, p 19), there is an excellent description of mysterious circular assemblies of hares (involving from 10 to 40 individuals) in The Leaping Hare by George Ewart Evans and David Thomson.
From Isabel Hood
I was fortunate enough to be educated in Scotland about 40 years ago, where a book by Angus Maciver, The New First Aid in English, was written “for pupils at a difficult period in scholastic life, namely the Transition Class in England and the Qualifying Class in Scotland”. The old “Qually” was a major hurdle in a Scottish child’s life, and The New First Aid was considered good practice for the English test. (Its contents still help considerably with crosswords.)
One of the sections is “Group terms or collections” and in a considerable list there occurs a down of hares, along with a cast of hawks, a baren of mules, a skulk of foxes, a stand of plovers, a watch of nightingales, a host of sparrows, a pride of lions, a siege of herons, a wisp of snipe and a smuck of jellyfish. Oddly, it gives a building of rooks rather than a parliament. Maybe Scottish rooks do more construction of nests than talking.
Downpatrick, County Down, UK
For the record
鈥� We unintentionally maligned a correspondent on our letters pages. Valerie Moyses wrote on 16 July to comment on an article on ancient handwriting. We headlined her letter “A graphologist writes…”. According to the Oxford Dictionary of English, graphology is “the study of handwriting, for example as used to infer a person’s character”. What we meant was palaeography, “the study of ancient writing systems and the deciphering and dating of historical manuscripts”. Rather like confusing astronomy with astrology. Sorry.
鈥� Gravity may be thin at Andrews Air Force Base (Feedback, 27 August), but Discovery landed at Edwards Air Force Base.
鈥� In our article on primates and social living we wrongly attributed several primate research papers to Proceedings of the Royal Society B (3 September, p 10). The papers were actually drawn from Biology Letters 鈥� now a completely separate journal.
鈥� The US Department of Agriculture’s Southern Weed Science Research Unit is in Stoneville, Mississippi, not Missouri as stated in “Enter the superweed” (27 August, p 17).
What are you seeing?
Zeeya Merali recounts interesting research results strongly suggesting that Chinese and American people literally see the world differently (27 August, p 12). On the opposite page, the same writer describes how an African frog hunts with its “eyes wide shut” 鈥� its perception of the external world is relayed by a skin receptor system, independent of its eyes, which allows the frog to hunt effectively at night.
On page 42 of the same issue, Peter Watson argues that the conceptual vocabulary of science is “not written in stone”. He points out that a number of basically anthropomorphic concepts such as “personality” or “depression” are out of date, and that scientists should seek ways to surmount semantic traps where, as recent research indicates, words clearly fail to bridge the gap between brain states and cognitive states.
Clearly the conceptual vocabulary implied by the words “eyes” and “sight” is inadequate to describe the African frog’s perception of its world. Similarly, when American and Chinese students looked at the same picture, how they perceived the information contained in it was markedly different. Using the same description of the students’ actions up to the point they first looked at the picture is correct: but what they then saw was culturally imbued, and that requires a different understanding, as Merali points out, and also a different vocabulary.
These three articles in one issue all neatly point to the complexity of perception and how it is mediated 鈥� surely the bedrock of science. Starting from a firm Baconian empiricism I am sure there is a neat way forward. The great 18th-century French scientist Antoine Lavoisier said: “Like three impressions of the same seal, the word ought to produce the idea, and the idea to be a picture of the fact”. Perhaps your readers can better that?
Soldiers in distress
I am disappointed to see the lack of effective therapy available to military personnel for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (27 August, p 6).
I am a consultant psychotherapist. I have treated people with PTSD and in the majority of cases there is a vast difference within just one session 鈥� sometimes a full cure. Once the PTSD is lifted, all the side effects usually disappear quickly. Excessive drinking often stops, the flashbacks stop, the nightmares stop, the depression lifts.
People usually require follow-up sessions only to help rebuild their lives. The sooner you treat the PTSD, the fewer sessions they are likely to need.
There seems to be a lot of talk about treating those who have PTSD, yet they rarely get sent to therapists that could help.
From Eugene R. Packer
These findings about PTSD are not surprising. Most of those I treat for this problem have sleep disorders. This, combined with the results of chronic stress, can seriously affect the immune system and have consequences for the heart, arteries and so on.
I have observed many of these problems among veterans from the second world war, Korea and Vietnam, but the condition is not restricted to combat survivors. I suspect that torture victims, rape victims and survivors of natural disasters will experience the same things.
Fair Lawn, New Jersey, US
From Duncan MacKenzie
What is truly sad about your report about long-term war trauma is that, as in most media reporting, the innocent Iraqi civilians are invisible.
There is not the slightest acknowledgement, nor whisper of recognition, of the huge trauma that they must be suffering 鈥� their houses destroyed, their neighbourhoods in sudden danger of car-bombers or firefights, their loved ones and neighbours killed, wounded, kidnapped.
Those troops and other westerners deployed are usually able to come home after their tours, but for many Iraqis there is no escape from the constant stress described by Debora MacKenzie. Why do these people not count? Why is their anguish and their long-term mental and physical health not worth mentioning?
Fremont, California, US
World without Darwin
John Waller’s “what if” contribution is surely right in its suggestion that in a world without Darwin, evolutionism would have developed differently (20 August, p 42).
Alfred Russel Wallace couldn’t have made an impact on his own, but there would have been a movement toward evolutionism in the 1860s, spearheaded by Herbert Spencer in Britain and Ernst Haeckel in Germany.
Without the idea of natural selection, this movement would have been even more firmly based on Lamarckism and other ideas of directed evolution.
Waller may be right to suggest that other areas of biology would eventually have undermined the credibility of simple Lamarckism. A science of heredity would have emerged 鈥� but it might not have included the oversimplified genetic determinism that shaped so much thinking in our own world and the eugenics movement would have had much less scientific support. “Evo-devo” 鈥� the light that the development of the embryo in the womb casts on evolution theory 鈥� would have played a central role in biology throughout, instead of being a latecomer which has had to struggle to gain a hearing.
In a world without Darwin, our biology might well contain more or less the same components as it does now, but we would see their relationships and significance in a very different light.
From David Gibson
You omitted to consider “what if Charles Babbage had completed his difference engine?”
If this had happened, perhaps computers as we understand the term now would have been developed mechanically in the late 19th century. This idea was explored in the novel The Difference Engine by William Gibson (no relation) and Bruce Sterling. The novel describes programmable computers the size of warehouses filled with spinning brass wheels, and it examines the social impact of computing in an age before electronics.
Leeds, Yorkshire, UK
We're pro-life too
There must be a better general term to describe the anti-abortion and anti-stem-cell-research organisations than “pro-life groups” (20 August, p 5).
Not only is the term inaccurate, but its implication that the rest of us are somehow anti-life is deeply offensive (as I imagine its originators intended it to be).
Could you not use something neutral, for example, “embryo rights groups” or “embryo protection groups”?
One class of horse
The mention of cloning sport horses raises the possibility of “one class” equestrian events (27 August, p 16). These would be similar to one-class sailing events, in which several boats of identical manufacture race together. The skill of the sailor is the determining factor rather than the boat. Cloned horses would allow the riders to compete on equal terms, with minimal variation between horses.
Art for all our sakes
If I read Peter Watson correctly, then his suggestion that the “serious business of the world” is located only in the realm of science, is one of the most ignorant and arrogant statements I have come across recently (27 August, p 44). If Watson doesn’t know what “artists” (and other non-scientists) actually do, then he shouldn’t be allowed to pontificate about it in the pages of a reputable magazine.
Special specs
Your interview highlights the excellent invention of adaptive spectacles by Joshua Silver (20 August, p 48). However, it seems to miss the point that the spectacles would make excellent and rapid sight-testing equipment rather than being an end product to replace spectacles. Anyone with just a little knowledge could use the adaptive optics to speedily test hundreds of people’s eyes.
Cheap, mass-produced plastic spectacles could then be taken off the shelf to match each person’s prescription. Mass-produced spectacles would be physically stronger and considerably cheaper to produce, whereas the membrane of the adaptive spectacles has to be quite thin to be flexible, and would always be a weak point if used for normal daily wear.
Magnetic glue
C茅sar Rodrigues suggests that moisture may be a possible “glue” for initiating planet formation in an accretion disc (27 August, p 19).
Another possible agent is magnetism. As ferrous elements condense, the particles they form may well be magnetised, especially if they condense within a magnetic field. And even particles without intrinsic magnetic alignment will concentrate an external field. Because magnetism is much stronger at short range than gravitation, when these particles collide with each other they will be more likely than non-magnetic dust to stay stuck together and form clumps.
As anyone who has used a magnetised screwdriver to pick up a single screw from a pile will know, ferrous objects are very good at forming clumps in the presence of a magnetic field.
The Earth’s core is believed to be made up mostly of iron and nickel, and astronomers hunting for Earth-like planets orbiting other stars have looked for spectral lines indicative of iron in those stars to help narrow down their search, suggesting that magnetic materials may be significant in the formation of terrestrial planets at least.
Time for Turner
I was intrigued by Don Olson’s dating of Ansel Adams’s photograph (27 August, p 5) as I used a similar technique to find that J. M. W. Turner painted Moonlight, a Study at Millbank at 20.35 GMT on 19 August 1796.
What makes that painting particularly easy to date is Turner’s fortuitous inclusion of the planet Jupiter near the full moon, curiously absent from the image on the Tate Britain gallery’s website, but plainly visible on the original.