For the record
鈥� The graph of brain mass against body mass accompanying the article “Don’t call me birdbrained” (23 June, p 36) was misdrawn: see for a revision.
C is for
Peter Slessinger suggests (Web Letter, 23 June) that participants in our research showing that synaesthetes have shared colour preferences for letters “were almost certainly given a set of colours from which to choose… thereby drastically reducing their choice” (19 May, p 48).
In fact, our participants were allowed to describe any colour at all. Between them they produced a total of 495 colour terms.
Interestingly, this was almost nine times as many terms as non-synaesthetes provided. This is compatible with studies showing that synaesthetes have superior abilities in colour perception and recall. (The diagram showing primary colours was included with the feature for summary purposes only.)
Slessenger’s proposal that synaesthetes’ colours stem simply from childhood ABC books is sensible, but has been tested, and rejected, elsewhere. Anina Rich and colleagues traced 136 ABC books published as far back as 1862 鈥� of which, surprisingly, only 38 used colour in any prominent sense. However, only 1 in 150 of their synaesthetes experienced colours consistent with any alphabet book.
Additionally, although Slessenger’s account is plausible for the examples he provided (eg, “A is for (red) apple, it’s less tenable when the entirety of alphabetic colours are considered. Indeed if synaesthetes’ colours were indicative solely of ABC learning, this would imply they lived in a world of green elephants (E), red mothers (M), black and blue tigers (T) and yellow cats (C).
Instead, our research indicates a different cause: synaesthetes colour their alphabets with a sophisticated, unconscious rule-system, in which, for example, associations are mapped according to the frequency with which letters and colour terms are encountered in the English language. High-frequency letters such as A are significantly likely to pair with high-frequency colour terms such as “red”.
Finally, Slessenger suggests our synaesthetes should be given symbols from an unknown language to test whether associations are independent of experience. This approach has been investigated and proved unhelpful. Strangely, depth of familiarity is not a strong predictor of synaesthetic colouring since some bilingual people have colour in only one language 鈥� and some monolinguals have colour for languages they do not understand.
And androgens?
I was interested to read of the effect that male twins have on their female twin in the womb (23 June, p 10). But why is it not the male who is affected by the double dose of oestrogen in the womb, from his mother and his sister?
There has been much discussion of environmental oestrogen affecting the males of many species. Are androgens less common in chemical pollutants, and therefore their effects on females less observed? Could any environmental increase in androgens cause even greater effects in the females of many species?
Heated argument
William Laurance’s claim that environmental impact statements are too narrow raises some interesting questions about the price of affluence (9 June, p 25). His criticism that a “narrow evaluation” will almost certainly give the green light to the proposed $5.2 billion expansion of the Panama canal says it all.
Such a project will, he writes, lead to “increased land speculation [and] overheated development”. In other words, it will make money for Panamanians, and make Panama more attractive to business.
Laurance does not indicate how “land speculation” is different from what happens anywhere when there is a greater demand for real estate, nor how heated development has to be before it can be deemed “overheated”. I vote he gets the job of telling Panama that in the interests of Mother Nature, it is best that it remain as Third World as possible.
Stupid discrimination
Michael Hanlon is right to draw attention to the justified discrediting of the “blank slate” view of potential attainment that still drives education policy in England (23 June, p 20). As a recently retired head teacher, I am well aware of the strong link between IQ and later educational attainment, and the much weaker predictive power of the standard tests that all children in England are forced to take at ages 11 and 14.
Hanlon is, however, quite wrong to suggest that pupils with IQ scores between 70 and 85 are likely to be functionally illiterate and innumerate when they leave school. Despite popular prejudice fostered by school league tables, performances at lower grades certainly represent functional ability in English and maths well above illiteracy and innumeracy, not to mention worthwhile skills and knowledge in the traditional school subjects like history, geography, science and foreign languages. Pupils of all abilities are surely entitled to have access to a broad and balanced education and to be taught by skilled teachers at an appropriate level.
The folly of adopting the C grade in GCSE exams in England and Wales as the pass-or-fail target for pupils, teachers and schools discriminates against the half of the population that necessarily has below-average IQs. Compounding this by denying them the basic elements of an enlightened, modern education by relegating them while still at school to mind-dulling manual training is an injustice with profound implications for creating a dangerously alienated cognitive underclass in our increasingly fractured society.
What were you thinking of to publish that nauseating article by Michael Hanlon? To refer to people who have a low IQ as “stupid” and “dim” defies belief.
Valuing vocational skills begins with the recognition that there are differing types of intelligence, all equally valid. Unfortunately, the care assistant and manual worker, though deemed by Hanlon to be necessary, receive very little in the way of financial remuneration. His pity for such people does not hide his true contempt when he describes them as dim and stupid.
Ilkley, West Yorkshire, UK
Michael Hanlon’s article should be compulsory reading for the Oxbridge graduates who determine education policy in the UK. As a teacher for 43 years I can confirm that the curriculum enforced on our schools condemns a large number of pupils to 11 years of misery due to their failure in each and every lesson of every school day.
I now meet ex-pupils who were unbearable at school but whom I would now be proud to call friends, now that the pressure of purely academic achievement has been replaced by the task of becoming a useful and respected member of society, at which they have succeeded.
From Ingrid Newkirk, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
According to Michael Hanlon we no longer enslave others on the grounds of their genetic inheritance and should not do so on the basis of a lower-than-average IQ. He writes that “The many victims of this discrimination have no voice, no ‘community’ and no legal sanction upon which to draw.”
But our treatment of every other living being in the animal kingdom is indeed based on genetic differences that, tragically, do not prevent them from experiencing the loss of joy and freedom we impose on them or the pain and fear we cause them.
When we all act like the moral agents Hanlon suggests we are, I will disband PETA forthwith with a happy heart.
Water from wind
Wind, solar and tidal energy are all perfect power sources for Australian desalination plants (16 June, p 8). Since it is not so important that you produce water at any particular hour of the day or even any particular day of the week, the plants can operate at a rate determined by the power available.
The fresh water in the tanks and ponds effectively stores the energy that goes into desalination. Add to this the abundant wind and solar resources in Australia and the fact that they won’t be adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere to further exacerbate their drought, and it’s a win-win combination.
And could growing vegetables in seawater greenhouses reduce the requirement for fresh water? Brackish and alkaline water work equally well and the small excess of fresh water produced soaks down into the soil and helps renew the groundwater. The brine produced as a by-product can be piped to the sea, where it causes no harm 鈥� just as Israel does around the Sea of Galilee with water from brackish springs.
From Vratislav R. Bejsak-Colloredo-Mansfeld
I am puzzled that no one has suggested a link between deforestation and drought. Is there any research on deforestation and land clearing in inland areas and disappearance of the rain? Australia has millions of hectares of cleared land.
Sydney, Australia
Prescient photons
I have read many articles about the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox and Alain Aspect’s experiment 鈥� but am still not convinced that the argument is watertight (23 June, p 30).
Even before the entangled photons are emitted, they will have a wave function corresponding to the probability that they might have been emitted. This wave function can propagate through the apparatus and interact with the polarisers. By the time they are actually emitted, the photons may already be “well aware” of the orientation of the polarisers. In effect these determine the polarisations of the photons when they are emitted: no faster-than-light effect is necessary.
If this has been considered, perhaps an article could explain the finer points for idiots like me? In the meantime there is still a chance that reality is real.
From Mike Griffiths
There is an obvious problem with the idea that things exist only when they are being observed. If it is true, how did the first observer ever come into existence?
Croydon, Surrey, UK
Chaotic will
Andrew Yake is quick to discount the relevance of chaos theory to the subject of free will (16 June, p 27). He dismisses chaos as “deterministic” without appreciating its profound implications.
People’s “free” choices are largely predictable. If you don’t believe this, watch the illusionist Derren Brown at work. There is, however, undeniably an element which defies prediction 鈥� which is most evident when the decision-maker is deliberately attempting to avoid being second-guessed.
If I aim to make my choice as hard for you to predict as possible, then what I am in all likelihood doing is trying to imagine what you are thinking I am thinking (and so on). This kind of recursive mechanism is a classic recipe for a chaotic system 鈥� though this is unlikely to be the exact path trodden in the chaotic decision-making Bj枚rn Brembs observed in fruit flies (19 May, p 16).
The crucial point is that chaos, whatever its source, produces an outcome that is at once wholly deterministic yet fundamentally unpredictable 鈥� by anyone, including, in this case, the decision-maker.
Our cherished notion of free will is not being ignored or cheapened here. Rather, it is being illuminated by a scientific principle whose deceptive beauty and simplicity distract from its profound practical and philosophical implications.
Tokai to task
The proper name of the famous Hungarian dessert wine mentioned in your article on wine-cellar mould is Tokaji (9 June, p 57). It has been produced exclusively in the region around the Tokaj mountain for centuries.
The European Union’s Court of Justice that wines from Italy could no longer (from 31 March 2007) be sold under the similarly pronounced “Tocai” name.
French producers phased out the equally similar “Tokay” name following an . It is unfortunate that your article inadvertently prolongs this sad story and hinders the recognition this wonderful Hungarian wine should enjoy.
The light programme
Sending enough power across a room to light a 60-watt bulb without wires doesn’t seem very new to me (16 June, p 29).
I saw this demonstrated as a small boy, during a public open day at the BBC Brookmans Park transmitter in Hertfordshire, UK, in the 1950s.
The electromagnetic energy in the room where the tuning coils were located was sufficient to power a light bulb held in the hand of this fascinated schoolboy, and of many others.
Deficient disorder
I was very pleased to read Dorothy Rowe’s sensible article on so-called mental illnesses (16 June, p 24). It has become something of a habit to name every kind of non-wanted behaviour as either a disease or a syndrome.
As soon as it has a name, the incidence of this new disease tends to rise dramatically. What is very wrong about this practice is that it takes away people’s responsibility for their behaviour, making it a matter of inevitability, and a cause for treatment.
From Richard House, Norwich Steiner School
Not before time, the scientific status of the ADHD diagnosis is being robustly challenged 鈥� as both Dorothy Rowe’s critical commentary on the explosion of diagnoses and David Ransen’s humorous letter on “Juvenile Obnoxiousness Disorder” (16 June, p 27) indicate. A self-fulfilling circularity lies at the heart of this so-called “disorder”.
From the outset, ADHD is simply assumed to exist, and psychiatric research is framed around this diagnostic category, the results of which are fed back into the diagnostic system. Thus the psychiatric language embedded in research and clinical practices actively constructs the very “pathological phenomenon” it claims to explain. A vicious, self-fulfilling circle is thus created whereby diagnosis and research reinforce one another, leaving their (by-now hidden) initial assumption unquestioned.
Such methodologically dubious psychiatric practices have little, if anything, to do with genuine science, and everything to do with modernist ideology and massively influential pharmaceutical-company interests. In reality, ADHD has always been a psychiatric convenience, a culturally created delusion which inappropriately medicalises challenging behaviour in children.
Under this ideology, such behaviour is spuriously conceived of, and then responded to, as a medical problem rather than as an understandable, and even healthy, response to the toxic culture in which children routinely find themselves 鈥� whether it be the family in which they have to survive, or the wider culture of a technocratic “modernity” to which they are relentlessly exposed, and with which their vulnerable senses are relentlessly assaulted.