What's in a face?
In your article on faces, there was a confounding variable in the reported experiment: smiling (14 February, p 28). Our brains seem to be hard-wired to interpret smiling positively. Nearly all of your data can be explained by it, yet the experiment does not control for smiles.
Only the paired female images gave positive results, and those were the pairs that exhibited greater differences in their smiles. For example, both composite faces under the “Humorous?” heading are smiling to a similar extent, and there was no difference found between them. In the “Religious?” category, we might suppose that people would consider those who are religious to be more serious, and the image with the smaller smile is indeed chosen by the majority. The image picked in the “Lucky?” category has a bigger smile: lucky people are likely to be happy. The experiment seems only to prove that people can spot a smiley face.
I can explain why “humorous” faces were so problematic to identify in the face experiment. You use self-reporting to determine humour, trustworthiness, luckiness and religiosity. However, often those who think themselves very humorous are not necessarily considered so by others. Is it only in the US that the self-described “life and soul of the party” is the person you try to flee from as they approach you, grinning like the Cheshire cat, at a cocktail party?
Albuquerque, New Mexico, US
Richard Wiseman and Rob Jenkins write:
鈥� Smiling may indeed account for some of the findings. However, it is difficult to understand why smiling effects vanish in male photographs, and research suggests that religious people rate themselves as happier than the non-religious. Were the “smiling” hypothesis true, it could simply reflect a mechanism for the effect rather than being a confounding variable, as emotional expression is very much part of the facial image. It may be that we found no effect in the self-rated humorous dimension because many people who consider themselves amusing are, in reality, annoying 鈥� thus the existence of clowns.
Eco-imperialism
The Chagos Conservation Trust (CCT) does not have a “plan” as described by Fred Pearce (21 February, p 10). The trust will publish a booklet next month on the importance of protecting the environment of the Chagos archipelago, supported by a second scientific document. These documents will show that your title and theme are way off track and seem overly concerned with controversy. Any “plan” would of course come from the UK government, not CCT.
Last year, the islanders published a proposal for resettlement of the archipelago. A group of scientists, in association with CCT, commented on these proposals, which costed repopulation at misleadingly low levels. The proposals ignored issues like food provision and underestimated the cost of an airport 鈥� and the damage it would cause 鈥� by a couple of orders of magnitude. We pointed out a lot of flaws in the document, and now one of its prominent supporters is telling us it is being “quietly buried”.
Chagossians themselves have said that they want to put conservation at the heart of the area’s future. The facts are a bit more complicated than “Eco-imperialism stalking the high seas”, as you put it.
From Mark Spalding,
While I was delighted that you have given some attention to Chagos, one of the world’s most important coral reef areas, I was somewhat frustrated that Fred Pearce appears to be trying to fuel discord and undermine further the possibility of gains for both conservation and human rights.
Newmarket, Suffolk, UK
Religious agenda
Amanda Gefter, telling us how to detect religious propaganda, writes: “When evolution is described as a ‘blind, random, undirected process’, be warned. While genetic mutations may be random, natural selection is not,” (28 February, p 23). Of course she is right about natural selection, but might not the writers she complains of have been reading Richard Dawkins, who does indeed speak in these terms?
In his book River Out Of Eden, for example, he writes: “In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it… At bottom… [there is] nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”
Dawkins cannot, I think, at present be described as a religious source, though I know that many are anticipating his conversion with some interest.
From James Humphreys
Amanda Gefter states the scientific claim that “humans are the product of purely material forces”. Science makes no such claim. Gefter is confusing the methodological materialism of science, where science limits itself to explaining the natural using natural causes, with metaphysical materialism, the doctrine that physical matter is the only reality. Science cannot adjudicate on such metaphysical issues as the latter.
Colchester, Essex, UK
Amanda Gefter writes:
鈥� Some evolutionary biologists may have characterised natural selection as random, but in the quote from River out of Eden, Dawkins does not. He speaks of indifference; that is to say, there is no intent behind evolution. “Lack of intent” is by no means synonymous with “random”. Secondly, while a scientist can subscribe to methodological materialism without subscribing to metaphysical materialism, science itself only speaks of material causes. From the point of view of science, there is no distinction between the two.
Sleep well
While managing a hostel for the chronically mentally ill, I realised that a deteriorating sleep pattern was the harbinger of illness in a resident, as discussed in Emma Young’s article (21 February, p 34).
One year, I was outraged when a consultant psychiatrist prescribed electroconvulsive therapy for an anxious, but otherwise intelligent and gentle, young man. However, after his treatment the man was surprisingly relaxed, and said that the general anaesthetic before the shock treatment gave him the best sleep he’d had in years. I’ve wondered ever since whether the anaesthetic is responsible for the occasional beneficial effects of this treatment, and if anaesthesia alone could be a treatment to break established patterns of behaviour.
Meanwhile, many people with insomnia self-medicate using alcohol and other drugs, and have no doubt that they are choosing the lesser of two evils. If you have ever had your life ruined by insomnia, you probably agree.
Forgotten empire
Jo Marchant’s review of two new books, which rightly highlight Islamic intellectual development from the 7th century onwards, states: “caliphs who… sponsored the translation of scientific texts from lands they had conquered” (21 February, p 46).
Many of these texts would have come from the Byzantines, the inheritors of Greece and Rome. Some credit must accrue to them as well as to the Islamic scientists with whom they worked. The Byzantines 鈥� Orthodox Christians rather than Roman 鈥� are almost completely left out of historical accounts produced under the sway of the western churches.
Gut feeling
Peter Aldhous writes that type 2 diabetes can be rapidly brought under control by inserting a sleeve into the small intestine, which alters the hormone and nervous signalling from the duodenum (31 January, p 18).
From observing my own diabetes over a period of 16 years I have concluded that it is a signalling problem, and that the offending organ is the duodenum, not the pancreas. Indeed, recent continuous monitoring of serum glucose showed that my pancreas can dispose of glucose far faster than the rate recorded in published data for a healthy young man.
There seems to be a need for basic research into duodenal signalling and abnormalities in people with diabetes. This might lead us to ways to sedate a twitchy duodenum and thus to a cure for the disease. We could then consign the brute-force use of insulin to the cupboard where they keep the mercuric chloride and the bloodletting instruments.
Metaphor for life
Stephen Strauss is right when he says that terms like “blueprint” and “book of life” are poor metaphors for the way that DNA functions (21 February, p 22). I think that a gene works more like a knitting pattern. Both contain instructions which, if followed correctly, result in the assembly of a structure that is both complex and useful 鈥� on the one hand a protein, on the other a sweater.
Body values
Susie Orbach gave us a rather pained and regretful summary of the modern technology of bodily improvement and augmentation (7 February, p 28). She stated the obvious facts that plastic surgery, the makeover industry and all the rest concentrate on people’s secondary sexual characteristics and their visible indicators of youth and health 鈥� and hence apparent fertility- but she did not follow through to any testable hypotheses.
With a bit of clever experimental design it ought to be possible to conduct controlled trials of makeover-desire in both people and other animals. Will some women select breast augmentation over a bigger income? Would stags opt for bigger antlers in preference to food, even when hungry? If peacocks were given the budget, would they shell out for a more colourful and impressive tail?
For the record
鈥� The Crab nebula is in the constellation of Taurus not, as we stated, Orion (7 March, p 14).
鈥� The materials used to print 3D images of bones are tricalcium phosphate and poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid), not tri-calcium triphosphate and polylactic acid (7 March, p 13).
鈥� In “Surviving in a warmer world” (28 February, p 28) we said that “9 million people would need 18,000 square kilometres of land to live on”. That figure should, of course, have been 9 billion people, and the area of land 180,000 square kilometres.
鈥� The DOI reference to Daniel Campbell’s research into the MET gene should have been (7 March, p 15).