Lay down your arms
John Horgan reports the welcome but unsurprising finding that war is not an inevitable result of human nature (4 July, p 38). I have argued this throughout my 60 years of peace campaigning. Humans are complex beings: aggressive and conciliatory; competitive and cooperative; individualistic and socially minded; but not killers by nature.
The psychological complexities of warmongering aside, we must above all stop squandering the Earth’s finite resources on the means of death and destruction.
The latest gives global military expenditure in 2008 as $1.464 trillion, an obscene amount. The governments of the world are committed by many treaties and agreements to greatly reduce this expenditure. Devoting even a small percentage of this money to removing the causes of conflict would improve everyone’s security. Yet over the years they have consistently succumbed to the vested interests of the military-industrial complex identified by former US president, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The scientists and engineers who produce the nukes, the Eurofighters, the missiles, the cluster bombs and all the other horrors of modern warfare should surely be demanding that their skills be used for constructive, peaceful purposes. There is a need for a Hippocratic oath for technologists and scientists, incorporating the key precept of the original: “do no harm”.
John Horgan’s article on the possibility of an end to war was very encouraging, but he forgot the biggest factor in continuing war: it is the biggest profit-making business of all.
Our military-congressional-industrial-complex runs the world. Unless it’s dismantled, we have no chance.
US presidents John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter both tried to begin this process 鈥� and both got assassinated: one physically and one metaphorically.
West Chazy, New York, US
It was detrimental to John Horgan’s suggestion that our species may outgrow war, that he repeated the old myth about democracies not going to war with each other. For as long as modern democracies have existed, they have done just that.
In 1914, almost all of the states that went to war with each other had parliaments elected by a majority of adult males. All of those parliaments voted for war by a clear majority.
The US civil war was a secessionist war arising directly from a multiparty election. Other cases include Ireland in 1918-1919, after Sinn Fein got a clear majority for independence, and Spain in 1936. Sri Lanka was a multiparty democracy throughout the 27 years of the Tamil separatist war that only recently ended.
Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, UK
Malaria catastrophe
Martin de Smet reports that malaria in Cambodia is developing resistance to artemisinins (20 June, p 22).
I lived in Uganda for four years, and saw the impact of malaria there. It is clear that if resistance becomes widespread it will be a death sentence for many people.
In Uganda we grew artemesia and made a tea from it that is a valuable prophylactic and treatment for malaria. I understand that there are about 20 compounds in artemesia that have anti-malarial properties, and some strains of the plant are effective against malaria although they contain no artemisinin. The chance of resistance developing to a composite of so many compounds is negligible. So rather than purifying one active compound from artemesia, we might do better to make a plant extract.
Unfortunately, this does not fit with international standards for the preparation of pharmaceuticals, which require exact quantities of active components to be specified. It ought nevertheless to be possible to market such preparations under regulations relating to herbal remedies, which only require quantities of the major components to be included on the product label.
Some effort may be needed to achieve the necessary international agreement, but it will be well worthwhile.
We cannot allow the fight to prevent malaria becoming resistant to treatment to be tied up in red tape.
Brainy boozers
I was not as surprised as your reporter at the correlation between drinking alcohol and scores on memory tests taken by senior citizens (4 July, p 14).
The question is, where is the alcohol consumed 鈥� is it drunk alone or with company? I expect that most seniors drink while at the pub or together with friends. In these cases, they are still in communication with others and the ever-changing world around them, so they keep their brains active, learn new things and stay sharp. Those seniors who drink less alcohol might spend more time alone at home, where the brain is exercised less.
Swine flu testing
Debora MacKenzie’s article gives the impression that the UK has a uniform flu-testing strategy that was likely to miss many cases of transmission within communities (23 May, p 10). This is not the case: Scotland has its own health policy. The First Minister assured me last month that Scotland is at the forefront of efforts to stem the flow of this disease, and has the most thorough swine flu-testing procedure in the world.
Project yourself
Your letters pages have been replete with claims of priority for the experimental induction of out-of-body experiences (11 April, p 22 and 6 June, p 26).
None of these predates George Malcolm Stratton’s 1899 report of carrying a mirror device on his shoulders for several days which produced an image of his walking body, seemingly a few metres in front of himself (). He reported that constantly seeing this mirror-self moving when he moved induced “the feeling of being mentally outside my body”.
Daniel M眉ller’s 2003 cinema movie Der Zweite Leib 鈥� 鈥� featured my replication of Stratton’s method with modern virtual-reality techniques, which was also mentioned in Science in 2001 ().
Don't panic. OK, panic
New 杏吧原创 clearly does not espouse Bj酶rn Lomborg’s Viewfinder soundbite when he calls for “a more reasoned, more constructive, and less frightening dialogue” on global warming (27 June, p 25).
The following week’s front page headline screamed: “It’s worse than we thought” (4 July).
Engineering traits
Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog (13 June, p 26) suggest that in the psyche of engineers lurks something that makes them more predisposed to terrorism than doctors, linguists, historians, or even sociologists.
Even if we accept their claim that engineering graduates are over-represented in the ranks of violent radicals from the Islamic world, it’s quite a leap to then assert that “engineers are more likely to have… personality traits that make radical Islamism more attractive”.
According to “piecemeal evidence” these include anti-democratic tendencies and an intolerance of ambiguity. Actually, the latter is a trait I rather admire in engineers: will this aircraft component fail mid-flight? There’s some ambiguity, but let’s give it a try anyway.
At least it is not just Muslim engineers that we need to keep a wary eye on. US engineering professors are apparently more likely to be “right-wing and religious”. It is not clear whether this means they don white hoods and burn crosses, or merely vote Republican and go to church. Oh, for a little less ambiguity.
On the evidence of this article this analysis is, as New 杏吧原创‘s own editorial column puts it, unlikely to be useful when it comes to understanding the hugely complex factors that propel people, engineer or otherwise, towards acts of violence. At worst, if adopted by the wrong people their theory could be spun and twisted to justify unfounded suspicion and mistrust, which is exactly what we need less of.
B4 da world ens
Viewfinder reported that one-in-three kids thinks the Earth will cease to exist before they grow up (27 June, p 25). I remember the same feelings when I was a teenager, during the ever-present threat of nuclear holocaust. My greatest fear was that it would all kick off before I had the chance to race over to my girlfriend’s place.
Even at the age of 55, the 4-minute warning seems inadequate to get anything meaningful done on the horizontal front: at least with global warming there is time for a little indulgence before we go.
Telepathological
Richard Wiseman claims to have proved that remote viewing does not work (13 June, p 6 and p 23). Surely all he has proved is that he personally cannot send images telepathically.
It could be that you need telepaths at both ends of the attempted transfer. He should repeat the experiment using a number of different people, including those who believe in the paranormal.
For the record
鈥� Marie Curie was alive between 1867 and 1934, not 1854 and 1923 as we stated (4 July, p 23).
鈥� Laurie Dizney and others reported their findings on the spread of infection in mice in Emerging Infectious Diseases (4 July, p 12).
鈥� The name of the Yale University anthropologist mentioned in “The End of War” is Carol Ember, not Carolyn (4 July, p 38).
鈥� There were two valid solutions to Enigma 1546 (4 July, p 24): 38.5 and 57.5 square centimetres. A second 拢15 prize has been awarded to R. F. Tindell of Great Shelford, Cambridgeshire, UK.