Letters to the Editors

Oct 25, 04:04 AM

Current Headlines: By Anonymous

Please Repeat the Question To the Editors:

As an undergraduate in psychology in the 1930s, I took a course in social psychology. One of the topics was questionnaires about attitudes. I took an instant dislike to the whole process when I encountered a questionnaire on racial attitudes. I found a true/ false question that displayed a hostile racial attitude toward African-Americans regardless of your response. Since then I have seen many questionnaires where hidden assumptions on the part of the authors produced questions that an informed subject would be unable to answer.

I was reminded of this when I saw the question "how evolution and religion relate" in Gregory W. Graffin and William B. Provine's column "Evolution, Religion and Free Will" (Macroscope, July- August). I would have to answer "both B and C." Yes, "religion is adaptation, a part of evolution" and yes, science, in this case evolution, and religion are "mutually exclusive tenets." Can we, like the White Queen, believe "six impossible things before breakfast?"

I can certainly accept the conclusion of evolutionary psychology that religion, in its multifarious (if not nefarious) forms helped clans, tribes and nations to grow and prosper ("adapt"). I also believe that the content of any religion today is untenable, that only science is a "way to know."

Morton Nadler

Virginia Polytechnic Institute

and State University

To the Editors:

In "Evolution, Religion and Free Will," Drs. Graffin and Provine conclude from their survey data that, although most evolutionary biologists identify themselves as philosophical materialists, they also regard evolution and religion as not competing. However, this conclusion does not cleanly follow from the survey results.

On the science-vs.-religion survey question, Drs. Graffin and Provine assume that those who chose response B ("religion is a social phenomenon that has developed with the biological evolution of Homo sapiens...") would disagree with response C ("[religion and science] are mutually exclusive magisteria whose tenets indicate mutually exclusive conclusions"). They conclude that "These eminent evolutionists view religion as a sociobiological feature of human culture, a part of human evolution, not as a contradiction to evolution." But a respondent who agreed with option C and deemed religion a failed competitor with science in the search for truth, would probably also agree with B and might prefer its fuller explanation of the nature of religious belief.

Mark Alford

Washington University in St. Louis

Drs. Graffin and Provine respond:

Several letters reflected the concern that the multiple options on the questionnaire are not mutually exclusive. Any number of truthful statements can be offered to a person, but certain ones will more accurately describe their worldview. This doesn't render the other statements false, it merely demonstrates the preferred worldview of the respondent.

Here is an example. Say we ask a respondent to choose one of the following statements that best describes her view: A: I believe that organisms result from the creative law of natural selection B: I believe that organisms result from automatic laws of nature without intervention of creative forces C: I believe that organisms are intelligently designed. All of these options could be deemed correct by one who studies natural science. Choosing option A, however, says something about the respondent: She clearly believes in natural selection as a creative force in nature; possibly the respondent is a neo-Darwinian. A naturalist who chooses B is somehow put off by the characterization of natural selection as a creative force. This person is not likely from the neo-Darwinian school. A person who chose C is clearly either a deist or a theist, a rarity among distinguished natural scientists.

Some respondents simply left a question blank if none of the statements correctly characterized their viewpoint. Such cases were rare.

The high return rate and the scarcity of critical comments about the questions in the written portion of the questionnaire led us to believe that the study adequately characterized the spectrum of opinions among evolutionary biologists.

The Life of Miss Potter

To the Editors:

As the author of Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature (Allen Lane, Penguin; St Martin's Press, 2007), I write to bring to your attention Keith Stewart Thomson's failure to properly acknowledge my work as the major source for his essay, "Beatrix Potter, Conservationist" (Marginalia, May-June), and the editorial policy of allowing such work to be published. Not only did Dr. Thomson paraphrase much of my work in his essay without acknowledging or citing it, he never mentions it by name in the text, and merely lists it as one of three other general sources, none more recent than 1988. (He does, however, find space to specifically mention the movie Miss Potter and its star.)

Dr. Thomson appropriates my thesis throughout and in general treats my research as though it were his own. He closely paraphases my analysis of the response of the botanists at Kew and includes my theory that Mclntosh was the model for Mr. McGregor, but without citation to my new evidence on which that premise is based. His final three paragraphs directly appropriate material from my book again without mention, as though he had discovered these facts for himself.

I note that your Marginalia column is not a "book review." Nonetheless, it should be held to the same standards of scholarship that are generally assumed for material published in American Scientist. Dr. Thomson's essay demonstrates a regrettable misappropriation of my work, a disappointing failure to acknowledge and properly attribute his source, and the use of outdated references which indicate his lack of currency in the field.

Linda Lear

George Washington University

Dr. Thomson responds:

I am sorry that Dr. Lear has taken offense with my Marginalia essay on Beatrix Potter. The problem may lie, I suspect, with the nature of these essays. They are not research articles (and use no endnotes), nor are they book reviews. The (very modest) art of writing these essays is to bring together information from a number of sources to create, in 1,500 words, a seamless story. No reader will have thought that it represented primary research on my part, although the viewpoint is completely personal and based on a long interest in the subject. The reader is pointed to my primary sources which, in addition to Dr. Lear's recent biography, include standard works on Beatrix Potter's art and the classic account of British moorland geography. None of these is mentioned by name, and I can understand that Dr. Lear might feel slighted thereby. Anyone interested in the subject will certainly find Dr. Lear's new book valuable.

Sweet Chemicals

To the Editors:

Roald Hoffmann's Marginalia column ("Legally Sweet," July- August) was, as usual, insightful and entertaining. However, the sucrose and sucralose structural drawings were not correctly done, the aspartame drawing was ambiguous, and the labeling of the guanidinoacetic acid derivative drawing was misleading.

Many of the lines indicating carboncarbon and carbon-oxygen bonds in the sucrose and sucralose drawings are mistargeted to hydrogen atoms, to subscript 2s or to somewhere vaguely between atomic symbols. The aspartame structural drawing does not indicate critical stereochemistry at the two critical chiral centers. The guanidinoacetic acid structure should have been labeled as a granidinoacetic acid derivative.

Thomas W. Flechtner

Cleveland State University

Dr. Hoffmann responds:

There is a lot of flexibility in the way chemical structures are written, and much shared sense for what people are trying to communicate. For instance very few people would imagine that - CH^sub 2^OH stands for -C-H-H-O-H. Similarly, I think the vast majority of chemists looking at the cases that Dr. Flechtner cites would know that the line heading up to the CH^sub 2^OH substituent indicates a bond to C and not H and not O. The positions of the lines could be improved, admittedly.

There is a time to show stereochemistry, as in aspartame, and there is a time to omit it; such a choice was made for aspartame stereochemistry in American Scientist. A different choice would have been made for the Merck Index.

"Granidine" and "granidinoacetic acid" are extremely rare terms, which would be unrecognized by the vast majority of organic chemists. Guanidinoacetic acid is pretty descriptive, and is the term used by chemists in the sweet taste community.

How to Write to American Scientist

Brief letters commenting on articles that have appeared in the magazine are welcomed. The editors reserve the right to edit submissions. Please include a fax number or e-mail address if possible. Address: Letters to the Editors, American Scientist, P.O. Box 13975, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 or editors@amsci.org.

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