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Scientists in Louisiana (and elsewhere) worried that a new law will open the door to teaching creationism (12 July, p 8) seem to have a simple solution: learn from the creationists. Proponents of intelligent design have gazumped science in the public policy field, using academic freedom as an argument to get their teaching into the …

If the intelligent tutoring system at the University of California, San Diego, currently "gets it right less than half the time" (5 July, p 23) when analysing students' expressions to gauge how hard lectures are, then how about taking its results and concluding the exact opposite? Easy becomes hard and hard becomes easy...

• We said that of 80 volunteers testing a single therapy for allergy, "only 20... reported side effects" and that this was "one tenth the number reported by those receiving the combination therapy" (26 July, p 11) . To clarify: there were 20 reports of side effects in patients receiving monotherapy, compared with more than …

Thank you for covering an important area of economics theory not often covered in scientific publications. Your headline says it all: "Forget textbook economics, the answer lies elsewhere" ( 19 July, p 5 and p 32 ). It is a shame that you do not mention the "elsewhere". To me, it must lie in other …

The common view that Darwin did not believe that acquired characteristics could be inherited (12 July, p 28) is mistaken. In The Life and Letters of T. H. Huxley , Henry Huxley records Darwin's fellow naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace writing: "Darwin always believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, such as use and disuse... I …

John Postgate, criticising Stuart Kaufmann's use of the word "creativity" in relation to evolutionary processes, describes natural selection as "random" (12 July, p 23) . It is anything but: without the non-random process of selection, adaptation would be unlikely to occur. When a non-random, but naturally occurring and understood, process generates a marvellous diversity of …

Amitabh Avasthi's report of the troubles of the eastern North Pacific grey whale (10 May, p 41) reminded me of Graham Lawton's article on whale falls (12 November 2005, p 50) and in particular, estimates of some 850,000 whale carcasses on the seabed at any one time, compared with 80,000 hydrothermal vent sites, both supporting …

I found your article "We need to talk about your scan..." (5 July, p 8) very interesting, having taken part in a project on ageing with researchers at Oxford University. As part of this they asked that we have an MRI scan of our head at the beginning and end of the project. Unfortunately, I …

Personal experiences of people who decided to get their DNA tested (5 July, p 36) gave me a good insight into the pros and cons of this new tool, which is likely to steal work from fortune-tellers. Though I am aware that the technology is not precise, I was nearly convinced that I should eventually …

At school we were told that Robert Millikan, while measuring of the charge on the electron, had discarded one oil droplet which had a charge of one third "because it was obviously wrong". Really? Perhaps the best way to find any such fractionally charged particles would be with a modified version of his oil drop …

Laura Spinney considers whether the brain generates noise to heighten perceptual sensitivity (21 June, p 42) . The answer appears to be no, unless there is a reason why sensitivity cannot be achieved by evolution producing neurons with lower firing thresholds. Noise might not be the only explanation for the observation by Gero Miesenböck of …

Mark Buchanan is right to question the "rational" account of economics offered by the majority of economists (19 July, p 32) . However, like them he describes the market as a natural phenomenon not a social one – he reifies it. He rightly notes that markets are the sum of individuals' actions, but fails (as …

Stephen Wilson complains that Lawrence Krauss fails to recognise religious believers' "yearning for meaning" in the face of a universe providing no evidence of a deity (5 July, p 20) . True, religious apologists do say that sort of thing, but unfortunately never tell us what they mean by meaning. If they are looking for …

A. C. Grayling calls academic exploration of the interface between science and religion an attempt to "give religion some of the respectability of science" (12 July, p 48) . It is not. It is an endeavour to transcend the limitations inherent in the scientific strategy of bracketing out questions of meaning and value. To compare …