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Frank Swain's article on colour blindness was interesting ( 17 March, p 38 ). I also find Jasper Fforde's novel Shades of Grey fascinating. It describes a society segregated by levels of colour vision. He summarises it : "Visual colour has become commodified, the social pecking order and levels of authority are not based on …

You say that an atomic clock has been used to take measurements outside a lab for the first time ( 17 February, p 17 ). But in the 1971 Hafele-Keating experiment , several atomic clocks were used to test relativistic time differences, when flown on airliners and compared with a reference on the ground. Other …

Mark Sheskin presented some interesting if, sadly, not unexpected statistics on our attitudes to inequality and fairness ( 31 March, p 28 ). Upper management pay contributes significantly to inequality; but there are more problems with it. Chief executives receive salaries and "bonuses" whether or not their company does well; they don't have to add …

Sheskin makes a good case that most people object more to economic unfairness than to inequality. But what causes this unfairness? Wealth is transmitted mainly through inheritance, social class and private education. Examine the background of supposedly "self-made men" and the silver spoon of social advantage will probably have played a part. That's not fair.

Fairness, not equality, is the central issue facing us, Sheskin argues . If, however, humans "evolved" a love of inequality, did they also evolve a sense of justice or fairness? If not, where does our knowledge of justice come from? The editor writes: There is a large scientific literature on the evolutionary origins of morality. …

Thank you for the interesting article by Gina Perry about Stanley Milgram's famous experiments ( 17 March, p 43 ). We should not forget that prior to these experiments, most people would have guessed that virtually nobody would go all the way, and psychiatrists were sure that only psychopaths would do so. Milgram showed that …

Perry gives an excellent critique of Stanley Milgram's claims of widespread willingness by individual volunteers to obey immoral orders. In addition, his later work shows that resistance to such orders was much more common where collective action by a group of volunteers was possible. Social ethics can be a more reliable counter to evil than …

Ben Collyer describes evidence that the switch from hunter-gatherer to agriculturalist caused a dramatic worsening of diet and an increase of disease and hard labour ( 24 March, p 44 ). This raises the question of why, then, it persisted. Masochism? The editor writes: • The loss of wetlands through rising sea levels contributed to …

Often different articles in the same issue of Â鶹´«Ã½ offer radically different world views, and the issue of 24 February is no exception. Buoyed up by the realistic, mature attitudes of Michael Mann on combating climate change ( p 22 ), Michael Marshall asking whether hairspray is really wrecking the planet ( p 23 …

Andy Coghlan says that hunter-gatherers are better at naming smells, based on them giving the same name for a given smell more consistently than horticulturalists ( 27 January, p 12 ). But the study scored a society's smell-naming performance as "0 if everyone in a group gave a different name, and 1 if all responses …