Survival Of The Fittest
All life-forms live because of their ability to adapt to their environment. “Coldblooded Rescue” [May 2010] reports another case of well-meaning humans adapting the environment to suit the limited survivability of endangered sea turtles. As the turtles continue to breed, they will continue to get trapped in Cape Cod Bay. Rescuers are making the turtles’ survivability dependent on them. We need to respect Darwin.
Wayne Gonzalez
San Jose, California
Altered Memory
Karim Nader’s belief that the act of remembering can change our memories [“Making Memories,” May 2010] echoes E. L. Doctorow in The Waterworks: “Remembrances take on a luminosity from their repetition in your mind...what you remember as having happened and what truly did happen are no less and no more than...visions.”
Charles Thomas
Midland, Texas
Hidden Hazards
Abigail Green’s Last Page essay [“Green Eggs and Salmonella?” June 2010] is a wonderful tour of must-read children’s literature. I hope her concerns about the hazards in the stories are meant as whimsy. Children are being smothered by virtual entertainment and controlled environments. Their stories should spark the imagination, fire the thirst for adventure and fan the flames of independence. Put that party hat on, drive up that giant tree (the car has a seat belt) and get going, you crazy dogs!
Keith Blodgett
Mesa, Arizona
Customized Organs
The article about tissue engineering [“Organs Made to Order,” July/August 2010] was an inspirational look at what scientists are capable of. Who would have thought that crazy, space-age ideas like growing back a limb might someday become reality?
Amber N. Middlemiss
Wyoming, Michigan
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Comments (4)
Letter to the Editor of Smithsonian Magazine
An Alternative View
Reference: - October 2010 Cover Story – Illustrated Man
For billions of people all over the world the human body is beautiful without being marked up or covered with self inflected scars. Your photography is super as usual but the glossy prints of body “art” give a superficial view. The article omitted the pain involved with cutting the body and what happens beneath the surface. There is the risk of infection and blood poisoning from cutting the body and sticking metal, bones and stones through the skin. There were no pictures of lip plates that are still used by women in Ethiopia to deform the lower lip and no mention of small feet deformed by binding the feet of girls in China.
Most people around the world that put on makeup and paint their bodies can easily wash it off and do no harm to their bodies with marks that are permanent. It was interesting to see an example of cannibal tribesmen that marked their bodies to commemorate victories in battle and to record their victims. In contrast to such pagan practices, people that are monotheistic: Muslims, Jews and Christians have been taught that the body is special and not to be deformed on purpose.
Overall, the article on body “art” and “illustrations” seemed to show such practices favorably. But for most people around the world, babies are beautiful and the human body is an art form of its own, just the way it is.
Gary Currall
Posted by Gary Currall on December 4,2010 | 12:22 AM
I read with great interest that Bob Hazen of the Carnegie Institution for Science (“Before There Was Life”, October, 2010) has spent a career trying to find out where life’s building blocks came from and how they “connected” billions of years ago in his effort to decipher the origins of life. Tell him he could have saved himself years of tedious, repetitive and ultimately futile experiments by looking in the Christian Bible, Genesis Chapter 1.
Posted by George Rose on November 9,2010 | 05:47 PM
Subject: Response to "Survival of the Fittest", Oct. 2010 Letters
Even though the problems of the turtles in Cape Cod Bay may be unrelated to any direct human causes, I'd like to address the general policy of human intervention, which was questioned in the letter "Survival of the Fittest" (Oct.2010).
Darwinian adaptation is measured in thousands to millions of years. Meanwhile, in our relatively short time on earth, humans have been causing the greatest mass extinction of flora and fauna since the dinosaurs 65 million years ago; by direct causes such as incursions into native habitats, and inadvertent ones such as introducing species which hitch rides on planes and boats to new environments, where they wreak havoc on the indigenous populations.
As long as there is any hope to rectify the causes of our impact---and there is more and more thanks to increasingly heightened attention----we should invest in buying time for these plants and animals. Many have been reintroduced and are beginning to flourish again, and there are places where native peoples have been successfully incentivized to alter their economy sustainably in order to save the very species they have always depended on.
If we take the attitude that Darwin's theory will just take care of everything, the exquisite symbiosis that evolved without our help will be so disrupted that earth will no longer be a hospitable place for us either.
Martha Aarons
Posted by Martha Aarons on October 8,2010 | 12:56 PM
I have been a subscriber and reader of the Smithsonian for over 25 years. This past issue contained a remarkable coincidence that I think is worth noting. Two articles with entirely different subject matter (Origin of Life and Tattoos of the World) involved two women with the same last name: Deborah Klochko and Kateryna Klochko. Perhaps I am mistaken that this is an unusual name, but this seems like an extraordinary coincidence. Is there anything further about this we could know, like it turns out they are related?
Posted by Gary Rosenblum on October 5,2010 | 02:04 PM