Final frontier

With references to Last attack (November 7), fundamentalists will keep on striking back to justify their existence in the age of science. Which is why there is so much of antagonism against Darwin’s theory of evolution and stem cell research. Intelligent design theory, put forward by the Catholics, is indeed the last effort by fundamentalists to counter the triumphs of science. The same group of fundamentalists are aghast at stem cell research, because success in this frontier will rob incurable disorders of all their mysteries. And in the world with no ailments and sufferings, the religious lobby will have little to do. We know that fundamentalists thrive on people’s sufferings. They love to terrorise people so that they can police the feeble minds of the ailing men and women.

Arun Sengupta
Calcutta-91

Planet mystery

A number of times it has been claimed that a new planet has been discovered beyond Pluto in our solar system. But such claims have remained largely unproved. In fact, it is doubtful whether even Pluto can be considered a planet; which means the very definition of a planet is a murky concept (What’s a planet, anyway, November 7). To qualify as a planet (literally, ‘wanderer’) a heavenly body has to revolve round a star in a fixed time and along a fixed route. But the problem arises regarding the size of the body. Scientists are still not sure about the size of a heavenly body that fits the basic definition.

Arjun Chaudhuri
Calcutta-25

Scary stories

It’s time scaremongering over a possible bird flu epidemic (Smartest virus, October 17) stops. These stories can only help press the panic button when the real outbreak occurs. I think all these scary stories are part of a public relation exercise by pharmaceutical companies that want to test experimental vaccines and anti-virals in southeast Asia.

Abhishek Mukherjee
Barrackpore