Mark Harris

While the Virgin Birth is certainly an extremely unlikely event, it is nonetheless not quite so genetically miraculous as Barbara Smoker thinks (Letters, 8 May). Very nearly, but not quite. She states that if the Virgin Mary had undergone parthenogenesis (a sort of spontaneous self-cloning), then the offspring would always be female, since Mary would not have possessed the Y chromosome which defines...

Jenny Diski confuses two subtly different ideas in quantum theory (LRB, 2 January). One is a fundamental (Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle), while the other is a thought experiment (Schrödinger’s cat). She is right that her mother may indeed correspond to a kind of Schrödinger’s cat if she has made no contact with her, and has no knowledge of her whereabouts, or even her existence. However,...