Sir

Ad Lagendijk, in his Essay “Pushing for power” (Nature 438, 429; 2005), draws a picture of the physics community dominated by aggressive males engaged in territorial combat and believes that these observations extend to other branches of science as well.

We beg to differ with him. We find biology to encompass a diversity of men and women, juniors and seniors, from around the globe.

At two conferences we have recently attended — the Ecological Society of America meeting in Portland, Oregon, in August 2004 and the International Botanical Congress in Vienna in July last year — women accounted for about a third of delegates and a similar proportion of session organizers and speakers.

Although women gave only about 19% of the keynote talks in Vienna, they were no less assertive than men in inviting themselves as keynoters for their sessions. (Sessions in Portland did not have keynote speakers, so cannot be compared.) Talks, whether good or bad, were rarely met by harsh or unfair criticism, and we did not feel that young scientists, non-native speakers or women were treated differently.

If physicists are to learn their lessons from evolution, they would do well to note that success does not come only to predatory males ‘red in tooth and claw’. It requires smart adaptation, soft power and, at more advanced levels, cooperation, all of which result in substantial diversity.

Perhaps they will also find that working in a more diverse community is more fun than being territorial predators.