  Over the last decade, interest in one-dimensional charge transport has
progressed from the seminal discovery of Landauer quantization of conductance,
as a function of carrier density, to finer-scale phenomena at the onset of
quantization. This has come to be called the "0.7 anomaly", rather connoting a
theoretical mystery of some profundity and universality, which remains open to
date. Its somewhat imaginative appellation may tend to mislead, since the
anomaly manifests itself over a range of conductance values: anywhere between
0.25 to 0.95 Landauer quanta. In this paper we offer a critique of the 0.7
anomaly and discuss the extent to which it represents a deep question of
physics.
