Sir, - In his attack on evolution Sean Power (April 29th) makes the mistake common to all creationists: rather than argue against established evolutionary theory, he attacks what he imagines evolutionary theory to be. If Mr Power was to consult the authorities on the subject, he would find most of the questions he asked answered satisfactorily. Further, Mr Power made several outrageous statements in his attack on evolution. To say that there is no recorded instance of evolution taking place would be to ignore, for example, the famous and well documented case of Manchester's moths changing colour during the industrial revolution - an instance which also refutes Mr Power's claim that there has never been a beneficial mutation. Also, his figures on population growth are based purely on his imagination and not on historical fact, which is that the world's human population has grown very slowly until recent centuries. Mr Power's analysis of the Cambrian Explosion as "disproving" evolution is ludicrous, as anyone who has read Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life will testify, and his evidence for the biblical flood is tentative to say the least.
On the more emotive issue of human evolution, Mr Power seems to believe that evolutionary theory dictates that humans arrived as the result of an inevitable predestiny, from ape to man. This is not the case, and there is no reason in evolutionary terms why today's gorillas and orangs should be tending towards humanity. It is similarly misleading to state, as Mr Power does, that only ape and human fossils have been found, with nothing in between. In fact, there are many such fossils and other records of early hominids from our Ramapithecine ancestors of approximately six million years ago, through Australopithecines and Homo Erectus.
If Mr Power wishes to believe in floods, gods, prophets and all the rest of it, he is perfectly free to do so, but to pretend that he has any scientific basis for these beliefs is misleading. - Yours, etc.,
Editor,
TCD Miscellany,
Regent House, Trinity College, Dublin 2.