Sir, - Dr Tassot's peculiar article against evolution ( July 18th), was a strange thing to appear in a mainstream newspaper. It repeated creationist arguments that have been thoroughly refuted many times.
Evolution is not a violation of the thermodynamical law that states that disorder (entropy) can never decrease. This law applies only to isolated systems taken as a whole. Inside such systems order can increase in one place as long as there is a compensating decrease elsewhere. By the way, by his own argument Dr Tassot does not exist because once he was a simple single-cell entity. Yet he managed to become the amazing complex creature he is today without violating any laws of physics.
Similarly with the age of the Earth. Geologists agree the Earth is billions of years old, just as the universe is billions of years older still according to physicists and cosmologists. (Recent experiments have been refining the age of the universe to at least 13 billion years). Pace Tassot, there has not been a massive rewriting of geology texts because of the experiments he mentions.
As for biologists, they know very well the problems of finding and interpreting fossils. Gaps in the record there will always be, by simple maths. If there are two fossils there is one gap. If there are three fossils then there are two gaps. And so on. Paradoxically the more fossils we have the more gaps there are.
Genetics has been around only 50 years and practical techniques for decoding the genome for about 10 years. We still do not know how many genes a typical human has - this is a live and lively topic as I write. To conclude from the inevitable teething difficulties of applying this baby science to the past that therefore evolution is wrong is absurd.
Tassot mentions the baleful consequences in morals of the teaching of evolution. The same could be said of the theory of relativity which is popularly taken to sanction moral relativism. (Even on its own fallacious terms this is wrong - Einstein's theory is less relativistic in this sense than the Newtonian ideas it replaced). And one of the follies of the moment is quantum quackery, when the counterintuitive ideas of quantum mechanics are abused to fleece the ill and the hypochondriac by those whose only correct knowledge of the theory is how to spell its name.
We should accept the truth of scientific ideas on scientific grounds alone.
The consequences in other fields we will just have to live with. We cannot make the sun orbit the Earth for our moral convenience. - Yours, etc.,
Paul Power, Santry, Dublin 9.