‘Rear bones in whales are vital for reproduction, no bones - no baby whales’

MR Harris (Letters July 12) returns for more punishment. His first howler is to reject the proven scientific fact that the rear bones in whales are vital for reproduction. No bones – no baby whales. Perhaps he would be willing accept this if he didn’t have a religious axe to grind.

Homo habilis is undoubtedly an ape. Homo erectus, like Neanderthals, is human. Minor morphological distinctions are the likely the result of dietary and climatic factors. (Neanderthals are believed to have suffered from rickets.) Despite Darwin’s prediction of billions of transitional forms and despite 150 years of searching, no transitional form has ever been found for anything.

Next Mr Harris claims that mutations, and cutting and recombining genes produces complexity, oblivious to the fact that genes and proteins are already incredibly complex. Cutting and splicing existing genes doesn’t explain where they came from in the first place. Thus he uses the prior existence of complexity in order to explain complexity! This is what happens when you pontificate on subjects you don’t understand.

Transposons can duplicate genes but the majority of gene duplications are meiotic or mitotic aberrations, resulting in malformations or diseases. Plants can tolerate duplications better than animals but to maintain genomic stability, all cells have builtin mechanisms to silence duplicated genes, after which they become subject to degenerative mutations. Evolution by gene duplication predicts a proportional increase in genome size with organism complexity but this is contradicted by the evidence.

Many calculations have been done to demonstrate the impossibility of producing complex biological mole- cules by random chance. Indeed, Sir Fred Hoyle abandoned his atheism when he realised this: “The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it... It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.”

Then Mr Harris dimly asks whether I wonder ‘how complexity could arise in 3.5 billion years’ knowing full well that I reject the fantasy of deep time. Of course it’s not a problem to fit it all into 6,000 years when you understand that the all-powerful creator God programmed in all the complexity and variety in the basic kinds at the beginning and that the fossil record is the result of the flood.

Those interested should watch the ‘Protein synthesis, DNA translation, m-RNA transcription’ video on YouTube and try not to laugh as you remember that Mr Harris thinks it all happened by chance.