Please don’t retitre from the evolution debate

DIALOGUE drives progress.

The effectiveness of a controversial proposition can only be improved if it is opposed by counter- arguments, in a healthy dialogue.

Could I therefore ask Keith Harris (evolution is science and arose from investigation, Echo May 17), not to retire from this debate please.

He has valuably highlighted the fact that the writings of the intellectuals I have quoted (Echo April 24 and May 3), in support of evolution being essentially a religious story about unrepeatable processes, all the way back to ultimate origins, have not been very persuasive.

I will keep trying. Professor Robert Shapiro wrote “We shall see that adherents of the bestknown theory have not responded to increasing adverse evidence by questioning the validity of their beliefs, in the best scientific tradition; rather they have chosen to hold it as a truth beyond question, thereby enshrining it as mythology. In response, many alternative explanations have introduced even greater elements of mythology, until finally, science has been abandoned entirely in substance, though retained in name.“Origins, Penguin Books, 1988, p.32.

As an example Mr Harris appeals to the fossil sequence, demonstrating the evolution of the horse, but this proved to be unreliable. “Other examples including the much-repeated ‘gradual’ evolution of the modern horse, have not held up under close examination.” (Starr C., and Taggart R., Biology, The Unity and Diversity of Life, Wadsworth 1992, p. 304). In fact, much earlier than this, the appeal to the fossil record in general was challenged.

In 1972, palaeontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen J. Gould proposed a theory called ‘Punctuated Equilibria’. They had observed that the degree of grad- ualism commonly attributed to Charles Darwin is virtually nonexistent in the fossil record. (Eldredge, Niles and S. J. Gould (1972).’ Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism’ (’Models in Paleobiology’. San Francisco: Freeman Cooper, pp. 82-115. Reprinted in N. Eldredge Time Frames. Princeton University Press, 1985, pp. 193223). Long periods of stability, sampled and recorded in fossils, were ‘punctuated’ by bursts of evolution, that were too short to leave a trace.

The faith called ‘Scientific Materialism’, which holds that reality is nothing but particles, and forces, in space and time, was critically examined by journalist and author Bryan Appleyard. “All that Freud and Marx and their successors have been doing is attempting to extend the principles of classical science into the human soul ... The most striking thing about us is that we are utter- ly unlike anything else in nature. Light, gravity, even the whole biological realm, are related to us only in the most superficial way: we reflect light, if dropped we fall and we have a bodily system roughly comparable to a large number of animals. All of which is trivial compared with the one attribute we have that is denied to the rest of nature - self-consciousness. In a sense, this makes the curious failures of science more understandable. For the problem of the self is not, initially at least, its origins, its history or even its mechanisms. The problem is its existence in one species out of millions and, apparently, on one planet out of billions.” (Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man, Picador, May 1992, p. 206.)” Name and address supplied