Sir, - A letter to Alan French (April 12th) objects to a statement by a Dr William Reville (April 1st) that "evolution is a fact". In similar vein I wish to offer the following comments: (1) Evolution is the theory put forward as continuously affecting all life. Yet it is nowhere to be seen in the world. Where can we see frogs on the way to becoming reptiles, or apes turning into men?
(2) We are told evolution requires long periods of time, in other words, the changes are so minute we cannot see them happening. Why should there be changes - at all (except limited variation within species)? All mutations are pathological. No one has ever seen a beneficent mutation, and nobody could possibly describe one.
(3) The population at the time of Christ is estimated at 300 million. It is now 6,000 million i.e., it has multiplied 20 fold in 2,000 years. Now if we were to go back in time, say 1,000,000 years ago, and if there were 100 people living then, and their rate of multiplication was only half the historical rate, say 10 fold every 2,000 years, the population of the earth after only nine two thousand year periods (i.e., after 18,000 years) would be 100,000 billion people! No wonder evolution is considered as ignoring reality.
(4) Before any kind of life can reproduce itself there must first come fully mature adults. But the chance of say a fully mature horse suddenly appearing, in theory, out of a different form of life, is mathematically impossible, not to mention the need of Mrs Horse having to appear at the same time.
(5) There is abundant archaeological evidence from around the world that an enormous flood occurred over the earth which covered the tops of mountains. It explains the finding of fossils of sea shells and fish on top of mountains, and the existence of herds of mammoths with their young, with food still in their stomachs, fully preserved in the permafrost in the Arctic stretching from Spitzbergen through Siberia. This great flood ended around 7,000 BC. It represents the great hiatus in the palaeontological record, and archaeologists have had to dig through the rock or sand or silt deposited by the flood, to get to the remains or evidence of an earlier civilisation of man. According to the evidence the most accurate estimate of the time of man on the earth is 20,000 years. The great flood plays havoc with the theory of evolution.
(6) No skeletons or skulls have ever been found of an intermediate type between an ape and a man. Skulls mentioned in the history books are either of an ape, or a man, and drawings of these are totally conjectural. "Piltdown Man" enshrined in the British Museum for 40 years was admitted to be a fraud, and was withdrawn. (7) The most long term and exhaustive breeding experiments, such as with the fruitfly Drosophila Melanogaster, which has 25 generations in a year, have failed to produce the slightest evidence in favour of evolution.
(8) But the most compelling and incontrovertible evidence against evolution is the earth's fossil record. If we go back to the earliest rock, a great and abundant marine fauna appears on the scene with startling abruptness at the beginning of the Cambrian period. Also varied and abundant fossils of animal life appear suddenly in the Cambrian rocks. These are fossils of living things of highly developed and complex structure. There is nothing which suggests slow evolution. The first shells, for instance, are fully developed. Fossils of new types of animal life appear suddenly at various times during the geological periods, for which no link with previous living things can be discovered.
Darwin recognised the enormous difficultly that palaentology posed for his theory and he devoted a whole chapter of the Origin of Species in an attempt to meet this difficulty. The best he could do was to express his belief that the fossil record is "incomparably less perfect" than is usually supposed. But in fact the fossil record is far more complete than Darwin supposed it to be, and than his followers admit. The fossil record is in accordance with the Mosaic cosmogony.
Evolution is a theory that has withstood all attempts to substantiate it. Dr W. R. Thompson FRS, onetime Director of the Commonwealth Institute of Biological Control, in his preface to the 1956 edition of the Origin of Species stated: "Darwinism was accompanied by a decline in scientific integrity." Yours, etc.,
Mount Prospect Drive,
Clontarf,
Dublin 3.