Sir, - A brotherly embrace to John Waters for his Hundredth Monkey. As a bio sociological observation, the Koshima Island experience effectively sweeps away Darwinism, while we can hope with John Waters that the operation of this principle in practice will sweep away the results of Darwinism.
The doctrine that all life is accidental and meaningless, the haphazard emanation from chemical reactions, and that the only operative principle in evolution is survive and grab, has been inculcated into our young for most of this century. Even now, it is hardly disputed in our obsolete schools and academies.
This convenient religion, of unquestionable scientific pedigree, underwrites with its whole authority the concept that the highest evolutionary types, "the fittest", in the jungle, whether animal or human, are those who can grab the most in the material world, at everyone else's expense. Its saints and heroes would be found among the Saddams, Pinochets, Murdochs and all the more or less invisible plutocrats who rule our present world, and whose interests are safeguarded and whose veneration is assured by prophets like Thatcher, with their sacred words of power - eg "market values", "growth", and of course "profit".
We can suspect that this inspiring philosophy upon which our modern society is founded, and the absence of all other values, may have something to do with the exponential increase among the young of suicide, drug consumption, crime and violence. In which case, one could argue that the belief in Darwinism does not have survival value, so that it proves its own contradiction by its own premise. - Yours, etc.,
Ballydehob,
Co Cork.