Sponsored by
Taking sides in the evolution debate
Referring to the letters on the Darwin debate (19 March).
John Vaughan suggests that the oldest human remains in the UK are 700,000 years old, and N. Bywater states that Homo Sapiens existed 100,000 years ago.
Whichever time scales you take, apes were around then and apes are still the same today. If apes have not produced anything like a new human over such a length of time, how do we know that they ever did?
John McGuiness quotes the changing colour of moths. This does not show that they are changing into anything else, and they remain as moths.
Believers in evolution suggest that the first living organism was a self replicating asexual cell which came about by chance. How then did the male and female type of reproduction 'evolve' from such a cell? Until such questions can be sensibly answered people will continue to believe that there is an unexplainable creator of all life who is beyond our understanding.
"Have you not known? have you not heard, that the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, faints not, neither is weary? there is no searching of his understanding" Isaiah 40 v 28
Stephen Knight, email
Gordon Rees (Letters, March 16) obviously does not understand evolution. A new variant of an established species has most chance of out-surviving the original when the environment or the type of food available is changing. In the deep ocean there is very little change, there are no ice ages or droughts. So the coelacanth can stay largely unchanged over 400 million years.
The brain of the predecessor of homo sapiens became larger by natural selection until it was clever enough to develop foresight and rationality. Any rivals to homo sapiens, such as neanderthal man, would be outdone in gaining the resources necessary for life. In fact, it is thought that some interbred with homo sapiens but their contribution to the human gene pool of today is very small.
Mr Rees has only to go to Cliffe Castle Museum to see a transitory stage between fish and reptile. The fossils of many transitory stage evolutes have been discovered.
Robert Tee, Hon Sec Humanist Society of West Yorkshire
Email to a friend
Print this page- Politics: Mark Hookham's Westminster blog - 5.33pm
- Castleford RSPB Fairburn Ings: High wire act Swallows’ summer parade
- Worker dies on North Yorkshire Moors Railway
- Video: Restaurant reopens on Leeds Harry Ramsden’s site after £500,000 refit
- Chocolat author will tempt guests at Leeds Big Bookend Festival
Looking for...
Featured advertisers
Jobs
Search for a job
Motors
Search for a car
Property
Search for a house
Weather for Leeds
Thursday 24 May 2012
Today
Sunny
Temperature: 10 C to 26 C
Wind Speed: 10 mph
Wind direction: North west
Tomorrow
Sunny
Temperature: 10 C to 23 C
Wind Speed: 20 mph
Wind direction: East
