Ironies of Darwinism
Sir: Christopher Booker may have been intemperate in his account of Darwinism as a scientifically indefensible fantasy, but he nevertheless pointed towards real problems which Elisabeth Whipp glosses over. Thus, she is surely wrong to say that the principles of neo-Darwinism are 'in daily use in . . . farms'. It is one of the ironies of Darwinism that the stock-breeding phenomena which Darwin (and many others) took to be one of the best sources of evidence for his theory have turned out to be irrelevant to it: farmers exploit not mutations (which are far too rare to be any use on a human timescale) but the range of variation that exists within a species at a given time. To give an analogy: a ruthless eugenic programme applied to the population of England over several generations could no doubt produce a nation in which scarcely anyone was less than six foot tall, but it does not follow from that that eugenics over any number of generations could turn Man into something that we would not recognise as Man at all – which is the controversial point. The case against Darwinism was made in a very carefully reasoned and welldocumented book, Darwin Retried, by an American lawyer, Norman Macbeth, which came out here in 1974. There are flaws in Macbeth's case (notably, he fails to recognise that the burdens of proof in a science and in a court of law are rather different), but his book certainly cannot be dismissed as Whipp dismisses Booker. After an extensive search I have failed to find any review or discussion of Macbeth's book in the academic biological literature. This scarecely suggests a picture of evolutionists as open-minded seekers after truth.
Geoffrey Sampson
Richard House, Ingleton, Yorks.
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