Letters | 2 October 2010

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Darwinian faith
Sir: I am always amazed at how little Darwin’s devotees seem to know about his theory of how evolution came about. In addressing the familiar riddle of why the fossil record does not show ‘intermediate forms’ between one species and another, Mr Lewin (Letters, 25 September) caustically claims that ‘intermediate is a mischief-word employed by creationists’.
Had he read my article more carefully (or, more to the point, had he ever read The Origin of Species), he would realise that it was Darwin himself who first queried the absence of those ‘intermediate forms’. Darwin’s answer to these and other fundamental objections to his theory was, as I said in my article, no more than a leap of faith that one day the evidence would be found to prove him right.
Since that evidence still hasn’t emerged, the Darwinians dismiss anyone who raises rational objections to the theory as a ‘creationist’. In fact it is they themselves who rest their version on blind belief, just like the creationists they despise — because they cannot see how much there is about the evolutionary process for which they can provide no scientific explanation.
Christopher Booker
Somerset

Full Sayle
Sir: Murray Sayle, whose death you noted last week, was not only among the best contributors to The Spectator in the 1980s: his articles were distinguished also by their great length. They would normally run to around 4,000 words — more than five times longer than the extract you published from his account of the burning down of his house in a hill village in Japan (‘Fire, fire!’, 25 September).
However, having just reread one of his most memorable pieces in The Spectator — on Gallipoli, the battle and the film (10 October 1981) — which was at once perceptive, provocative and moving, I would confidently state that they were never too long.