Summary
TORCUIL Crichton did a good, balanced job on evolution and the attack by "intelligent design" theorists (Seven Days, September 4), but some of the points made by the creationist Philip Bell need answering.
Bell claims that "Darwinism has not moved on". Perhaps he did not take any courses on evolution while a student in Swansea. If he had, he would know that evolutionary biology is a highly active area of modern science, with many hundreds of papers published each year. Like any science, it is full of controversies such as the debate over Gould's idea of punctuated equilibrium.See the full content of this document
Extract
Danger of Religion in Science Class Readers' Views
Like any good science, controversies are settled ultimately by the balance of evidence and the testing of alternative theories, not by reference to ancient texts. So, who hasn't "moved on"?
Bell also says, repeating a frequent creationist claim: "We see variation, what people call micro-evolution, but no new kinds of plants or animals are involved - they never cross the systematic barriers that have existed since taxonomy was invented." Actually, one of t...See the full content of this document
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