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New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 332, 2 November 1945, Page 5

Sir,-Mr. Williams will, I trust, pardon me if I modify his somewhat extravagant and misleading statement that "no one... has ever developed a new form ... of animal by any other means than by breeding it from previously existing ancestors." My suggestion is that "no one has ever developed a new form of animal." The breeding experiments with the Drosophila Melanogaster begun .in 1910 have produced over 400 varieties of this fly. All of these varieties except those too imperfect to breed at all, have been able to breed freely with the parent stock. When wild species of the fly can be induced to cross, they either yield no offspring at all, or produce sterile hybrids. Immutability of species "ey to be the rock on which most evolutionary theorists founder, in fact belief in evolution to-day must rest on vague generalities just as Darwin privately confessed in 1863. May I also point out to "Quote Fair" that fossils of men of modern type have been discovered in deposits certainly at least as old as, probably older than, those containing Java man, Peking man and their dubious confreres, so that no fossil has yet been proved ancestral to ‘modern man. I find it a less severe tax on my imagination to believe that "man suddenly appeared in his full glory" than to accept the fantastic implications of atheistic evolution.

M.

FINLAY

(Wellington). Tee