Evolution and a Creator

This book may be an important contribution to an argument developing in the scientific world about the origin of man. Darwin's theory of Evolution by Natural Selection was in its time a concept so heretical that it took Darwin, a Christian believer, many years before he could commit himself to expound it. It is now so universally accepted that to question it or to seek to modify it is almost equally heretical. Richard Dawkins, in his popular book The Blind Watchmaker has shown by computer studies that the operation of chance through aeons of time is sufficient to explain the development of man from the elementaiy matter of this universe. No need for a Creator. However of recent years a view has been gaining ground amongst some scientists notably in Britain and the USA which they have called the Anthropic principle. "There exist invariant properties of the Natural World and its elementary components which render the gross size and structure of virtually all its components quite inevitable. The sizes of stars and planets, even people are neither random nor the result of any Darwinian selection process from a myriad of possibilities.... they are manifestations of the possible equilibrium states between competing forces of attraction and repulsion.... and they are determined by a mysterious collection of pure numbers that we call the Constants of Nature. (Barrow and Tipler The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, OUP 1986). The inference can be made that the Universe was designed, in fact that it was created. From a study of the evolution of bone and the remarkable permanence of its basic design features Graham Beale argues that the gene determining it must have been present in the first cell and survived unchanged. Either this gene appeared by chance or it did not, if the latter, some other agency a genetic engineer must have formed it. Genetic uniqueness and the 81