Natural Selection

As the number of people sickened in a nationwide E. coli outbreak pushed past 100, federal officials Saturday expanded an earlier warning against eating bagged spinach to include all fresh spinach and any product containing the raw greens. "What we need to do is get a clear message to consumers," said Dr. David Acheson, chief medical officer of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's food safety branch. "The best thing ... is to simplify it."

Dean A. Ohlman, the president of the Christian Nature Federation (Letters, Oct. 11), perpetuates the single most common misconception regarding the randomness of evolutionary change in his assertion that "because the secular humanist presupposes that natural things can only have natural causes, he concludes that design in the universe must have come about by change." Assuming that he is referring to "design" in the organic world, and ignoring alternative evolutionary forces (most notably genetic drift)

Why are people so appalling? Why are people so admirable? Why are people as a whole--or even as individuals--so difficult to pin down? Why, indeed, are people so relentlessly driven to ask "Why?" Questions such as these, particularly in combination, cut close to the heart of what it means to be human, and "Human Natures" is an earnest attempt by the distinguished Stanford biologist Paul R. Ehrlich to provide an answer to the timeless conundrum that our strange species poses.

Much food lore has sprung from the Salinas and nearby valleys, this fecund farm country that stretches from oak-studded hills to the fertile bottom land and packing plants of Salinas and King City. This is Steinbeck country, and the National Steinbeck Center on Salinas' Main Street pays homage to the farming themes of "The Grapes of Wrath" and "Cannery Row." Organic farming has deep roots here, and so does the phenomenon of bagging fresh greens.

Re "OK in Church but Not in the Schools," editorial, Dec. 10: I have to take issue with you regarding your presumption that the theory of evolution and natural selection is established scientific fact, no longer subject to scientific debate and experiment. The questions that remain unresolved are not the details of the fossil record but rather the idea that all of the diverse and complex life on Earth developed from simple proteins in a primordial soup through a process of random reactions, mutations and natural selection.

Kevin M. O'Brien of Laguna Hills, who wrote in a Dec. 6 letter reply to "Stronger Tollway Fences Considered to Deter Wildlife" of Nov. 28, needs review of his basic biology and physics terminology. So does The Times. In trying to describe how spending $250,000 on tollway fences was wasteful, O'Brien used the term "entropy" to describe what I assume he meant as Darwin's "natural selection." Entropy is the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, which is basically a measure of spontaneous disorder in the universe.

Philip Kitcher, a bright young British philosopher of science at the University of Minnesota, has written a new book that seeks to thwart an entire discipline. At least where humans are concerned, Kitcher tries to show that the new work in evolutionary biology called "sociobiology" has nothing of value to say and so many misleading and dangerous connotations that it is best restricted to the non-human world.

As a scientist, I have a deep-seated prejudice against people who proclaim they have figured out nature without first doing their homework and reviewing the scientific literature. Oh I know: Science is a club steeped in orthodoxy and dogma; it takes an outsider free of all that rigorous training to think creatively. What foolish arrogance! Let me demonstrate how such thinking is a trap even for finer minds.

Re: Tracy Belles' letter about starving sea lions and the natural selection that is occurring on San Miguel Island: This planet is 5 billion years old and has been through many changes. This is one of them. El Nino is not a human creation. Where should all the animals go? Who is going to take care of them? Let's bring a daily truckload of fish to San Miguel Island until we have 12,000 sea lions on the island. What are we going to do in 20 years, when the next El Nino hits? (Two daily truckloads of fish?