Letter: Scientists kept occupied by evolution

Sir: Those who think the Deluge really happened (letters, 10 April) might try imagining it with the eyes of Leonardo da Vinci, whose notebooks describe in detail the scene as the waters rose continually for 40 days; the hills crowded with people fighting for their lives against each other, and against wild beasts that had also made for high ground, the starvation, the thirst, the parents killing their children to save them further suffering. What had this "pitiless slaughter", as Leonardo calls it, "genocide", as we might say today, to do with any notion of justice attributable to a god?

Leonardo was sceptical about the whole thing. If the waters covered the mountain-tops, the world would have been a globe of water, he pointed out, and where could the waters have run off, once the deluge ended?

He was, of course, centuries ahead of his time. Seeing how many still believe this moral, or rather immoral, fable to be true, I ask myself how many more centuries will be needed before he makes his mark.

RONALD GRAY

Emmanuel College,

Cambridge