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BIRDS, BEASTS AND MORALITY

Author: Date: WEDNESDAY, October 14, 1998
Page: A18
Section: Letters

I like Chet Raymo's columns, but he is skating on very thin ice with his Oct. 12 Science Musings (``Did Darwin make him do it?'' Health/Science). First, he makes a strong evolutionary case for infidelity, and then in the end he comes up with some weak, strained verbiage for taking it all back. This is a case of trying to be too smart by half.

Since the Vietnam War, we have been bombarded with such precocious, well-meaning but misguided, incendiary attacks on the traditiona, practical morality that has evolved over the millennia in successful cultures like ours. When people start weasel wording the underpinnings of establishment decency with references to the behavior of the birds and the beasts, the result will be impressionable youngsters behaving like birds of prey and beasts of the jungle. We're seeing more and more of this at younger and younger ages.

ROBERT A. diCURCIO

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