I REFER to Dr David Dudgeon's letter (South China Morning Post, April 14) headlined, ''Why evolution must be studied''. If the teaching of evolution is, as I understand, restricted to the Darwin theory, the objections raised by Chan Sing-lai (Post, April 6) are not without merit. Darwinism obviously contradicts the tenets of the Holy Scriptures without providing any convincing evidence to the contrary. The complexity of living matter in the very first organisms, more than a billion years ago, and the tremendous diversifications that ensue in the animal and vegetable kingdoms cannot be explained either by Darwin's ''natural selection'' or by J. Monod's theory of chance and necessity. How could a bacteria cell whose DNA tape is about 1 mm long (and 5,000 times its own length) have been at the origin of a transformation several hundred thousand years later into a human cell whose DNA tape is 1,000 times longer, and this, just by genes mutations resulting from adaptations to environmental pressures. It can only have been possible by successive and massive additions of new genes to the genetic code, but how? Science has, so far, not been able to solve the enigma of the genetic code, I mean its origin and the mechanism by which it is expressed. It is common knowledge that a computer will only function if it has been programmed, a fact that implies the existence of a programming intellect that supplies the information required to operate the system. Given the present state of knowledge, science has not provided any answer to this precise point and no wonder if some are looking towards the Holy Scriptures in search of an explanation. CLAUDE LENOBLE Mid-Levels
