It is surely a pointer to the resources of our society that turning aside from the usual serving of social and political conflict, a number of readers for some weeks have been engaged in our letter columns in an exchange of views on the origins of human life, on the differing perspectives of creationists and evolutionists and on the relationship between science and religion.

It is to this controversy that we wish to contribute by drawing attention to some recent findings of science which seem to deepen the mystery of human origins. In February of this year two genome projects which aimed to list the complete genetic code for a representative human being published their findings. It is unfortunate that the significance of their findings has been overshadowed by a row as to whether the findings should be made freely available to the public or that access should require the payment of expensive fees. The findings, it is said, are likely to revolutionise medicine as it will enable treatments and drugs to be customised for each individual. One project, Celera, is commercially funded and its findings are at present only available to less than fifty richly endowed subscribers. The other project, funded by governments and charities, publishes daily on the Internet and already has been utilised by thousands of scientists, a large number being in the developing world. The row is in fact part of the wider international controversy as to whether corporations should be allowed to patent life-forms, perhaps the ultimate kind of exploitation.

The findings have shocked everyone, not least the scientists. It has been reported in the UK Guardian Weekly that the genome (the complete genetic code for any individual) reveals that the human chromosome has only 30,000 genes, twice the number of a fruit fly, only l0,000 more than a round worm and only a few hundred more than a mouse!

Surely it would have been reasonable to expect that human kind, given our towering position in achievements over all other living things, should have had a gene count of at least 300,000. Given these findings how can one explain the uniqueness of man?

One recognises levels of unusual intelligence in animals. Insects demonstrate remarkable capacities for communication and organisation, for example the bees and the ants. But an anthill remains an anthill. It does not point forward to human capacity to build pyramids in Egypt in Africa or in Belize and other Central American states or the Taj Mahal or a Gothic cathedral or a sky-scraper in Malaysia. Birds and whales warble but there is a vast distance between such primitive sounds and even folk music, let alone the musical heritage of mankind.

Confronted with this mystery some scientists have attributed the emergence of the human species to the stimulus of pressures from the environment. And indeed there is a theory (if not a fact) that attributes the emergence of civilisation to the response of the human species to the problems of living in "hard" countries. If the country is soft in that it is possible to gather food, to pick fruits and nuts or hunt game there is no stimulus to move to the higher stage of herding animals or cultivating grain crops. But this was the response of "homo sapiens". It does not explain how one of the man like creatures including the Neanderthals which had emerged in several parts of the world, suddenly developed, one might say comparatively speaking in a very short time, as a full blown human being in the river gorges of Africa. How had the process of "hominisation" occurred?

The creationists would have no difficulty providing an explanation. Man, they would say, was created with a soul. Genes have been likened to a musical score, the soul is the conductor which transforms the musical notation into a great work of art namely the human being.

On the other hand, the evolutionists offer a range of explanations. One of the greatest evolutionists, the Jesuit priest and palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin took the position that the seeds of consciousness, self-awareness was always implicit in the original material in which the processes of evolution worked. As organisms became more complex, the seeds of consciousness came to the fore, eventually taking control of growth and development. But Teilhard de Chardin also envisaged the possibility that there could be a special intervention which added soul to an existing species or to each individual member, the latter being perhaps the usual Christian position.

Whether it be the result of creation or of evolution or evolution plus intervention it would be argued that the soul cannot be measured by scientific projects, its existence could only be demonstrated by objective results.

The mystery remains. It is usually argued that science clears up mystery and in its place advances facts. The genome projects have done the reverse. The question of human origins is now, it seems, more than ever shrouded in mystery. But such mysterious outcome to scientific analysis is perhaps not so unusual. Time magazine has recently reported that astrophysicists have learned that the Milky Way is made up of a l00 billion or more stars, that tens of billions of other galaxies lie beyond its edges and that these galaxies are rushing headlong away from one another. Such vastness quickly slips beyond imagination into mystery.

The debate will continue as scientific knowledge progresses.