From Mark Bussell
I can’t believe Fred Pearce wrote that “perhaps natural rainforests are constructed far more by chance than by evolution” (18 September, p 44). Evolution is what happens when “chance” events affect plant or animal individuals or populations. There is no “guiding hand”, only the combined effects of environmental stressors.
Even accepting what Pearce probably intended by the comment, any half-decent ecological model would surely show how such a situation would arise. Introduce several hundred species, probably selected as a number of discrete groups within which individual species were known to be at least compatible, and there will inevitably be room for a lot of them to find space, even on a small island.
Oxford, UK
