REGARDING Tom Sargent's comments on evolution and creationism (Letters, April 29) in common with millions of others, I was taught to believe in a god, but when I reached the age of eleven, I began to realise that what I was being taught didn't stand up to intelligence examination.

Mr Sargent asks the age-old question: 'Which came first, the chicken or the egg?'

Well, we can think this through if we have some knowledge of the way in which evolution works.

Simple, single-celled creatures, like bacteria, reproduce by dividing while some mate with cells of opposite polarity. Some cells, however, fail to separate in division, carrying on with what they were best at doing before, collecting food or reproducing, etc.

This goes on uninterrupted until a colony of cells is formed, with each cell contributing to the common good and a nervous system develops to keep all the cells co-ordinated - sensitive front and develops, capable of detecting and collecting food and so and this collection of cells becomes an individual - a kind of worm or grub.

All this doesn't happen overnight but over millions of years.

Over many more millions of years of development, this species has no resemblance to its ancestors except that, it goes through all the stages of the development through which they went to arrive at what it now is.

Eventually, it develops the most efficient method of reproduction and it becomes capable of producing parcels of DNA to perpetuate its species -- eggs.

Its evolution doesn't stop here, it can further evolve into a bee, a cockroach, earwig or any of the millions of species of insects.

So while a chicken can lay an egg, an egg can't lay a chicken. So as we can clearly see, the chicken comes first.

ALBERT MORRIS, Clement View, Nelson.