No elites in nature

If, as Alastair Harper says (Letters, 3 March), nature is elitist, we should have no anxieties about the deaths of a few predatory birds as a result of wind turbines. Indeed, we would welcome it as an opportunity for the birds to overcome and adapt to their new environment; natural selection of only those birds with genes for radar would create a new, improved, raptor elite.

However, the concept of an elite cohort of raptors, or any other group of animals, is not justifiable. There are no elites in nature, only survivors; elitism is a human construct, conferred on those organisms that appear to display some aspect of behavi-our we deem to be admirable.

It is disturbing that we ap-pear to find predation in the natural world an admirable trait.

JAMES BOYLE

Eastwoodmains Road

Clarkston, Glasgow