The Facts of Life: Shattering the Myths of Darwinism. A Review.

Every day I get letters, in capitals and obsessively underlined if not actually in green ink, from flat-earthers, young-earthers, perpetual-motion merchants, astrologers and other harmless fruitcakes. The only difference here is that Richard Milton managed to get his stuff published. The publisher - we don’t know how many decent publishers turned it down first - is called ‘Fourth Estate.’ Not a house that I had heard of, but apparently neither a vanity press nor a fundamentalist front. So, what are ‘Fourth Estate’ playing at? Would they publish - for this book is approximately as silly - a claim that the Romans never existed and the Latin language is a cunning Victorian fabrication to keep schoolmasters employed?

A cynic might note that there is a paying public out there, hungry for simple religious certitude, who will lap up anything with a subtitle like ‘Shattering the Myth of Darwinism.’ If the author pretends not to be religious himself, so much the better, for he can then be exhibited as an unbiased witness. There is - no doubt about it - a fast buck to be made by any publishers unscrupulous enough to print pseudoscience that they know is rubbish but for which there is a market.

But let’s not be so cynical. Mightn’t the publishers have an honourable defence? Perhaps this unqualified hack is a solitary genius, the only soldier in the entire platoon - nay, regiment - who is in step. Perhaps the world really did bounce into existence in 8000 BC. Perhaps the whole vast edifice of orthodox science really is totally and utterly off its trolley. (In the present case, it would have to be not just orthodox biology but physics, geology and cosmology too). How do we poor publishers know until we have printed the book and seen it panned?

If you find that plea persuasive, think again. It could be used to justify publishing literally anything; flat-earth, fairies, astrology, werewolves and all. It is true that an occasional lonely figure, originally written off as loony or at least wrong, has eventually been triumphantly vindicated (though not often a journalist like Richard Milton, it has to be said). But it is also true that a much larger number of people originally regarded as wrong really were wrong. To be worth publishing, a book must do a little more than just be out of step with the rest of the world.

But, the wretched publisher might plead, how are we, in our ignorance, to decide? Well, the first thing you might do - it might even pay you, given the current runaway success of some science books - is employ an editor with a smattering of scientific education. It needn’t be much: A-level Biology would have been ample to see off Richard Milton. At a more serious level, there are lots of smart young science graduates who would love a career in publishing (and their jacket blurbs would avoid egregious howlers like calling Darwinism the "idea that chance is the mechanism of evolution.") As a last resort you could even do what proper publishers do and send the stuff out to referees. After all, if you were offered a manuscript claiming that Tennyson wrote The Iliad, wouldn’t you consult somebody, say with an O-level in History, before rushing into print?

You might also glance for a second at the credentials of the author. If he is an unknown journalist, innocent of qualifications to write his book, you don’t have to reject it out of hand but you might be more than usually anxious to show it to referees who do have some credentials. Acceptance need not, of course, depend on the referees’ endorsing the author’s thesis: a serious dissenting opinion can deserve to be heard. But referees will save you the embarrassment of putting your imprint on twaddle that betrays, on almost every page, complete and total pig-ignorance of the subject at hand.

All qualified physicists, biologists, cosmologists and geologists agree, on the basis of massive, mutually corroborating evidence, that the earth’s age is at least four billion years. Richard Milton thinks it is only a few thousand years old, on the authority of various Creation ‘science’ sources including the notorious Henry Morris (Milton himself claims not to be religious, and he affects not to recognise the company he is keeping). The great Francis Crick (himself not averse to rocking boats) recently remarked that "anyone who believes that the earth is less than 10,000 years old needs psychiatric help." Yes yes, maybe Crick and the rest of us are all wrong and Milton, an untrained amateur with a ‘background’ as an engineer, will one day have the last laugh. Want a bet?

Milton misunderstands the first thing about natural selection. He thinks the phrase refers to selection among species. In fact, modern Darwinians agree with Darwin himself that natural selection chooses among individuals within species. Such a fundamental misunderstanding would be bound to have far-reaching consequences; and they duly make nonsense of several sections of the book.

In genetics, the word ‘recessive’ has a precise meaning, known to every school biologist. It means a gene whose effect is masked by another (dominant) gene at the same locus. Now it also happens that large stretches of chromosomes are inert - untranslated. This kind of inertness has not the smallest connection with the ‘recessive’ kind. Yet Milton manages the feat of confusing the two. Any slightly qualified referee would have picked up this clanger.

There are other errors from which any reader capable of thought would have saved this book. Stating correctly that Immanuel Velikovsky was ridiculed in his own time, Milton goes on to say "Today, only forty years later, a concept closely similar to Velikovsky’s is widely accepted by many geologists - that the major extinction at the end of the Cretaceous ... was caused by collison with a giant meteor or even asteroid." But the whole point of Velikovsky (indeed, the whole reason why Milton, with his eccentric views on the age of the earth, champions him) is that his collision was supposed to have happened recently; recently enough to explain Biblical catastrophes like Moses’s parting of the Red Sea. The geologists’ meteorite, on the other hand, is supposed to have impacted 65 million years ago! There is a difference - approximately 65 million years difference. If Velikovsky had placed his collision tens of millions of years ago he would not have been ridiculed. To represent him as a misjudged, wilderness-figure who has finally come into his own is either disingenuous or - more charitably and plausibly - stupid.

In these post-Leakey, post-Johanson days, creationist preachers are having to learn that there is no mileage in ‘missing links.’ Far from being missing, the fossil links between modern humans and our ape ancestors now constitute an elegantly continuous series. Richard Milton, however, still hasn’t got the message. For him, "...the only ‘missing link’ so far discovered remains the bogus Piltdown Man." Australopithecus, correctly described as a human body with an ape’s head, doesn’t qualify because it is ‘really’ an ape. And Homo habilis - ‘handy man’ - which has a brain "perhaps only half the size of the average modern human’s" is ruled out from the other side: "... the fact remains that handy man is a human - not a missing link." One is left wondering what a fossil has to do - what more could a fossil do - to qualify as a ‘missing link’?

No matter how continuous a fossil series may be, the conventions of zoological nomenclature will always impose discontinuous names. At present, there are only two generic names to spread over all the hominids. The more ape-like ones are shoved into the genus Australopithecus; the more human ones into the genus Homo. Intermediates are saddled with one name or the other. This would still be true if the series were as smoothly continuous as you can possibly imagine. So, when Milton says, of Johanson’s ‘Lucy’ and associated fossils, "the finds have been referred to either Australopithecus and hence are apes, or Homo and hence are human," he is saying something (rather dull) about naming conventions, nothing at all about the real world.

But this is a more sophisticated criticism than Milton’s book deserves. The only serious question raised by its publication is why. As for would-be purchasers, if you want this sort of silly-season drivel you’d be better off with a couple of Jehovah’s Witness tracts. They are more amusing to read, they have rather sweet pictures, and they put their religious cards on the table.

Your note # 96 sounds like someone who is out of debating ammo. If the best you can do is pick on my spelling, maybe you need to rethink some of your assumptions.

The Bible also contains prophesies about the future, too. It prophesied that although Israel was utterly destroyed and laid waste in 70 AD, at the end times they would be back in their land! (They now are)

It also says that, although there were not 200 million people in all the world at the time of the prophesy, there would be a hostile army to the east of Israel of 200 million soldiers. (There is)

It prophesied a one-world govt when the idea was unattainable. It prophesied there would be a way for the entire world to watch a particular event all at the same time. That there would be a coming economy based on global commerce. That there would be a coming one-world religion. That there would be a way to make it impossible for people to buy or sell anything anywhere in the world without an identifying technology that could be implanted in them. That there would come a war technology that could destroy a large city in one hour.

And many other prophesies, all in the same book that prophesied The coming Jewish Messiah, and that gives an account of how the universe was created that is very much in opposition to the one you currently hold.

Science mixed with religion rarely produces bad religion or good science. Take islam for instance, a complete religion that dictates everything about everything, when applied to science, it leaves its practitioners at the mercy of their enemies smart bombs, while praying to its god for deliverance form evil infidels. That what happens when science is tainted by religion.

With Darwinism or evolution, there is nothing to be tainted save for piles of assumption, guesses and hypothesis stated as fact. Science and Christianity are not in conflict. The conclusions drawn based on assumption after assumption is what ends up in conflict.

Let's see how this works in science. Scientists decided to agree that beyond a certain point in time, all men were hunter/gatherers. Based upon their findings of what they call primitive weapons - stone knives and bear skins. They may or may not proffer that people don't stop being hunter gatherers; but, beyond a certain point in time, they will not accept that men were other than that. Now, it is not even arguable that the oldest recorded civilization raised crops. They also fought wars with bows and arrows and spears. Yet if bows, arrows and spears were the only thing we could find of them, they would be considered hunter gatherers. This is because the data is being interpreted in context of scientific belief rather than fact.

A more prominent example might be the mystery of how a 21st dynasty Pharoah who supposedly ruled and died before a 22nd dynasty Pharoah of Egypt, could have instead died after the 22nd dynasty king and be later buried in a tomb constructed next to his assumed forruner - so close in fact that sections of the 22nd dynasty tomb had to be modified to allow for the assembly of the 21st dynasty tomb. Many scientists reject this - even refuse to consider the facts because it interferes with the facad they have created to fit their beliefs. The facts show the 21st dynasty king died last - therefore, the conclusion is that the 2 dynasties ruled simultaneously. The impact is obvious. If we remove 1 dynasty of family rule from the timeline of history, the rest of the timeline must be adjusted forward to compensate. This destroys their explanation of things the way they've seen it for years. And that's the problem with pontificating on things one cannot make factual statements about for lack of supporting facts.

The truth is, that based on the methods we have, there is no possible way to date anything with any measurable certainty beyond our own lifespan. This is true because all methods of date testing involve unknowns that cannot be tested. Ultimately, that leads to speculation - not facts. falsifiable results create facts. Carbon dating can never be proven accurate because it assumes multiple things - but two primarily: the constancy of atmospheric carbon levels, and non-contamination of samples. Neither of these two things are falsifiable. Therefore the results produced based on these assumptives are not falsifiable and therefore unfactual. 1000 years from now, some archeologist will uncover packing peanuts in a landfill. everything around it will have biodegraded, and in absence of other evidence, either a comet hit the planet and deposited this strange material which modern science cannot duplicate - or some advanced civilization created it at a time when everyone was supposed to be hunter gatherers. I can tell you what the pointy headed scientists would stick with - the comet. Hocum's razor doesn't allow them to wander out of their own beliefs or world view. BTW, the razor is a convenient red herring when other argumentation is failing - beg reason but make it sound scientific.

The Bible doesn't offer that all men before a certain period were hunter gatherers. Nor is there any factual proof of this. Men hunt today and camp out today. That doesn't make them hunter gatherers - nor does it preclude advanced societies. The Bible deals with a smaller portion of time and is arguably more accurate in it's conclusions than science has been - despite the naysayers that fraudulently contend that the Bible says the earth is flat - ain't in there.

The Bible also didn't get the name Shishak confused. The proper name or 'short' name of Ramsees II was Shisha. Some will ask, 'there is a k missing, why?' The Jews historically will purposedly misspell the name of a hated enemy when they put it in writing. There is no Biblical reason to believe that Ramsees wasn't Shishak. There are factual reasons which show us he was, and that the "traditional" candidate, Shoshenk, could not have been. It isn't the Bible arguing with facts or with science. It's the beliefs of certain scientists projected on science and fact that is at odds. Scientists ignore - even destroy evidence if it harms their story. Evidence just disappears. You know, like the huge skeletons with red hair found in Western US cave burials that were 7+ feet tall on average. All that remains of them is the photographic evidence - the actual remains just vanished. Why? Because they cause problems to the stories generated by secular scientists with agendas. Plain and simple.

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