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

New Statesman ^ | 28 August 1992 | Richard Dawkins

[Tomalak]

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.

[DrDavid]

i'm sorry but you're wrong. the answer is 42.

I suggest the question is "Who is responsible for this mess?" (units for the answer American Presidents).

[Dimensio]

"Law" signifies a theory that has both withstood rigourous testing and is used as the basis for future hypothesis and theory. It does not mean "proven".

"Law" in science only means that falsifying it would create a bigger mess than would falsifying a theory that is not "law".

[f.Christian]

Creation...

Originally the word liberal meant social conservatives who advocated growth and progress---mostly technological(knowledge being absolute/unchanging)based on law--reality--UNDER GOD...the nature of GOD/man/govt. does not change. These were the Classical liberals...founding fathers-PRINCIPLES---stable/SANE scientific reality/society---industrial progress...moral/social character-values GROWTH!

Anti-Science...

Then came the post-modern age of switch-flip-spin-DEFORMITY-cancer...Atheist secular materialists through ATHEISM/evolution CHANGED-REMOVED the foundations...demolished the wall(separation of state/religion)--trampled the TRUTH-GOD...built a satanic temple over them---made these absolutes subordinate--relative and calling all the residuals---technology/science === evolution to substantiate/justify their efforts--claims...social engineering--PC--atheism...anti-God/Truth RELIGION--crusade/WAR--INTOLERANCE/TYRANNY against God--man--society!!

[Old Professer]

Darwinism is a zero-sum game; one must first presume that there is a finite resource and a static future for it to work.

The larger and more gut-wrenching debate centers around the purpose of sapient life, for sentience itself is insufficient to explain the the nuance of thought.

One's first encounter with death as an observer is difficult enough to unhinge the weaker screws among us, but the extrapolation to our own inevitable crux is devastating eventually.

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

By Dylan Thomas

"Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

"Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night."

"Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

"Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night."

"Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight "Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

"And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

Dylan Thomas died at the age of 39.

Not a single one of us wants to go gentle into that goodnight, yet few of us fight against the fading of the light.

Our father on the height is not just a figurative term but the sum of all fathers back to the beginning of time; why must some people persist in rubbing our noses in the unchallengable fact that the basic curse of mankind is ignorance?

In Genesis it is written that the first sin was the arrogance of omniscience, it seems from these threads that it must always be so.

May the force be with you.

[Dimensio]

So it is "faith" not to accept a proposition without evidence, is that it?

[general_re]

What are you doing here? I thought Wednesday was applesauce day at the home...

[TightSqueeze]

They, like you, begin with the assumption that all religion is false…

I never said that, nor do I believe that all religion is false, you just apply pi$$ poor logic. I just don’t believe that everything has underlying religious, political or sexual overtones, sometimes a banana is just a banana.

[Khepera]

It probably would do no good for me to tell you that your wrong. So I won't.

[berned]

No offense, but your # 73 was a tad lame.

It doesn't address the mind-boggling unliklihood of one teeny tiny insignicant nation like Israel giving the world BOTH it's most read, studied and written about book in History -- The Bible; AND ALSO giving the world it's most admired, written about, and talked about person in History -- Jesus Christ. BOTH coming from one little nation smaller in size than New Hampshire, smaller in population than Hong Kong.

The fact that the two were connected bu hundreds of written-in-advance prophesies pushes the statistical liklihood of these being coincidental, off the scale.

Additionaly, it is this same book, the Bible, that is in a head-on confrontation with evolution. A theory which is not only unproven, but coming apart at the seams more and more with each day.

[Dimensio]

True. I'd just say "why?" and ask for evidence for any assertions you might make.

[TightSqueeze]

Wow you use your fingers better than a twenty dollar whore.

[lews]

Please, don't confuse evoltion with evolutionists. My problem is not with the theory, but, with the theorists. It is those theorists who limit the discussion to only atheistic ideologies that are the problem. In order for science to ever get to the bottom of the issue it must be rid of it's ideological interferences, primarily atheism.

[whattajoke]

The universe looks old. Exactly as it would look if it's really old. As if it has one, specific, consistent history. As if it has been expanding for fifteen billion years from a single point. As if light has been traveling through it, lensing through gravitational fields, and as if events hundreds of thousands of light-years away have sent light at right angles to us, hundreds of thousands of years ago, which reflected off other objects and then came toward us. We can use Euclid's geometry to show how far away these objects are and how old their light is.

The Earth looks old. Exactly the way it would look if it's really old. As if it's been around for four-and-a-half billion years, and was hot and molten for the first half-billion of it, as if the continents have been gradually moving for the entire time, and as if the oceans and rivers and streams and tectonic flows have been shaping it, slowly, for all that time. As if Africa and South America have been receding from each other for millions of years, as the deposits have built up on the continents and the sea floor has spread, with the magnetic iron and nickel in the volcanic deposits recording the Earth's changing magnetic field, exactly in time with the changes we have been measuring. It looks just as if radioactive isotopes have been here, changing into their stable daughter elements in accord with the laws of physics, changing the ratios of those daughter isotopes in exact proportion to the elements (not the isotopes) found in the rock, just exactly as if they've been doing so for hundreds of millions, or billions, of years.

Life on Earth looks old, exactly like it would be if it's really old, as if it's been here for almost the entire history of the Earth, as if it's been changing all that time, with new species appearing, each similar to something that was here before. As if coral, dated to three hundred million years ago by the radioactive material in the rocks it was growing on, was showing four hundred days in a year, exactly matching the predicted slowing effect of lunar tides on the Earth's rotation over three hundred million years.

Life on Earth looks as if it's descended from a common ancestor. Exactly like it, just as if it's arranged in a nested hierarchy of similarity, instead of all the infinite other ways it could have been arranged, and as if the junk, noncoding DNA in each animal has exactly the same similarity relationship as the morphological hierarchy, like the errors in DNA, shared in the nested hierarchy, such as why humans and chimps and gorillas can get scurvy but all the other mammals can produce their own vitamin C.

Certainly God could have created the Earth six thousand years ago. Or last week, for that matter. But regardless of when it was created, it was created to look exactly as if it had all this history?

[stanz]

Sorry, but it is most definitely used for fossil dating.Fossils are dated by assessing the age of the matrix they are embedded in to establish their relative age.

Please refer to article: (site: id-archserve.ucsb.edu/Anth3/Courseware/Chronology/09_Potassium_Argon_Dating.html)

Chronological Methods 9 - Potassium-Argon Dating --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Potassium-Argon Dating Potassium-Argon dating is the only viable technique for dating very old archaeological materials. Geologists have used this method to date rocks as much as 4 billion years old. It is based on the fact that some of the radioactive isotope of Potassium, Potassium-40 (K-40) ,decays to the gas Argon as Argon-40 (Ar-40). By comparing the proportion of K-40 to Ar-40 in a sample of volcanic rock, and knowing the decay rate of K-40, the date that the rock formed can be determined.

How Does the Reaction Work?

Potassium (K) is one of the most abundant elements in the Earth's crust (2.4% by mass). One out of every 100 Potassium atoms is radioactive Potassium-40 (K-40). These each have 19 protons and 21 neutrons in their nucleus. If one of these protons is hit by a beta particle, it can be converted into a neutron. With 18 protons and 22 neutrons, the atom has become Argon-40 (Ar-40), an inert gas. For every 100 K-40 atoms that decay, 11 become Ar-40.

How is the Atomic Clock Set?

When rocks are heated to the melting point, any Ar-40 contained in them is released into the atmosphere. When the rock recrystallizes it becomes impermeable to gasses again. As the K-40 in the rock decays into Ar-40, the gas is trapped in the rock.

The Decay Profile

In this simulation, a unit of molten rock cools and crystallizes. The ratio of K-40 to Ar-40 is plotted. Note that time is expressed in millions of years on this graph, as opposed to thousands of years in the C-14 graph. Click on the "Show Movie" button below to view this animation. How are Samples Processed?

Clicking on the "Show Movie" button below will bring up an animation that illustrates how a K-Ar sample is processed and the calculations involved in arriving at a date. This is actually a mini-simulator, in that it processes a different sample each time and generates different dates.

K-Ar Processing

Limitations on K-Ar Dating

The Potassium-Argon dating method is an invaluable tool for those archaeologists and paleoanthropologists studying the earliest evidence for human evolution. As with any dating technique, there are some significant limitations.

The technique works well for almost any igneous or volcanic rock, provided that the rock gives no evidence of having gone through a heating-recrystallization process after its initial formation. For this reason, only trained geologists should collect the samples in the field.

This technique is most useful to archaeologists and paleoanthropologists when lava flows or volcanic tuffs form strata that overlie strata bearing the evidence of human activity. Dates obtained with this method then indicate that the archaeological materials cannot be younger than the tuff or lava stratum. Because the materials dated using this method are NOT the direct result of human activity, unlike radiocarbon dates for example, it is critical that the association between the igneous/volcanic beds being dated and the strata containing human evidence is very carefully established.

As the simulation of the processing of potassium-argon samples showed, the standard deviations for K-Ar dates are so large that resolution higher than about a million years is almost impossible to achieve. By comparison, radiocarbon dates seem almost as precise as a cesium clock! Potassium-argon dating is accurate from 4.3 billion years (the age of the Earth) to about 100,000 years before the present. At 100,000 years, only 0.0053% of the potassium-40 in a rock would have decayed to argon-40, pushing the limits of present detection devices. Eventually, potassium-argon dating may be able to provide dates as recent as 20,000 years before present. Links Geochron Laboratories

[Khepera]

And GOD will do away with evolutionists. It's all so perfect.

[Dimensio]

Uhm, it addressed that "unliklihood" quite nicely. None of it happened, you just think it happened because Queen Maeve made it appear to have happened. It couldn't have really happened, though, because the universe was created Last Thursday.

This of course, nicely explains everything without going into detail regarding the selective nature by which the "prophecies" of Christ's coming are interpreted.

[kpp_kpp]

i'm not trying to argue for either point...

one faith says there is another realm or dimension to existance other than the natural.

the other "faith" says that there is no other realm or dimension to existence beyond what we can see, touch, hear, taste, smell, i.e. the natural realm.

what "natural realm" evindence can falsify either faith?

[Dimensio]

Er, so are you suggesting that science should be open to the supernatural?

[Dimensio]

Well, I say that the only realm that I can currently experience is the "natural" realm. I withold judgement on the existence any other proposed "realms" until I someone offers up such a proposal and a test for that proposal.

Until then, in the abscence of evidence for such realms, I won't waste my time worrying about them.

[gdani]

A theory which is not only unproven, but coming apart at the seams more and more with each day.

I suppose your Bible has proven that the universe was created in 6 days, that Adam & Eve were the first two humans, that woman was made from a man's rib, that dinosaurs existed during biblical times and that the earth is only approx 6,000 years old?