Shattering the Myths of Darwinism

The book is an objective examination of the scientific merits of Darwinism in light of the most recent scientific findings in the field and in the laboratory, from a scientific rather than religious perspective. Its main conclusion is that neo-Darwinism is little more than a persistent urban myth, unsupported by evidence or experiment. Publication details are:

Some details are given below of the contents and some press quotes. Please feel free to pass on this message to anyone you think may be interested.

Part One: Chaos

Darwinism is the only theory of origins taught in schools and universities worldwide. Yet although science can demonstrate conclusively the circulation of the blood, or the expanding universe, or the value of physical constants, science has so far been unable to produce any direct evidence for evolution by genetic mutation and natural selection. The theory is revered, but remains conjectural.

The past two decades have seen many new research findings in every one of the complex interlocking set of disciplines that go to make up the Darwinian theory: findings that undermine and challenge many fundamental tenets on which the theory is constructed. These include tenets as elementary as the age of the Earth, the formation of sedimentary rocks and the formation of the main features of the Earth's crust, the limits to specific variation, the causes of extinctions, and even the possible origins of life - long considered settled in broad outline. Yet these new findings have been given short shrift by the ruling ideology of the life sciences.

Most people -- including most teachers -- have been led to believe that the rocks of the geological column and the fossils they contain have been dated absolutely by radiometric methods. In reality, none of these rocks or fossils can be dated by radiometric methods and their assigned dates are estimates -- based on Darwinian conjectures.

Radiocarbon assay has been found to be flawed and unreliable. In one recent case, South African 'bushman paintings' dated as 1,200 years old by Oxford University's carbon accelerator were found to have been painted at evening classes by a Johannesburg housewife.

All radiometric methods of dating have been found to be deeply flawed. Uranium-lead, potassium-argon and rubidium-strontium have all been found to give wildly inaccurate dates. Dating scientists get around this unreliability by selecting 'suitable' rocks to date and rejecting 'unsuitable' rocks, their suitability being judged by Darwinian criteria.

Part Two: Clay

Can sedimentary rocks be formed rapidly, or are millions of years necessary? A major sedimentary formation excavated in Sumeria was caused by a flood in historical times.

According to the ruling ideology of Uniformitarian geology, "The Present is the Key to the Past". Yet careful analysis of the rocks of the geological column shows that nowhere in the world today are there rocks forming that are anything like the historical rocks of the Earth's crust. In reality, the present entirely fails as a key to the past. Moreover, recent experiments in France and the US have shown that stratified rocks can form rapidly and simultaneously -- not over millions of years.

There is conclusive evidence that coal beds forty or more feet in thickness can form rapidly, not over millions of years. If coal can form rapidly, why not other sedimentary rocks?

The idea of catastrophism -- rapid formation of rocks -- is anathema to conventional geology. Yet there is mounting evidence for catastrophic processes. Examples include the young age and rapid building of the world's mountain chains in historical times; the gigantic extent of certain rock formations, requiring singular, acute causes; and the occurrence of extinctions on a massive scale of terrestrial -- not marine -- creatures.

If Darwinian processes of gradual evolutionary change had taken place the rocks of the Earth's crust would contain fossil evidence of such processes. The rocks should contain sequences of fossils from adjacent strata showing indisputable signs of gradual progressive change.

But this is not what is shown in the sequence of the rocks. Nowhere in the world has anyone met this simple evidential criterion with a straightforward fossil sequence from successive strata. Yet there are so many billions of fossils available from so many thousands of strata, that the failure to meet this modest demand is inexplicable if evolution has taken place in the way Darwin and his followers have envisaged. It ought to be relatively easy to assemble not merely a handful but hundreds of species arranged in lineal descent. Schoolchildren should be able to do this on an afternoon's nature study trip to the local quarry: but even the world's foremost paleontologists have failed to do so with the whole Earth to choose from and the resources of the world's greatest universities at their disposal.

Part Three: Chance

Although universally taught and widely accepted, the concept of 'natural selection' or 'the survival of the fittest' is no more than an empty tautology, incapable of explaining the origin of species. Experimental evidence formerly accepted in support of the concept, such as industrial melanism in moths, is now regarded as irrelevant to evolutionary biology.

An even more damaging criticism of the concept of natural selection is that - limited though its content may be - it is so nebulous that it can be made to fit a whole range of mutually contradictory outcomes of the evolutionary process.

As a theory, natural selection makes no unique predictions but instead is used retrospectively to explain every outcome: and a theory that explains everything in this way, explains nothing. Natural selection is not a mechanism: it is a rationalization after the fact.

In the first edition of On the Origin of Species Darwin said; 'I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale.'

This is Darwin's central idea of evolution in a nutshell: bears can become whales, or whale-like, given enough time and enough natural selection. However Darwin withdrew this claim from the second and later editions of the book.

Almost certainly this was because as an animal breeder he knew from first hand experience that no plant or animal breeder has ever succeeded in producing a new species by selective breeding. Primarily this is because of what Harvard's Ernst Mayr called "genetic homeostasis" -- the barrier beyond which selective breeding will not pass because of the onset of sterility or exhaustion of genetic variability.

Writer Jonathan Wiener has claimed that Darwin's finches on the Galapagos Islands represent an example of "Evolution in real time" and his book, the "Beak of the Finch" has been instrumental in confirming many people's belief in Darwinian processes of genetic mutation and natural selection.

Yet this interpretation of the data on Darwin's Finches is categorically contradicted by clear evidence that all the 13 "species" of ground finch on the island are in fact members of the same species who breed fertile offspring and who differ merely in diet and beak shape.

Darwinist make many claims of observed speciation. These claims vanish when examined closely and are seen as no more than pseudo- speciation. In some cases, it is merely subspecific variation being passed off as speciation. In others it is cases of freak degenerative mutations which play no evolutionary role.

The only mechanism in neoDarwinism for introducing novelty of form is genetic mutation. Yet advantageous or beneficial spontaneous genetic mutation remains no more than a hypothetical necessity to the neo-Darwinist theory.

No one has ever observed a spontaneous inheritable genetic mutation that resulted in a changed physical characteristic, aside, that is, from a small group of well-known and usually fatal genetic defects. Because noone has ever observed such an event, noone really knows whether they occur at all and, if so, how often. Because deleterious mutations are known to occur, Darwinists appeal to the statistics of large numbers. If deleterious mutations can occur, then given enough time beneficial mutations must occur.

This fundamental part of the neoDarwinist theory remains unsupported by evidence or experiment.

Computers have been used apparently to simulate the evolution of "insect" like graphics images ("biomorphs") through Darwinian processes of mutation and natural selection.

Yet such programs are not a true representation of random mutation coupled with natural selection. On the contrary they are dependent on artificial selection in which the operator controls the rate of occurrence of mutations.

It is the operator who chooses which are the lucky individuals to receive the next mutation - it is not decided by fate - and of course it is the most promising ones who are chosen. That is why they end up looking like recognizable images from the operator's memory.

Above all, such computer experiments falsify the most important central claim of mechanistic Darwinian thinking; that, through natural processes, living things could come into being without any precursor.

Part Four: Creation

By far the strongest primary evidence for evolution, for common descent and for Darwinian processes of mutation and natural selection, is that of homology -- the name given to the anatomical correspondences between different species that biologists and paleontologists have noted and studied for centuries.

Darwin observed; 'What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat should all be constructed on the same pattern and should include similar bones in the same relative position?'

This classic case of homology - the forelimbs in vertebrates - turns out in fact to be flawed, since forelimbs develop from different body segments in different species. In the newt, the forelimbs develop from trunk segments 2,3,4 and 5; in the lizard from segments 6,7,8 and 9; and in humans from segments 13,14,15,16,17 and 18.

Similarly, there are many other cases both from embryology and from molecular biology which show that homology is largely an illusion that is not maintained at the embryological level or the molecular level. Different genes are responsible in different species for specifying the same anatomical features.

Darwinism became buttressed at an early stage by a powerful array of supporting evidence, held to confirm its basic principles, but which in fact represented nothing more than the assumptions of the ruling ideology of Darwin's era. These assumptions concerned a broad range of minutely described natural phenomena, such as the persistence of vestigial organs in the human body, left behind by evolution, and the recapitulation of former evolutionary stages by embryos.

Encyclopaedia Britannica currently cites 'more than 100' organs of the human body which are supposed to have lost their function, and to be mere appendages which time and further evolution will no doubt dispel entirely from the human frame. The list includes organs such as the pineal gland, the thyroid gland, the thymus, the coccyx, the appendix, the ear muscles and the tonsils. Modern scientific examination of these claims shows that they are based simply on ignorance of the function of the organs concerned.

Scores of "missing links" between humans and apes have been claimed by Darwinists since Eugene Dubois discovered "Java Man" in 1891.

"Java Man" is now accepted as having been an extinct ape, and every single claimed "missing link" fossil has been re-assigned either as an extinct ape or as a human essentially the same as modern humans.

"Lucy" and other Australopithecines are now known to be extinct apes unrelated to humans, while "Neanderthal man" and "Homo habilis" are known to have been humans not significantly different from living humans. The missing link is still missing.

There are many scientific alternatives to neoDarwinism most of which are ignored. They include Lamarckism (inheritance of acquired characteristics), the origin of life from space, various forms of vitalism, and some entirely original ideas such as 'morphic resonance' and 'formative causation'.

Despite Lamarckism being always referred to as 'long ago discredited', the fact is that many recent experiments with both plants and animals have confirmed some form of inheritance of acquired characters.

The chief defect of neoDarwinism is that is fails to provide a global supervisory mechanism that would ensure the continuity of the extremely high levels of genetic integrity evidenced in nature and that would explain holistic biological phenomena such as the re-growth of the salamander's leg, the metamorphosis of the butterfly, or recovery from the 'eyeless fly' gene.

Afterword: Controversies

The neo-Darwinian idea of evolution by chance mutation coupled with natural selection has from its inception been welcomed as an extremely powerful tool of explanation. It has been adopted by some of the most distinguished scientific and philosophical minds of the twentieth century to explain phenomena as diverse as animal and human behavior, social movements and trends, and the progressive development of inanimate objects ranging from the elements to the stars, to galaxies and even the universe itself.

This is powerful, heady stuff. But if the idea of neo-Darwinian evolution is unsupported by evidence or experiment when applied to the heredity of plants and animals, what factual basis is there for applying the concept to other natural phenomena?

A particularly unfortunate and entirely fraudulent adoption of Darwinism in recent years has been the economic Darwinism that has influenced the economic and social policies of most western nations.

NeoDarwinism fails to explain satisfactorily a whole range of extraordinary natural observations -- starting with the thick skin on the soles of our feet, which is a genetic inheritance. Fish secrete 'mirror scales' to camouflage themselves against predators, but their skin has to be exactly seven millionths of a centimeter thick or it will not work. Can such precision be the result of undirected, spontaneous mutation?

Darwinists in the early decades of this century believed they had identified the fish from which all land-swelling creatures descended: the coelacanth. This identification was shattered when a living specimen of the coelacanth was caught by fishermen. A scientific cautionary tale.

The intense battle between Darwinists and their opponents has raged unabated for more than a century. In recent decades, some Darwinists have resorted to academic censorship, with the result that papers criticising neoDarwinism are not published and the subject is no longer openly debated by press and broadcast media. Journalists who try to write about these issues are routinely suppressed, on the grounds that they must be secret creationists or "creationist allies". Even the Internet has its Darwinist censors.

Darwinism is the only remaining mechanistic philosophy from the Nineteenth century that continues to be taught in schools and universities -- Marxism and Freudianism having been comprehensively discredited.

Darwinism is flat-earth science. Yet it continues to be the ruling ideology of the life sciences, and is likely to continue to dominate until a new generation of biologists grows up willing to question science's sacred cow.

Shattering the Myth of Darwinism

Some press quotes

"The world of science faces the biggest challenge yet to one of its most basic beliefs: Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. An authoritative compilation of scientific findings."

Neville Hodgkinson
The Sunday Times

"Richard Milton's "Shattering the Myths of Darwinism" . . . could shake the "religion" of evolution as much as "Honest to God" shook popular Christianity 30 years ago."

Leader Column
The Times

"Milton . . . utters some important warnings. We ignore them at our peril."

Julia Neuberger
The Sunday Times

"In his popular book "Shattering the Myths of Darwinism", journalist Richard Milton shows Darwinism as a crumbling edifice, supported only by a conservative scientific establishment."

Matthew Cockerill
The Daily Telegraph

"One of Richard Milton's chief purposes is to argue that, in the absence of sufficient scientific evidence, Darwinism should not continue to be taught in schools and universities as though it were holy writ. In this he succeeds admirably."

James Rogers
Literary Review

"I am glad that a new book (by an agnostic) has just been published which brings together much of the evidence against neo- Darwinism. Bang goes the empirical basis on which neo-Darwinism rests."

Bishop Hugh Montefiore
The Church Times

"Shattering the Myths of Darwinism" -- as well as being agreeably readable -- punctures the myth more effectively than anybody has done before."

Brian Inglis
The Irish Independent

"Milton's immensely readable book dispels many of Darwin's theories, not least of all his idea of 'the survival of the fittest'."

Trisha Fermor
The Courier

"If a religious creationist had written it, no one would have paid attention. But Milton is a professional science writer and well informed on what is going on in the departments of geology and old bones."

John Michell
The Oldie

"To those fed up with the atheistic reductionism of certain Darwinists the book may come as an answer to prayer, especially as Milton claims no religious beliefs."

Michael B. Roberts
Church of England Newspaper

"The cover has a picture of a shattered Darwin, and with a passing reference to Marxism, the book attempts to consign Charles to the same dustbin as Karl. Here there is a valid point: 'Ideological Darwinism has replaced scientific Darwinism in our educational system'."

E. G. Nisbet
Nature

"When a reputable science correspondent of more than 20 years' experience, who does not claim to be religious, raises serious doubts, then it is time to sit up and listen."

Challenge

"On subject after subject: methods of dating, the fossil record, microbiology, geology, etc., Milton shows the inadequacy of the evidence for Darwinian evolution."

"Milton's criticism of evolution does not spring from religious or philosophical pre-suppositions, he is simply convinced that evolution is scientifically unsupportable."

Simon Ladd
Alpha Magazine

"Charles Darwin? Outmoded. Evolution? A myth. Not the usual assertions of a fundamentalist from the bible belt, but those of a disciple of the scientific method. And based on scientific arguments."

[Translation]
Enrico Verdecchia
Panorama

"Richard Milton . . . presents a vigorous refutation of neo- Darwinism based entirely on the evidence of science."

"Backed by his experience as engineer and science journalist, and inspired by an interest in geology and palaeontology, he explains his doubts and difficulties with the general theory of evolution in a lucid, non-technical and very readable style."

Anthony Nevard
Daylight

"There are three main reasons that "Shattering the Myths of Darwinism" seems poised to make unprecedented inroads into the Darwinist camp. First, Milton makes an absolutely devastating case, leaving not a stone upon a stone of the received evolutionist credo. Secondly, he puts his case against evolution with the calmness and confidence of a man who is justifiably sure of his facts and with the modest clarity of a debater who knows that his arguments hold water and need no rhetorical flourishes but only lucid exposition to prevail. And thirdly, he disarms the knee-jerk reaction his opinions are likely to excite from disciples of the scientific establishment by reassuring them that he has no wish to reinstate the Book of Genesis."

Floodgates
Book Review Supplement

Richard Milton

Facts of Life: Shattering the Myths of Darwinism

A Presentation by the Author

Part One: Chaos

Part Two: Clay

Part Three: Chance

Part Four: Creation

Afterword: Controversies

Shattering the Myth of Darwinism

Some press quotes

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