Quotes
from Shattering the Myths of Darwinism
Darwin’s original conception …has received too many mortal blows from the ugly facts of scientific enquiry to remain viable. (p. 230)
SCIENTISTS. Most scientists privately accept that there are serious objections to Darwinism… and privately they will admit to the objections. However, they have become reluctant to discuss them in public (and in a public forum like the Internet they will deny them altogether) because they fear that they will aid their critics and unwittingly discredit their own profession. In some cases, they feel it is better to be discreet, pretend that there is nothing wrong, or even tell a “little white lie” in the interests of the greater good of science. (p. 269) …Darwinism has never had much appeal for science outside of the English-speaking world… its ascendancy in science, in both Britain and America, has been waning for several decades as its grip has weakened in successive areas: geology; paleontology; embryology; comparative anatomy. Now even geneticists are beginning to have doubts. (p. 277)
There is a strong streak of intellectual arrogance and intellectual authoritarianism running through the history of Darwinism… It is seen in the outrage and indignation with which they greet any reasoned attempt to expose the theory to debate and to the light of real evidence. (p. 277)
SEQUENTIAL FOSSILS. The case for Darwinism would be made convincingly if someone were to produce a sequence of fossils from a sequence of adjacent strata (such as ammonite species or sea urchins) showing indisputable signs of gradual progressive change on the same basic stock, but above the species level (as opposed to subspecific variation). Ideally this should be demonstrated in a long sequence, ten or twenty or fifty successive fossil species, showing major generic evolution — but a short sequence would be enough. But this simple relationship is not what is shown in the sequence of the rocks. Nowhere in the world has anyone met this simple evidential criterion… 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. (p. 110)
HUMAN EVOLUTION. …the evidence for humankind’s own evolution is actually nonexistent. (p. 195)
INTELLIGENCE. In the baffling new world of modern physics, scientists find themselves observing and examining a cosmos that has become less and less like a clockwork machine and more like an intelligence. …it would surely be absurd to bestow intelligent characteristics upon the behavior of nuclear particles yet fail to accord such characteristics to living structures. (p. 234)
NATURAL SELECTION. Natural selection is not a mechanism: it is a rationalization after the fact. (p. 130)
MUTATIONS AND EVOLUTION. I believe that Darwinists should muster the courage to come clean… reserving the term mutation for any change in genetic coding… and use some other term — perhaps “novation” (novelty-producing mutation) — to describe the kind of mutation they say is potentially useful. …Can we estimate the rate of “novation” as opposed to the rate of mutation? Yes, we can. The rate of novation is a number that is vanishingly small (if not actually zero). It is a number so small that in order to account for synthetic evolution by random mutation, one has to have an almost religious faith… (p. 158-159)
I am seriously concerned, on purely rational grounds, that generations of school and university teachers have been led to accept speculation as scientific theory and faulty data as scientific fact… (p. 4)
To most students, teachers, and even some scientists it will come as a surprise to learn that recent research into the age of the Earth has produced evidence that our planet could be much younger than had previously been thought:
- existing methods of geochronometry such as uranium-lead decay and radiocarbon assay have been found to be deeply flawed and unreliable
- the extent of genetic change by selection has been found experimentally to be limited
- bacteria can be induced in the laboratory to mutate in a direction that is beneficial to them — without generations of natural selection
- only a catastrophist model of development can account for important Earth structures and processes such as continental drift and most fossil-bearing rock formations — most of the Earth’s surface in fact. (p. 6)
RATE OF DEPOSITION. Curiously, too, no geologist seems to have checked out the geological column dates with an electronic calculator on a commonsense basis. …For instance the Cretaceous period is said to have lasted 65 million years and is 15,000 meters thick — an average annual rate of deposition of 0.2 millimeters. Now look at the Siluarian period: this, too, yields an average rate of deposition of about 0.2 millimeters per year — as does the Ordovician, the Devonian, the Carboniferous and the rest. …about the thickness of a human hair in a year …such a slow rate would be quite incapable of burying and fossilizing entire forests, dinosaurs, or even a medium-sized tadpole. (p. 23)
RADIOACTIVE DATING. …radioactive dating techniques are far less reliable than was previously thought; the Earth could be much younger than has been supposed by Darwinists; and nothing like the billions of years required by evolution theory have elapsed since the Earth’s formation. (p. 30)
GEOLOGICAL PROCESSES. Most non-geologists (and perhaps even some geologists) will be surprised to learn that observations of modern geological processes show, however, that nowhere today are there rocks being formed anything like those in the geological column. (p. 72)
SEDIMENTARY ROCK LAYERS. According to Berthault, “These experiments contradict the idea of the slow build up of one layer followed by another. The time scale is reduced from hundreds of millions of years to one or more cataclysms producing almost instantaneous laminae.” These innocent-sounding words are the death knell of the idea that the existence of meters of sediments is by itself evidence for a great age for the Earth. (p. 78)
NO FOSSILS. There is one final observation that can be made about all the sediments of the geological column in relation to present-day processes, and it is the greatest anomaly of all. Today there are no known fossiliferous rocks forming anywhere in the world. (p. 78)
EVAPORITES. …perhaps the most striking example of present processes failing to explain the past, the case of so-called “evaporites.” Extensive beds of common salt, gypsum, and anhydrite occur on most continents… no modern sea or lake is presently forming evaporite beds in any way comparable to these geological deposits, which are of immense thickness and great chemical purity. …contain no organic remains — no fossils… The purity of these deposits and the absence of material derived from surrounding land point to them having come about not through evaporation… but through precipitation from chemically saturated waters… again it implies a catastrophic origin and singular or rare events. …Perhaps instead of “evaporites” we should …adopt the name “catastrophites”! (p. 75-76
EVIDENCE FOR EVOLUTION. The problems that have bedeviled horse paleontology also beset every other branch of the science. Indeed, the gaps in the fossil record are reflected in the living world where many major animal and plant groups are high and dry with no discernible predecessors. The development of the entire order of mammals is missing from the fossil record, from its supposed shrewlike ancestor of the late Cretaceous until modern times. …In fact, more than 100 years of further intense collecting by well-funded professional expeditions has not yet yielded any of the remains that Darwin envisaged… (p. 104, 109)
NATURAL VARIATION. The natural limit on the amount of variation that can be induced in a species is merely the expression of the fact that nowhere in the animal or plant kingdom is there a species that is capable of the infinite biological plasticity demanded by evolution theory, capable of unlimited adaptation to different environments and different modes of life. Living organisms are systems with limited potential for change in which variation of one characteristic reacts on other characters, usually with unfavorable results. This finding is of central importance because it is one that Darwinists will usually accept, having considered the evidence, but will later on simply forget all about when they are speaking of the Darwinian concept of variation and natural selection. It seems to bring out the Jekyll and Hyde in evolutionists from Darwin down to the present. (p. 137-138)
All of the above quotes are from Richard Milton’s Shattering the Myths of Darwinism (Rochester, Vermont: Park Street Press, 1997), pp. 308.
