|
32 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A rehash of many tired anti-evolutionary arguments., January 11, 1998
Although he draws on many examples and cites many references, I am having difficulty deciding if author Richard Milton is himself ignorant of biology, or is expecting his readers to be so. His primary references for paleontology, mammalian evolution, geology, and other subjects are 20, 30, or 40 years old. There are certainly classics this old still worth reading in these and many other fields, but as he is using textbook-level surveys, and citing them as examples of incomplete or murky knowledge in scientifically contentious, heavily researched areas, it is a false use of authority. There are several up-to-date references available in these fields. Two of many examples: * He cites an encyclopedic entry from 1982 as evidence for the mystery of enzymes; this predates modern molecular biology.
* He uses Simpson's 1961 book _Horses_ to attempt assaults at this classic evolutionary progression; evidence of a reading of MacFadden's 1992 _Fossil Horses_ is strangely missing. He either misunderstands or deliberately misstates many aspects of biology. Examples:
* His dual use of individual variation both for and against Darwinian evolution;
* His statement that there is clearly no widespread "struggle for existence" (ask any insect);
* His statement that taxonomy is purely arbitrary (classification is a constant attempt to flesh out and depict evolutionary relationships);
* He says that uniformitarianism is false because there are many catastrophes, but uniformitarianism includes the existance of catastrophes of many scales;
* His suggestion that mountain ranges must have lifted much more quickly and much more recently than every other geologists would believe;
* His dismissal of plate tectonics using creationist energy calculations, followed by the silly proposition that the Wisconsin ice cap melted miraculously quickly, giving us the Flood while prying apart the continents (if this were true there would be so much evidence of this catastrophe there would be 17 journals devoted to its study);
* Following this, he suggests that convergent evolution of placentals and marsupials will clearly have to be rethought, implying that convergent forms are closely related because they look alike ("only a professional zoologist could tell their skulls apart"). He offers no clue as to how they could have developed, in so short a time, the fundamental difference between placental and marsupial development;
* He says that primordial abiogenesis is impossible, yet later cites claims of spontaneous germination (probably due to contamination [he was after all citing Pasteur from the 19th century]) as evidence of some mysterious life force;
* He says homologous structures should have homologous genes (what does he say about homeobox genes, which control early development of nearly all metazoan animal embryos from rotifers to humans?);
* He ignores or misstates much embryology and development. He gets much of his science from old textbooks and popularized accounts and exploits the inherent debate within science, much the same as politicians resistant to doing anything about global warming, or environmental degradation. If scientists were so resistent to changing their dominant theories, there would have been little of the amazing scientific progress seen this century. Milton is proof that, if you put a conspiratorial spin on resistance to your case many people will be deceived into thinking you must be telling the truth. There are many point-by-point debunkings of this book on the Internet. Search for the book title.
|
by Michael A. Cremo
by Michael Denton
by Phillip E. Johnson
by Lee M. Spetner
