It’s a shame that this book is so poorly written. Judging by the number of footnotes, Bergman did a lot of research and came up with some interesting findings. However, the book is repetitive and organized strangely.
Here is an example of a mess of a sentence. “Provine answered the reason is due to wishful thinking, religious training, and intellectual dishonesty are all important factors.”
Writing about Darwin’s digestive ailments, Bergman writes, “He vomited so often that he actually had a porcelain vomitatorium installed in his study behind a curtain.” There is no such word as “vomitatorium” in English. “Vomitorium” is a word, but it doesn’t mean a container in which to vomit.
A funny example of the poor proofreading is, “to those who believe in immorality of the human soul, the destruction of our world will not appear so dreadful.”
In one place, Bergman writes, “Although devoted to his wife and daughters, he treated them like children.” This seems to contradict what he writes in another place. “As [sic] analysis of Darwin’s letters reveal [sic] that Darwin’s wife, Emma, was ‘always the mother, never the child, Darwin always the child, never the father.’”
Anyway, Darwin was a bit weird. He not only enjoyed shooting animals, but also liked to kill them by throwing rocks at them. I think hunting is okay if you eat what you kill, but Darwin went way beyond that in the quantities of animals he killed. Bergman speculates that he thought he was speeding up evolution by eliminating the less fit animals that were too slow or stupid to get away from him.
Darwin thought that white Europeans were the most highly evolved, and that some of the more “primitive” races would become extinct. He also thought that women were less evolved than men. He never said he thought women would become extinct, but that would be an interesting story line for a science fiction movie.
Personal foibles aside, the real dirt on Darwin, according to Bergman, is that he wasn’t all that good a scientist. Other people had come up with the theory of evolution before he did. He used their ideas in his writings without giving them credit. Bergman claims Darwin was careless in his collection of specimens and documentation of his work, for example, sometimes failing to write down which island his specimens came from.
Darwin had a theory, called pangenesis, of how heredity works. He thought that the somatic cells, in response to the environment, produced little particles that he called gemmules. The gemmules migrated to the reproductive organs to pass on the traits to the offspring. This is similar to Lamarck’s idea of hereditability of acquired characteristics. When Darwin's cousin Francis Galton attempted to verify pangenesis by doing some well designed experiments with rabbits, the results were negative. Darwin refused to accept that pangenesis had been proven false, and he was not happy with Galton.
Gregor Mendel did experiments between 1856 and 1863 with 29,000 pea plants. He came up with the correct explanation of how some inherited traits are dominant and some recessive. He published his seminal paper in 1866. The science of genetics is based on the work of Mendel, not Darwin, who was totally on the wrong track. Darwin evidently never read what Mendel published and never understood the basic principles of genetics.
Dr. Marc Kirchner, member of the National Academy of Science and Harvard Medical School, says, "In fact, over the last 100 years, almost all of biology has proceeded independent of evolution, except evolutionary biology itself. Molecular biology, biochemistry, and physiology have not taken evolution into account at all."
Darwinism has given us some interesting speculations about fossils, but nothing that really improves our lives. Some praise the theory of evolution for freeing us from the constraints of religion, but ancient writings show that there were atheists thousands of years before Darwin. Nothing against pure science, but I can’t think of a single useful scientific discovery that depends on the theory of evolution. If there were no theory of evolution, we would still have analgesics, anesthesia, antibiotics, antidepressants, antiseptics, birth control, chemotherapy, dentistry, eyeglasses, genetics, hearing aids, insulin, pacemakers, surgery, vaccinations, vitamin pills, and X-rays. If anyone knows of any practical benefit to humanity that we would not have without the theory of evolution, please enlighten me.
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