Anyone educated in a developed country in the past fifty years is familiar with the ideas of Darwinism: that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and that life has evolved over billions of years through a process of genetic mutation coupled with natural selection. These ideas are so familiar that they now seem self-evidently true.
Everyone, from primary school child to postgraduate student, has been presented in textbooks, TV programmes and museum exhibits, with the evidence that supports Darwinist ideas. There is the peppered moth, which evolved darker coloration to remain camouflaged on trees darkened by pollution. There are the famous Darwin’s Finches on the Galapagos Islands — 13 species of finch all diverging from the evolutionary tree by adapting to different habitats and way of life. There is the famous text-book chart of the evolution of horses, from a small dog-like creature 50 million years ago to the modern horse.
When it comes to human origins, pupils and students are equally familiar with the evidence for our evolution from an ape-like ancestor. Everyone who has visited the British or American Museums of Natural History has seen the restoration of our earliest supposed ancestor, ‘Lucy’ the Australopithecine, with her upright gait, her human-like hands and feet and a thoughtful expression on her intelligent face.
The trouble with all this ‘evidence’ is that not a single piece of it has any foundation in scientific fact. It is nothing more than urban scientific myth inspired by wishful thinking and self-delusion on the part of a relatively few scientists, dedicated to Darwinism as a fundamental world view — almost a religion.
I first began to question the received wisdom on Darwinism when I became interested in geology and palaeontology thirty years ago. It is a peculiarity of the British Isles that they contain every geological formation — and hence practically every type of fossil — found on Earth. By taking a trip around the coasts and quarries of Britain, anyone can examine the geology of the whole world for themselves. And here I found my first puzzle. Why was I unable to find, in this perfect natural laboratory, evidence of evolution in the rocks? There should be millions of transitional species between ancestral creatures and more modern ones — but where were they?
It wasn’t just me who couldn’t find them. Scientists had been diligently searching every continent for fossil evidence for 150 years, yet had not found a single uninterrupted sequence of fossils demonstrating evolution from one species to another. (See www.AlternativeScience.Com/talk-origins-transitions.htm)
The best that anyone had been able to manage was to assemble isolated fossils from different strata of different ages which looked anatomically similar and to claim that they must be ancestors and descendants — because no other rational explanation was possible.
Yet this failure to find conclusive fossil evidence is inexplicable if life really has evolved in the way Darwin envisaged. The Earth’s crust should be filled with sequences of evolving fossil species.
It ought to be relatively easy to assemble 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 palaeontologists have failed to do so with the whole Earth to choose from and the resources of the world’s greatest universities at their disposal.
This basic failure of science to substantiate the fundamental theory of Darwinism switched on my journalist’s antennae. Like most reporters, I was born with a suspicious mind; the kind of mind which says ‘show me’. But when I asked science to show me the evidence for Darwinism and tried to make their story ‘stand up’ in the way that reporters are trained to, I encountered only nervous coughs and shy smiles.
After a while scientists declined to speak to me saying it was obvious that I must be a ‘religious crackpot’, a Creationist with a hidden agenda who was simply out to attack science (despite the fact that I have no religious beliefs and my investigation was strictly factual.) I later found that this ‘crackpot’ label was an alibi behind which Darwinists had been hiding for years whenever they were pressed to produce real evidence.
But suspicious though I was, I was hardly prepared for what I found when I began to investigate the rest of the evidence I had been offered.
My first surprise came when I learned that fossils cannot normally be dated by radiometric means. Volcanic rocks can be dated by radioactive decay but not sedimentary rocks — the rocks fossils are found in. How then had the fossils been dated with such apparent accuracy? It turns out that their ages had been ‘estimated’ or ‘interpolated’ by Darwinists.
Even more astounding, I learned that radiometric dating can be wildly unreliable, in one case producing dates varying from half a million years to 17.5 million years old for rocks near Lake Rudolph. Even the age of the Earth itself is disputed and scientifically in doubt. For example, the uranium-lead/helium method which yields an (estimated) age for the Earth of 4.5 billion years, yields an age of only about 175,000 years when used on the Earth’s atmosphere.
But what about the Peppered moth? And Darwin’s Finches? What about the fossil horses? Like the other evidence, these cases melted away like snow on a spring morning as soon as I investigated. It turns out that the dark variety (the so-called ‘melanic’ variety) of the peppered moth existed before industrial pollution darkened trees, so the change in colour of the moth was nothing more than a shift in the balance of an existing population: light moths were eaten, dark moths survived. If this was ‘Natural selection’ in action, it explained nothing.
Darwin’s 13 species of finch turn out not to be 13 different species, but merely varieties of the same species — just as all the breeds of dog are varieties of a single species. If they do not demonstrate speciation (one species turning into another) then how do they demonstrate Darwinian processes? It is argued that they are in the process of turning into different species, but where is the scientific evidence for this? It doesn’t exist on the Galapagos or anywhere else. (Seewww.AlternativeScience.Com/darwin’s_finches.htm)
The fossil horses turned out to be the most bogus of all.The famous chart showing an unbroken line of descent from Eohippus of 50 million years ago to Mesohippus 30 million years ago to modern horses is a simple fake. All of the fossil species illustrated are completely isolated in the fossil record with no scientific chain of evidence linking them. Indeed, there are large gaps in the geological and fossil recordwhich the chart deliberately glosses over or ignores. (See www.AlternativeScience.Com/talk-origins-horses.htm)
And what about Lucy, our ape like ancestor? The erect posture of the restoration, the humanlike hands and feet are all works of fiction. According to Stern and Susman, who described the type species, ‘Lucy’ was an arboreal ape with hands and feets adapted for swinging through trees, not for walking and toolmaking. Indeed, their paper shows that Lucy’s hands and feet are long and highly curved even when compared to a modern ape like a chimpanzee, not short and flat like a human’s. The museum restoration is nothing more than a work of Darwinist fiction.
The Darwinian concept of long slow evolution over billions of years has led to distortion of our ideas on human origins in unexpected ways. If our ancestors were apes with small brains, then early humans must have been stupid, brutal cave people. Only humans of the last ten thousand years can be considered civilised and fully human in the modern sense. This view has caused generations of anthropologists and archaeologists to discard or neglect clear evidence that humans were intelligent, civilised beings capable of advanced industry and commerce perhaps half a million years ago — maybe much longer.
Certainly anyone trained in engineering who tries to make a flint hand axe of the early stone age (Acheulian) type, will find, as I have, that such tools are every bit as well designed and well made as modern tools. The people who made these axes 250,000 years ago thought and acted as modern humans, and their grasp of technology and manufacturing processes was fully modern, not crude and undeveloped.
Publication of “Shattering the myths of Darwinism” was greeted, predictably, by a storm of criticism from Darwinists. Dr Richard Dawkins wrote that the book was ‘loony’, ‘stupid’, ‘drivel’ and that I was a ‘harmless fruitcake’ who, ‘needs psychiatric help.’
Later, when the Times Higher Educational Supplement commissioned me to write a critique of Darwinism, Richard Dawkins mounted a campaign to have the article suppressed and not published — a campaign which, sadly, was successful. (See www.nexusmagazine.com/arcoverups.html)
Perhaps more significantly, in the ten years since the book was first published, neither Dawkins nor any other Darwinist has successfully rebutted any of the scientific objections raised in the book.
It was largely as a result of the closed-minded reception of my critique of Darwinism by many in the scientific community that I wrote Alternative Science, an examination of the way in which scientific innovations have traditionally been scorned by the keepers of the reigning scientific paradigm: self-appointed scientific vigilantes who I call the ‘Paradigm Police’. (See www.AlternativeScience.Com/alternative-science-book.htm)