Posted on 07/03/2002 9:53:47 AM PDT by Tomalak
Every day I get letters, in capitals and obsessively underlined if not actually in green ink, from flat-earthers, young-earthers, perpetual-motion merchants, astrologers and other harmless fruitcakes. The only difference here is that Richard Milton managed to get his stuff published. The publisher - we don’t know how many decent publishers turned it down first - is called ‘Fourth Estate.’ Not a house that I had heard of, but apparently neither a vanity press nor a fundamentalist front. So, what are ‘Fourth Estate’ playing at? Would they publish - for this book is approximately as silly - a claim that the Romans never existed and the Latin language is a cunning Victorian fabrication to keep schoolmasters employed?
A cynic might note that there is a paying public out there, hungry for simple religious certitude, who will lap up anything with a subtitle like ‘Shattering the Myth of Darwinism.’ If the author pretends not to be religious himself, so much the better, for he can then be exhibited as an unbiased witness. There is - no doubt about it - a fast buck to be made by any publishers unscrupulous enough to print pseudoscience that they know is rubbish but for which there is a market.
But let’s not be so cynical. Mightn’t the publishers have an honourable defence? Perhaps this unqualified hack is a solitary genius, the only soldier in the entire platoon - nay, regiment - who is in step. Perhaps the world really did bounce into existence in 8000 BC. Perhaps the whole vast edifice of orthodox science really is totally and utterly off its trolley. (In the present case, it would have to be not just orthodox biology but physics, geology and cosmology too). How do we poor publishers know until we have printed the book and seen it panned?
If you find that plea persuasive, think again. It could be used to justify publishing literally anything; flat-earth, fairies, astrology, werewolves and all. It is true that an occasional lonely figure, originally written off as loony or at least wrong, has eventually been triumphantly vindicated (though not often a journalist like Richard Milton, it has to be said). But it is also true that a much larger number of people originally regarded as wrong really were wrong. To be worth publishing, a book must do a little more than just be out of step with the rest of the world.
But, the wretched publisher might plead, how are we, in our ignorance, to decide? Well, the first thing you might do - it might even pay you, given the current runaway success of some science books - is employ an editor with a smattering of scientific education. It needn’t be much: A-level Biology would have been ample to see off Richard Milton. At a more serious level, there are lots of smart young science graduates who would love a career in publishing (and their jacket blurbs would avoid egregious howlers like calling Darwinism the "idea that chance is the mechanism of evolution.") As a last resort you could even do what proper publishers do and send the stuff out to referees. After all, if you were offered a manuscript claiming that Tennyson wrote The Iliad, wouldn’t you consult somebody, say with an O-level in History, before rushing into print?
You might also glance for a second at the credentials of the author. If he is an unknown journalist, innocent of qualifications to write his book, you don’t have to reject it out of hand but you might be more than usually anxious to show it to referees who do have some credentials. Acceptance need not, of course, depend on the referees’ endorsing the author’s thesis: a serious dissenting opinion can deserve to be heard. But referees will save you the embarrassment of putting your imprint on twaddle that betrays, on almost every page, complete and total pig-ignorance of the subject at hand.
All qualified physicists, biologists, cosmologists and geologists agree, on the basis of massive, mutually corroborating evidence, that the earth’s age is at least four billion years. Richard Milton thinks it is only a few thousand years old, on the authority of various Creation ‘science’ sources including the notorious Henry Morris (Milton himself claims not to be religious, and he affects not to recognise the company he is keeping). The great Francis Crick (himself not averse to rocking boats) recently remarked that "anyone who believes that the earth is less than 10,000 years old needs psychiatric help." Yes yes, maybe Crick and the rest of us are all wrong and Milton, an untrained amateur with a ‘background’ as an engineer, will one day have the last laugh. Want a bet?
Milton misunderstands the first thing about natural selection. He thinks the phrase refers to selection among species. In fact, modern Darwinians agree with Darwin himself that natural selection chooses among individuals within species. Such a fundamental misunderstanding would be bound to have far-reaching consequences; and they duly make nonsense of several sections of the book.
In genetics, the word ‘recessive’ has a precise meaning, known to every school biologist. It means a gene whose effect is masked by another (dominant) gene at the same locus. Now it also happens that large stretches of chromosomes are inert - untranslated. This kind of inertness has not the smallest connection with the ‘recessive’ kind. Yet Milton manages the feat of confusing the two. Any slightly qualified referee would have picked up this clanger.
There are other errors from which any reader capable of thought would have saved this book. Stating correctly that Immanuel Velikovsky was ridiculed in his own time, Milton goes on to say "Today, only forty years later, a concept closely similar to Velikovsky’s is widely accepted by many geologists - that the major extinction at the end of the Cretaceous ... was caused by collison with a giant meteor or even asteroid." But the whole point of Velikovsky (indeed, the whole reason why Milton, with his eccentric views on the age of the earth, champions him) is that his collision was supposed to have happened recently; recently enough to explain Biblical catastrophes like Moses’s parting of the Red Sea. The geologists’ meteorite, on the other hand, is supposed to have impacted 65 million years ago! There is a difference - approximately 65 million years difference. If Velikovsky had placed his collision tens of millions of years ago he would not have been ridiculed. To represent him as a misjudged, wilderness-figure who has finally come into his own is either disingenuous or - more charitably and plausibly - stupid.
In these post-Leakey, post-Johanson days, creationist preachers are having to learn that there is no mileage in ‘missing links.’ Far from being missing, the fossil links between modern humans and our ape ancestors now constitute an elegantly continuous series. Richard Milton, however, still hasn’t got the message. For him, "...the only ‘missing link’ so far discovered remains the bogus Piltdown Man." Australopithecus, correctly described as a human body with an ape’s head, doesn’t qualify because it is ‘really’ an ape. And Homo habilis - ‘handy man’ - which has a brain "perhaps only half the size of the average modern human’s" is ruled out from the other side: "... the fact remains that handy man is a human - not a missing link." One is left wondering what a fossil has to do - what more could a fossil do - to qualify as a ‘missing link’?
No matter how continuous a fossil series may be, the conventions of zoological nomenclature will always impose discontinuous names. At present, there are only two generic names to spread over all the hominids. The more ape-like ones are shoved into the genus Australopithecus; the more human ones into the genus Homo. Intermediates are saddled with one name or the other. This would still be true if the series were as smoothly continuous as you can possibly imagine. So, when Milton says, of Johanson’s ‘Lucy’ and associated fossils, "the finds have been referred to either Australopithecus and hence are apes, or Homo and hence are human," he is saying something (rather dull) about naming conventions, nothing at all about the real world.
But this is a more sophisticated criticism than Milton’s book deserves. The only serious question raised by its publication is why. As for would-be purchasers, if you want this sort of silly-season drivel you’d be better off with a couple of Jehovah’s Witness tracts. They are more amusing to read, they have rather sweet pictures, and they put their religious cards on the table.
‘And has made us to be a kingdom and priests to serve his God and Father’ (Revelation 1:6)
"John echoes Yahweh's words, spoken at the Exodus. He told Israel that they would be a kingdom and a priesthood. The same words are now applied to the church. The community of faith is to be a kingdom in the sense that God will reign in it. But there is a sense in which the power of the kingdom will be shared by its citizenry. Compare Revelation 5:10 ‘They will reign on the earth.’
"John lived in the ancient east where kings were proverbial for their absolute power, and splendid lifestyle. For those who join with Christ, life is full of privileges. The first and primary privilege is the liberation from the deadening burden of sin (1:5). But other brimming satisfactions follow."
"Jesus predicted that those who cast their lot in with him, would discover surprising joys. He pictured a poor ploughman; toiling day and night to make ends meet. One day his plough turned up a casket of treasures. From that day forward life was decked with overflowing benefits. Some of them are listed in the Beatitudes. ‘Blessed are the poor, theirs is the kingdom of heaven; blessed are those who hunger, for they will be satisfied; blessed are they that... weep---for they will laugh’ (Luke 6:20,21).
Paul adds this thought: ‘We are heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ’ (Romans 8:17)
"There is a quality of life that God intends for us. For now, it is principally known in the spiritual blessings that are ours in Christ. A day will come when the material world will correspondingly yield a bounty to us."
Human and ape scurvy (and other genetic defects we share) are evidence of so-called macro evolution.
Is it any harder to believe in miracles than punctuated equalibrium?
Yes, it is for me. You see, there's nothing to 'believe in' with science, the way there is with the several revealed and traditional religions. We know science is just human thought trying to make sense of the world; our understanding changes with more knowledge and theory.
Since parts of the Bible (eg the worldwide flood) are known to be false, relying on it for natural history just seems silly to me.
Woahhs: Sure they are...but they start calling them "laws."
Doesn't work like that. Theories don't become laws. Laws and theories are different kinds of things. Laws are descriptive whereas theories are explanatory.
A law says that, under defined conditions, a system of a defined type will behave in such a manner as the law describes. A law, properly speaking, has nothing to say about why the system should behave in that way. A theory, OTOH, seeks to explain why some system behaves as it does, or has the characteristics it does, usually by proposing some causal mechanism.
A theory can never be proven because, even if it were to explain all known and relevant phenomena perfectly, it is always possible that some not-yet-known phenomena are unexplained by the theory, or would even falsify it. In addition, even if a theory is uncontradicted by any known evidence, it is always possible that there is a better theory that has yet to be thought of or proposed that would explain the known data equally as well, and more data besides (a more general theory) or one that would explain the data more elegantly (a less "ad hoc" theory).
Laws cannot be proven because of the fact that they implicitly claim universality (all systems of the defined type must be behave as the law describes) and thus can be falsified by any instance of a "misbehaving" system.
In short, proving either theories or laws would essentially require omnipotence, an exhaustive and complete knowledge of all phenomena to which they are relevant.
The most heroic, uplifting, inspiring scene in the whole of English literature is the construction of Pandaemonium, the capital city of Hell, in Milton's Paradise Lost. After the Fall, Satan and his minions know only agony. They can barely function. Satan rouses them out of their stupor and puts them to work building the city to get their minds refocused. Some of Heaven's greatest artisans have fallen along with him; under these impossible conditions, they do their best work of all.
Of course, Milton has always been accused of painting too noble and sympatheic a portrait of the Prince of Darkness.
Laws are empirical, not necessarily universal. They are rules of thumb based upon observation. Ampere's law, for example, fails for circuits that contain capacitors. It is still called a law, however, because of how it was constructed, and it is still taught because it works well in its region of applicability.
Belief in heaven partially disengages man from proactive endeavors here on earth. It is almost as bad as the "End Days" beliefs.
Here is what I wrote on the matter in another post:
You prefer not to think about cosmic questions such as the meaning of life or the origin of the universe, which necessarily lead to pondering the role of God, religion and so on in how we lead our lives and what our ultimate purpose is.I am not a celestrial mechanic, I am a man. It puzzles me why some claim 'knowlege of God' is neccessary to live a meaningful life, one that is congruent with the idea of 'good'. The way I see it, 'God' gave me the means to do this by providing me with mind, heart and conciousness.
I defy anyone religious to illustrate how thier 'purpose in life', their goals, are fundamentally different than mine... or to be more specific: What can be achieved via religion that cannot be achieved through ethics and compassion?
I see religion as the historical forerunner of philosophy -- that does not mean however that religion is the BASIS of philosophy, but rather the PATH that man had to walk in order to learn.
Once man takes on the more refined philosophical system, does it really make sense to hold onto a crude precursor?
Ethics/philosophy/love is just religion without the epic drama, diminution, and neurotic boogeymen.
Some precepts of religion I consider outright dangerous; for instance, the idea of a promised hereafter and a judge of man seems to me to inculcate a strategy of simple refraining from 'evil' while spawning a reluctance to truly 'fight the good fight' by attacking things that WE-THINK-but-are-not-quite-sure-are-bad. It is an ideology that erodes confidence in ourselves, in our CAPABILITY to JUDGE. To BE, to LEAD and EXEMPLIFY.
It neuters what I consider to be our true soul -- the WAKE we make on the minds of our fellows, on the mind of man, in our lifetime. Instead we sit like passive babies, behaving but not LIVING, waiting to be fed our promised heaven. The pilot light in the breast is cold, and your soul is always 'on the other side' of death.
That light is your soul, ignite it now, let it spark the furnace of passion -- and LIVE!
Well that may be well and good for you and your religion, but where does that leave me, as I am reformed druid, and that is not part of our texts?
Oh one last thing ... if what you call God is the entity that has the eternal hell you speak of ... I would not consult with him as I don't deal with psychopaths
Evolutionary theory is not bound in an ironclad manner to usefulness. It operates under constraints, for instance -- it might be 'useful' for mammals to have wings as well as arms (or 'legs') but the development of those wings involves a massive transition of design, and AT ALL POINTS along that transition the organism has to reap benifits that PAY FOR the transitional biology of the moment relative to competing mutations.
Evolution is not capable of "thinking" 'in the long run', but only in terms of the lifespan of the creature:
Do pre-wings (stubs) really benefit me, or would someone whos mutations gave them bigger arms or better eyes be more successful at life -- more likely to have offspring hence propogating that mutation?
That is the 'test' every variation must pass.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.