When, a dozen years ago, I first published my view that Darwinism is scientifically flawed, I immediately encountered a kind of opponent who was to become very familiar to me over the next decade. I mean the kind who (quite sincerely) believes that anyone who challenges the conventional Darwinist view must be someone who is simply ignorant of the scientific facts. Such an opponent thus sets out to cure the ignorance he meets by the simple expedient of rehashing over and over again the tenets of the received wisdom, as found in the pages of Nature and Scientific American.
These guardians of Darwinian truth find it literally impossible to believe that anyone could actually have conducted some research and analysis that has led them to conclude rationally that Darwinism is scientifically flawed and think that -- like an Englishman abroad -- if only they shout a little louder, the dimwit foreigner might finally get the Darwinist message.
Michael Brass is such an upholder of the received wisdom on Darwinism, and his book, The Antiquity of Man, is just such a rehashing of that received wisdom. There is nothing new here. No new facts, no new scientific discoveries, not even a new interpretation or new analysis, merely the repetition of all the same old stuff that anyone who has ever spent time in a dentist's waiting room, leafing through old copies of National Geographic, is already thoroughly familiar with.
But in his book, Brass is not merely sounding off about anti-Darwinists in general -- he has some specific targets in his sights. From the outset he attacks scientific creationists for their views and he singles out the book 'Forbidden Archaeology' by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson.
As I'm not a creationist, and I don't have any religious beliefs, I don't intend to try to speak for Cremo, Thompson or anyone else, and I'm sure they are well able to look after themselves. But I am concerned, as a secular critic of the scientific content of Darwinism, that writers like Brass are getting away with obscuring the real scientific issues under the guise of 'debunking' what they pretend is merely 'creationist propaganda', a pretext that enables them to continue to dodge engaging in real scientific debate.
What a book like Forbidden Archaeology shows, in my view, is that if even a half (or even a tenth) of the objections raised by its authors are valid scientific objections, then Darwinism is a theory that is in deep, irremediable trouble. And the best that Brass can do in the way of rebuttal is to question a handful of their cases as unproven or badly chosen. His preferred method of rebuttal in almost all cases is that described earlier: he simply recites again, more loudly, the accepted Darwinist view.
We get an early glimpse of Brass's fundamentalist stance on the evidence claimed to support Darwinism such as dating of fossils. On page 38 he presents a table of two kinds of fossil dating. He labels the first as 'relative dating' and the second, radiometric dating by the potassium-argon method, he calls 'absolute dating'. Now, as his degrees are in history and archaeology, it is perfectly possible that Brass is completely unaware of the important scientific error he is making in describing radiometric dating of fossils as 'absolute' dating, and is merely taking it on trust from his physicist colleagues that his belief is correct -- as most scientists do. But the fact remains that the words 'absolute dating' can never be used in connection with the radiometric dating of fossils of any kind. (For background to dating fossils, see 'Shattering the myths of Darwinism' chapters 3, 4, and 5.)
To be fair, I should add that Brass is far from being the only professional scientist who is confused about this question. Most Darwinists are. Even Gavin de Beer, director of the British Museum of Natural History, wrote in the museum's Guide to Evolution, first published in 1970, that the rocks forming the geological column and the fossils in them had been directly dated by radiometric methods -- a claim which is scientific nonsense and based solely on ignorance of the real facts.
In the same passage, Brass tries to make his claims for the potassium-argon method seem credible by pointing out that '0.01% of all natural potassium is radiopotassium.' To the uninitiated, this rarity must make the method seem special. But Brass forgets to mention that the substance this radioactive potassium turns into, the end product that is measured, is argon-40. Argon is the twelfth most abundant element on earth, and more than 99 per cent of it is argon-40. And there is no physical or chemical way to tell whether a given sample of argon-40 is the residue of radioactive potassium or was present in the rocks when they formed.
There are many other places where Brass shows he has swallowed Darwinist urban scientific myths hook, line and sinker. On the very first page of his introduction he repeats the commonly-made claim that Darwinian evolution is supported by observed speciation, when the true scientific facts are that there is not a single real case of observed Darwinian speciation (the cases listed in the talk-origin "FAQ" being entirely bogus [more information available here]).