February 7, 2013
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Shattering “Shattering the Myths of Darwinism” – Preface
I picked up Richard Milton’s Shattering the Myths of Darwinism with such (I admit naively) high hopes. Several creationist acquaintances of mine had told me of the thorough and scientific nature of this text. I resolved to go into this with an open(ish) mind. However, I also went into this with a long history of reading books that popularize science, in the nature of Miller, Dawkins, Hawking, Greene, Bryson, Gould, so on and so forth. There are a few general trends of the books that do a service to their subject matter. Thus far, this book fails on all those counts.
In any non-fiction book that wishes to be taken seriously, proper citation is key. If you claim a fact, you back that up with a source. When you cite said source, you make damn sure that you do so in a way that anyone looking for it could find it with the proper access to Amazon, journals and/or a library. You make goddamned sure it can’t be confused with anything else, and your reader doesn’t have to spend an hour going through a stack of newspapers or an entire textbook. And you sure as fuck don’t quote somebody, especially someone who is critical of you or you are critical of, without giving the exact, specific spot you can find that quote and the exact context. Milton is a sorry sack when it comes to providing his sources. For instance, one of his citations simply reads: “Nature 8.27, 1992.” For those of you that don’t know, issues of Nature typically ring in just shy of 200 pages and features 10-20 separate articles on a myriad of topics by dozens of authors. Citing the entire magazine is akin to someone asking what you’re listening to and you point to your iPod. I assume you all have nanos which can only hold a few dozen songs. Half of that if they’re by Led Zeppelin. Or just one live rendition of Stairway to Heaven.
Robert Plant was 26 when they started this song.
Simply put, this man wouldn’t have passed a freshman science course with this shit. It makes it harder than Mel Gibson in a Holocaust museum to take this man seriously as an academic who is going to tear down all the work of thousands of real scientists. And yes, I’m sorry for putting that image in your brain.
On a personal, nitpicky note (because so far I’ve been so gracious, right?), I hate when authors use endnotes. As Al Franken pointed out in Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, authors often use endnotes to hide away the fact that they aren’t using their sources correctly. Normally by the tenth citation or so, you’re too lazy to flip to the back of the book to check it out. If you want to show people you’re being absolutely open about your use of other people’s work, footnotes show the maximum transparency. If you feel the need to use endnotes, put them at the end of each chapter.
On further reading, we see that Milton calls Nature “the most respected scientific magazine in the world,” which apparently takes his complete disregard for neo-Darwinian thought to be… what, a teenage anti-parent angst phase? By calling a source an absolute authority on a subject, then making an entire book on the subject that one of the most core principles that the source you claim to respect is based upon seems hypocritical in the least, functionally retarded in the more on-the-nose vernacular.
Then we come to the crux of the argument, which has since been voiced by Ben Stein by those who care about the plight of creationists in academic discourse while eschewing reading in his “documentary” Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (a title I found fitting for a film in which almost no true intellectual thought was allowed to seep through to the actual movie): anti-Darwinian voices are muted by the “establishment,” thereby propagating the cult of neo-Darwinism and shunning anybody who may even slightly disagree with this established status quo (p. x). I mean, sure, forget the fact that the peer-review process kicks tens of thousands of neo-Darwinian scientific papers from being published in journals as high as Nature to as low as, say, the Journal of Hymenopterology (to which I once submitted a paper discussing the evolutionary aspects of phenotypic plasticity in pavement ants, but was rejected, which I can only assume is due to anti-Semitic tendencies in the scientific establishment… or maybe my research didn’t meet their standards, but that wouldn’t paint me as the victim of the established scientific foothold).
As Milton points out (p. x), “it is not just outsiders who cannot be heard, it is dissenting members of the scientific professions themselves.” See!? That’s why my paper wasn’t published. It wasn’t lack of scientific rigor, or a complete dearth of any true findings that others in the field would find interesting and/or applicable. I was discriminated against! This also explains why my thesis on how the editor-in-chief is a doody-head that I wrote in crayon on the back of a woman’s sanitary napkin also was not published. DISCRIMINATION! See, just like the scientists whose plight Milton discusses, my controversial views weren’t published because they were “anti-Darwinian in implications and hence counter to the ruling ideology in the life sciences.” I mean, fuck the fact that biology isn’t a monarchistic institution. We don’t have a king or queen.
We do, however, have a Joker.
Science doesn’t work that way. The whole reason we have the peer-review process is to fight against the personal biases that we, as people, hold on to. The scientific method does everything it can to fight prejudices like that. That’s the whole reason we have the peer-review process. And the reason these anti-evolution “theses” were rejected from reputable journals is the same reason that flat-earth posts are rejected, or why you don’t see “the Holocaust was a lie” chapters in our history books. Sometimes “I BELIEVE THIS SO HARD HOW CAN YOU DENY IT!?” just isn’t enough to make it science. Now suck it up and bring your A-game (I truly hope you haven’t been bringing it thus far) for the rest of the book.
Comments (19)
I think the problem is the guy did bring his A-game and it fails. I wonder how many people put garbage out there simply because they know it will sell to a target audience. I’ve worked with sales people who tell customers anything just to make the sale, the ensuing commission and monthly quota. It’s the “There’s a sucker born every minute” mindset and selling anti-science to the ignorant is an easy sale. Cha-Ching!
Any scientific journal will have footnotes. Failing to have transparent footnotes is a good warning sign.
Peers do check and recheck different things. Some peers come early and some peers come late. I suppose Amazon book review will have some really scathing reviews too.
The Amazon book review: http://www.amazon.com/Shattering-Myths-Darwinism-Richard-Milton/dp/0892818840 does bring up points that Milton discusses. Species that occurs on Islands is a lot easier to observe than species that change on the mainland. Maybe Darwin’s observation does have a few footnotes that need to be re-observed.
Basically neo-Darwinism is being promoted by this book. If I was to review this book I would point out some of the conclusions were done just to be controversial and this book would not support or support much science.
@PPhilip - Critiquing Darwin is one thing, considering that the peer-review process wasn’t anywhere near what it is today. But the whole book is critiquing neo-Darwinism, aka modern day evolutionary biology, which is as far a cry from Darwin’s work as modern-day microbiology is from Louis Pasteur. I wouldn’t dispute germ theory by citing nothing but Pasteur’s work (which, it should be noted, was absolutely cherry picked when presenting his results).
What of the content of his arguments?
My only comment is on the use of footnotes vs end-notes - often times it’s a publisher’s decision, in part to save paper when printing. It may not be on the author, who has little say in the typesetting. I’ve had a couple of published professors rant about the vagaries of publishers and how it frustrates them no end that there’s not one universal standard.
That said, the first issue you raised regarding citing the whole book as opposed to a specific page number… that’s unforgivable scholarship.
@FringeChristian@revelife - I’m doing this chapter by chapter as a little experiment of my own. So far he hasn’t presented a single argument.
Let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine that he had dotted all his “i’s” and crossed all this “t’s” with regard to his references. Did you find anything glaring factual errors?
Paragraph six has a neat funny ending…good post or book review.
We at Table 54 hate to say this, but what do you expect for creationists? Their science always leaves a lot to be desired.
- Y
Love this post. There should be something clever to say about the creationist view, but a cleaver would be more appropriate.
@PlatotheSmurf - This is the “preface” post, which indicates that the substantive critiques will come in later installments. What GL is saying is important, though, because the author either doesn’t know how to properly cite sources according to an approved format, or he is purposefully trying to make it hard (if not impossible) to assess his claims and sources. That’s why the publications I edited refused to publish articles that were not properly cited. Your claims are only as good as your citations in science.
That being said, there’s is no such thing as ID/creationist literature that is not riddled with fundamental, factual errors. This is pretty apparent when you read the other evolution posts GL has made where the anti-evolution arguments are completely obliterated, and the adherents of those theories proceed to fail quite miserably to defend those beliefs.
@UTRow1 - The first thing anyone does these days is go after the sources. That’s an excuse for avoiding the real argument.
Everyone knows that studies are biased. Has the author in question been dishonest about his bias?
If not, let’s get to the real argument, shall we?
@PlatotheSmurf - He’s not going after the sources, he’s pointing out that it’s virtually impossible to verify this author’s claims because of his illiterate citation style. If you can’t review the evidence behind a claim, you can’t determine whether the claim is valid.
Feel free to “get to the real argument” before GL’s next post by going to any of the dozens of posts here where GL and I have destroyed creationism/ID.
@UTRow1 - Why are you or GL a greater authority on the author’s sources than the author himself?
This kind of attack is useless because it is based in bias and the unwarranted assumption of authority over the author’s brain and his sources.
The exact arguments you make against creationists can be made against the theory of evolution.
It all gets down to whether one places his beliefs in the basic principles of reasoning or the let’s create it on the fly, relativism.
@UTRow1 - Here is Krisko in his own words:
“In any non-fiction book that wishes to be taken seriously, proper citation is key.”
Translating that to simple English: His sources are bad.
Otherwise, Krisko is just playing Trivial Pursuit instead of saying exactly why this author is wrong about creationism based on the author’s own reasoning.
@PlatotheSmurf - Uhhh…You need to think about what is written a bit more carefully. What is being said and what you are claiming was said are two very different things. Let me demonstrate: “In any non-fiction book that wishes to be taken seriously, proper citation is key[]” has nothing to do with the sources of the author’s claims. The sentence, along with the rest of the article, says (in no uncertain terms) that the author’s citations are bad. Not his sources. Citations do not equal sources. Citations are how an author supports his claims with evidence from sources. Sources are the place the evidence comes from (and thus, what the citation refers to). These are two very different things. You can have completely credible sources while having very dubious and/or misleading sources. In fact, GL seems to be fine with his sources(e.g., Nature).
To further distinguish, here are examples:
(a) Attacking the source: “Jerry says 2 + 2 = 6, but I don’t believe anything Jerry says because Jerry is a Mormon idiot.”
(b) Criticizing a citation: “I can’t verify the author’s claim that 2 + 2 = 6 because the author provided no volume number, page number, or year for the journal he cited, making it impossible for me to verify whether there is evidence supporting his claims. The journal he cited to has 10,000 volumes, and I would have to read all of them in order to verify his claim.”
This is an important distinction because the former is a logical fallacy while the later is not. The later is a completely viable argument.
Second, there are several widely accepted citation formats that all serious writers adhere to to avoid the problems GL has discussed (e.g., MLA style). Scientific journals often have unique scientific citation formats that authors must adhered to in order to be published in the journal (e.g., AAAS). However, virtually all of these citation formats require the author to convey the same information (e.g., journal name, volume, publication year, author name, etc.) so that the reader can determine whether there is evidence supporting the author’s claims. Milton adheres to no recognized citation format and fails to provide the information required to verify his claims and see his evidence, which creates glaring problems that undermine his credibility and the credibility of his arguments. Milton’s citations are so bad that he, effectively, doesn’t provide evidence for many of his claims (because you can’t find the evidence in the sources he cites to). As a result, he isn’t making evidence-backed claims; he’s simply asserting things for people to accept based on faith, personal knowledge, laziness, etc. It doesn’t take a genius to understand why this is an issue for a book that intends to offer an empirical refutation of well-established science.
All that being said, both GL and I have significantly more relevant scientific training, education, and experience than Richard Milton with regards to both evolution and the life sciences in general, as he is an engineer and we are biologists. Period. I’m not saying that he is necessarily wrong, or that we are necessarily right, but nobody can possibly argue that Milton is an expert on this subject matter, that he is beyond reproach, or that he deserves deference. He simply has no significant background in this subject matter, and as GL will likely demonstrate, his beliefs are patently wrong.
@UTRow1 - Just one question. Tell me where are all the transitional forms of living? Im not talking about lack of fossils, but the lack of living creatures. It looks like you all need some authorities to tell you something instead to use your brain. All you can say about Milton is that he does not present his sources in a right manner hence is not trustworthy. It’s stupid.
@questfrost - Your question is entirely nonsensical.
First, by definition, all transitional species are extinct. I can’t provide an example of a live transitional species, because all living species are (in the sense you are using it) not transitional species. For an analogy, your question is like me demanding that you provide me an example of a living dead person. If a species doesn’t die, it can’t be a transitional species.
That being said, we have plenty of examples of speciation. A cursory search of “speciation” will reveal literally thousands of examples.
Second, most (if not all) species currently alive are evolving to some extent. For example, 10,000 years ago, the average height of a human was 4 feet and 7 inches tall, lived only to be 20-30 years old, couldn’t digest milk, etc. Mankind is demonstrably different than it was 10,000 years ago.
Third, I accept evolution because it clearly happens. We see it in the world around us, we see it in the fossil records, we see it in genetics, and we see it in labs. Virtually 100% life scientists agree because the evidence is overwhelming. So, whether or not you understand the theory well enough to accept it is immaterial to me. As a scientist, I know (at least with scientific certainty) it happens based on rigorous studies and personal experience. As a non-scientist skeptic, you think it doesn’t happen because you are not educated on the subject and lack personal experience relevant to the subject.
The fact that you are so comfortable just declaring virtually all scientists are wrong while clearly putting 0 effort into knowing the scientific evidence is very troubling.
That being said, no. I never said Milton is wrong because he does not present his sources. I say Milton is wrong because I know more about evolutionary biology than him, and I know for a fact that his arguments are wrong. The fact that he doesn’t even know (or care) to cite sources in a way that will allow for people to verify his claims is just evidence that he is both an idiot and a hack.