Chapter 1
A National Treasure
By the river Thames at Teddington, west of London, straggles a cluster of
nondescript factory buildings that seem an unlikely home for a national
treasure. Yet the buildings are of national importance to everyone in the United
Kingdom because of a few pieces of metal kept there.
The buildings are those of the National Physical Laboratory, and the pieces
of metal are platinum standards kept at strictly regulated temperature in
air-conditioned chambers to act as the indisputable authority for Britain's
national weights and measures, the pound and the kilogram, the yard and the
meter.
Paradoxically, these standards are never used for everyday purposes. Noone
goes to Teddington to measure out a meter of cloth or a foot of parcel string.
But their mere existence - unchanging and unchallengeable - is the nation's
guarantee that standards exist: that should it ever be necessary, it is
theoretically possible to make a physical comparison with the accepted measure
and say with absolute certainty that the subject under test either is or is not
of the stated weight or length.
It's not easy for members of the public to visit the National Physical
Laboratory, because it is a busy government research establishment and the
repository of many secrets. But it is certainly possible. Those fortunate enough
to be given access to the NPL will see the famous platinum kilogram standard and
the atomic clock that is the authority for Greenwich Mean Time. You can check
your wristwatch and, in principle at least, check up on your 12-inch ruler and
the weights of your kitchen scales.
A few miles to the east of Teddington stands the very much more imposing
structure of the British Museum of Natural History, famous to generations of
schoolchildren for its dinosaurs and dramatic reconstructions of the Earth's
geological history. This building, too, is the repository of a 'national
standard' but one that is not on display in a glass case and that has proved
very much more difficult to track down. The museum is one of the world's primary
sources or authorities for the theory of evolution by natural selection, the
theory that is taught in schools and universities the world over: a kind of
headquarters for Darwinism.
Like millions of people, I have visited the museum many times to stare in
wonder at its contents. But I have been unable to see with my own eyes the
decisive evidence for the general theory of evolution. I have been able to see
many marvels and to study mountains of evidence: the Geological Column that
reconstructs the geological and biological history of the Earth; the dinosaur
skeletons and myriad other fossils; marvels like the skeleton of Archaeopteryx,
seemingly half bird, half reptile; the reconstructed evolution of the horse
family. But unlike its counterpart at Teddington, the museum is unable to
exhibit the unchallengeable authority that conclusively demonstrates that
evolution by natural selection has taken place and is established as fact.
This is very far from saying that scientists have failed to make the case for
Darwinian evolution. On the contrary, no rational person can visit this or any
other Natural History Museum and not be deeply impressed by the evidence that
has been painstakingly assembled: evidence of historical development over
geological time, of similarity of anatomical structure in many different
species, of change and adaptation to changing environments. But, frustratingly,
even with all this evidence, it is impossible for the genuinely objective person
to say, 'Here is the conclusive scientific proof that I have been looking for.'
My disappointment among the glass cabinets of Kensington was the beginning of
a ten-year journey to try to find that conclusive proof. It has been an Odyssey
that has taken me far both geographically and in time. As a science reporter I
am used to beating a path from library to museum to laboratory and back again.
Now I had to become a scientific historian as well and even a scientific
detective to find the evidence I needed to examine afresh. That evidence is of
many different kinds and is found in incongruous and often strange settings: in
remote quarries and coastal cliffs; in libraries and museums and even in bank
vaults. Some can be seen only with the aid of the electron microscope and some
has proved not to exist at all.
But although this book has taken me a decade or more to research, my
immediate reason for writing it is a simple personal dilemma. My daughter Julia
has just celebrated her ninth birthday. She is quickly developing an interest in
natural history and like many nine-year-olds is an avid fossil collector and
dinosaur-spotter. She is beginning to have serious science lessons at her school
and is just now being introduced to the idea that life on Earth has arisen
spontaneously from a common ancestor in the remote past and that all the species
of animal and plant alive today have evolved from earlier species. Over the next
ten years, she will be taught that the mechanism governing this process is that
of genetic mutation and natural selection - the neo-Darwinist or synthetic
theory of evolution.
The fact that Julia is beginning to absorb the general theory of evolution
has been giving me sleepless nights. Is Julia being taught the truth? Or is she
- and are we - being seriously misled?
Let me make it clear that my doubts about the general theory of evolution do
not arise from religious objections. I want my daughter to have access to the
fruits of scientific enquiry, whatever those findings should prove to be. But I
am seriously concerned, on purely rational grounds, that generations of school
and university teachers have been led to accept speculation as scientific theory
and faulty data as scientific fact; that this process has accumulated a
mountainous catalog of mingled fact and fiction that can no longer be contained
by the sparsely elegant theory; and that it is high time that the theory was
taken out of its ornate Victorian glass cabinet and examined with a fresh and
skeptical eye.
My doubt about the theory arises from a number of sources. It comes first and
most importantly from the inability of Darwinists to pass the simple test
described earlier; to show a thinking member of the public conclusive scientific
evidence to substantiate the theory, in the same way that the National Physical
Laboratory can demonstrate physical constants, the College of Surgeons can
demonstrate the circulation of the blood, or the Greenwich Observatory can
demonstrate the expanding universe.
Second, it comes from the world of scientific investigation itself, a world
that I write about in my job as a science reporter and where many discoveries
that have an important bearing on evolution theory have been made in the last
two decades, but have received little publicity.
Third, and perhaps most eloquently, it comes from the disarmingly direct
questions of a nine-year-old child: Where did we come from? How old is the
Earth? Do the butterfly and the elephant really have a common ancestor?
Today, the neo-Darwinist or synthetic theory of evolution enjoys unrivalled
prominence as the only rational theory to account for the origin of species and
the evolution of all creatures including humankind. It is the only theory of
evolution taught in schools, colleges, and universities. It is presented as fact
in museum displays, lectures, and publications. A few controversial points are
referred to in museum publications and biology textbooks, but these are viewed
as peripheral controversies, whose outcome cannot alter the basic truth revealed
by neo-Darwinism. The synthetic theory is universally taken as having been
confirmed in all its main essentials - only a few isolated details remaining to
be tidied up by specialists in esoteric disciplines such as molecular biology.
The teachings of this theory are familiar to everyone educated in a western
country in the past fifty years. The Earth is of immense antiquity, formed 4,600
million years ago: life on this planet is also of very great age; emerging
spontaneously in ancient seas 3,000 million years ago; and the great variety of
species that exist today are all descended from one or a few primitive organisms
evolved in those ancient oceans, by a process of random genetic mutation coupled
with natural selection.
These ideas are the cornerstones of modern historical geology and of our
contemporary world view, as familiar to the elementary school pupil as to the
postgraduate student of biology or geology.
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To most students, teachers, and even some scientists it will come as a
surprise to learn that recent research into the age of the Earth has produced
evidence that our planet could be much younger than had previously been thought:
existing methods of geochronometry such as uranium-lead decay and radiocarbon
assay have been found to be deeply flawed and unreliable; the extent of genetic
change by selection has been found experimentally to be limited; bacteria can be
induced in the laboratory to mutate in a direction that is beneficial to them -
without generations of natural selection; only a catastrophist model of
development can account for important Earth structures and processes such as
continental drift and most fossil-bearing rock formations - most of the Earth's
surface in fact. These major discoveries have had profound consequences for the
neo-Darwinist theory of evolution, yet few of them have found their way into the
public domain, still less into school or university textbooks or museum
displays.
This book attempts to make accessible, and put into context, these new
discoveries to enable nonscientists to evaluate for themselves the status of the
general theory of evolution and the new light cast on existing theories by the
latest discoveries.
A number of books attacking the neo-Darwinist theory - and evolution in
general - have been published in recent decades by religious writers seeking to
promulgate biblical creation as an alternative viewpoint, and I should make it
clear at the outset that this book is not in any sense a contribution to
creationist literature, nor does it represent the creationist viewpoint
(although some creationist objections to neo-Darwinism that have a basis in
scientific research are included here).
Because some of the scientific matters discussed in this book are highly
controversial, I have included references to original studies wherever
necessary. However, responsibility for the conclusions drawn from these sources
is mine alone.
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