Tag Archives: origin of species charles darwin

Global Warming: Darwinian Evolution in Humans?

12 May

By Mike McGee

Most scientists have a difficult time looking at the possibility of the Darwinian evolution of the physical form and structure of human beings in responses to challenges from the environment. We can easily see how a plant or a lower animal can alter its structure and very being, or become extinct either locally or widespread, under evolutionary pressures exerted over only a very few years.

Global warming is almost certainly a product of the increase in the population of the earth from 2 billion to 7.5 billion souls in the span of less than a century. It is mathematically definite that the increase in body heat and cooking fires and auto engine heat alone will raise the natural planetary temperature to some degree. Add on factories and HVAC and land denuded for agriculture or meat, and other things needed to sustain a larger population, and there is even more natural and inevitable pressure increasing the planetary temperature. Continue reading →

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Creationism or Evolution in the Public Schools? Both

9 Mar

From www.mcgeepost.com .Copyright © 2013 Michael H. McGee. All rights reserved. Please feel free to share or re-post all or part non-commercially, hopefully with attribution.

These comments relate to some of my previous blogs. In Charles Darwin and Geological Time I asserted that the modern concept of evolution is a completely warped version of what Darwin had in mind. I made it clear that we have no reliable evidence to look into the geological deep past of the earth. Stories such as that the earth is 4.6 billion years old, or that dinosaurs ruled for 65 million years, are the products of the imagination of scientists who were willing to make up things in order to explain the origin of the earth; whereas Darwin stuck with facts in explaining the Origin of Species, and he got it right.

In Albert Einstein and Space-Time, I challenged the reality of many of the astronomical and cosmological “discoveries” of the twentieth century. I stated that mathematics has been used by scientists as a substitute for observed evidence. Using only the abstractions of math, these scientists have constructing a fabricated history of the universe began from a Big Bang singularity 13.77 billion years ago. We cannot know what is going on beyond our solar system with any certainty, let alone the certainty of Received Truth as given us by our cosmologists.

I find that these very entertaining so-called scientific facts are no more real than the myth of the Minotaur. Much less entertaining is the reality that all our students from the first grade through post-graduate degrees are being indoctrinated on a daily basis that these fabricated myths are in fact the reality of our planet and the universe.

One way to give more incentive to students is to stop teaching science as entertainment and myth, and substitute hard facts in the place of the current wasteland of vast delusions. Young people can tell when they’re being conned by the educational system, even as early as the primary grades. They will not find their passion for science easily in an educational system which seems to be pushing them toward things they at some level see as not making any sense; which will not make any difference in how people live, work, and make progress. Will the Big Bang help us make progress on clean-fuel automobiles? No, it will not.

For example, the debate on whether we should teach Creationism or Evolution, or both, in the public schools, has raged like a wildfire for a hundred years, confusing and turning off generations of otherwise eager students. Here’s a great compromise: teach neither.

There is absolutely no question that the account of creation in the Judeo-Christian Bible is entirely theological and cultural. It is not science, and was never intended to be science. Theology deserves great respect on its own terms. It has no place being taught in our public schools as a scientific explanation of our origins.

The authors of Genesis never set out to be paleontologists or cosmologists. Giving them status as scientists does nothing to forward either theological or scientific inquiry. Further, at least here in the US we are constitutionally prohibited from teaching theology in the public schools.

The problem is that the scientists who have magnified Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories to great extremes are also basically promoting a theological concept. Scientists tend to treat Darwin’s books as inspired writing, and they make Darwin the prophet. One reason the current interpretations of his writings are theological is that we must rely solely on faith and belief in order to accept them, which is no different than the teachings of the Book of Genesis.

In its most extreme version, the theology of evolution states that there was a random big bang explosion fourteen and a half billion years ago, and the way we are today is the result of totally random mutations occurring over that fourteen and a half billion years, and we are absolutely nothing more than the sum of our randomly selected parts. There is no God, and materialism is the highest good. One must accept such an explanation of the world based on belief, as an act of faith. The high priests of science urge us to have faith in their belief about the world, and ceaselessly condemn those who have any other view of the world.

The US Constitution should also prevent the teaching of evolution as a basis for creation. It is not science. Evolution as now preached is a religion of materialistic self-determination, with just as much mystical teaching as any other religion. The denial of God is as entirely theological as the affirmation of God. There is no ontological difference in the two points of view.

One of the publications which blatantly promotes the theology of evolution and space-time is Scientific American. I really like the magazine and just renewed for another three years. Their reports on scientific progress are great. I read their more speculative forays to remind myself how very mystical science has become.

For example, in their most recent issue a respected astronomer says that computer simulations show that the Milky Way galaxy is expanding by gobbling up smaller nearby galaxies “If the [computer] simulations are right, then ancient halo stars and dwarf galaxy stars should [both] be made from the same stuff.” She compares the chemical composition of these two entities as shown on her instruments, and finds they are the same. This proves, she says, that the Milky Way is gobbling up smaller galaxies.

I say that this proves only (1) that the needles on the measuring instruments she uses are moving in a predictable manner based on the design of the instrument; or (2) that what she is seeing in her telescope is the dust cloud hovering over the Atacama Desert; or (3) that computer simulations have nothing to do with the actual behavior of galaxies. (I call the first category of explanation “intelligent design.” Yes, intelligent beings designed her measuring instruments.)

I want to make it clear that I’m not singling out this particular teacher-researcher. I’m sure there are at least a thousand other articles published which have made similar definitive findings based on unsupportable assumptions. None of these researchers show respect for the Scientific Method, which has brought so much progress to our world.

And from the third grade on up through the most advanced doctoral programs students are being taught this stuff that makes no sense to them. And most students have built-in bullshit detectors: the innate ability to know at least at a subconscious level when they’re being fed ideas lacking in substance or real value.

It’s great entertainment to teach students from the third grade on up about fierce velociraptors and the smiley-faced brontosaurus, and about the dramatic fury of black holes and the big bang, and that we are descended from artistically rendered cavemen. But it’s not science. It’s a mass delusion, and the really bright students can see right through it. Why should they want to pursue a career in the science of building an even higher mound of BS from the delusions of the past and present?

In science, as in other areas of life, we should seek to teach wisdom to those whom we have the high privilege of instructing. In his 1984 book From Knowledge to Wisdom, Nicholas Maxwell, University College London, defined wisdom as “The desire, the active endeavor, and the capacity to discover and achieve what is desirable and of value in life, both for oneself and for others.”

Mass delusions exaggerating what science can tell us about our world and our universe are not wise. And those who encourage the next generation to build on and perpetuate these mass delusions are not wise teachers and are not teaching wisdom. Where is the fundamental value and wisdom in learning the false myths of geological time and cosmological space-time?

What can we teach in place of Evolution and Creationism? Well, we can teach that different cultures have different creation stories. In the dominant cultures in the United States the creation story is the narrative found in Genesis, and this creation story has shaped our thinking about the world. It has made us bold and creative: the people of both the Old and the New Testament are the Chosen People. The creation stories from other cultures shape the thinking of these peoples in this way and that. Creation stories have value in telling us about the values and history of both ancient and modern civilizations.

We can teach that Charles Darwin changed science forever in 1859 by among other things refuting the then prevailing belief that all organic species were separately created in their present form at the relatively recent beginning of the earth. He also proved beyond doubt that mutability was a primary characteristic of living organisms, including human beings.

What he taught us in these areas has been subsequently confirmed by DNA science. What he taught us has been actively used by scientists to greatly benefit the planet by the cross-breeding cattle and other livestock, and hybridization of wheat, rice, and other crops, to have higher yields and more elastic climatic ranges. It has been invaluable in studying the mutations of disease-causing organisms. Each of these advances has great value to all of us.

Teachers, stop messing with the minds of your students in your science classrooms! Put away your funky dinosaur pictures and your charts of the universe, and use this time to teach basic and advanced science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

“We don’t need no education…. We don’t need no thought control…. No dark sarcasm in our classrooms…. Hey! Teachers! Leave those kids alone!” Pink Floyd.

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Charles Darwin and Geological Time, Part Two

14 Feb

From www.mcgeepost.com .Copyright © 2013 Michael H. McGee. All rights reserved. Please feel free to share or re-post all or part non-commercially, hopefully with attribution.

Now I am going to shift gears and get into how Charles Darwin’s almost totally factual and accurate observations on the Theory of Evolution have themselves “evolved” into a fantasy world of mass delusion and science fiction which does not deserve the name of Evolution.

For this section of the story I will stick to the science of the nineteenth century, ending in 1906. After that date things changed, yet as I will show in later posts, remained the same fantasies as before 1906, with “Evolution” becoming a concept which Charles Darwin would never even recognize were he to come back and look at it now.

In Great Britain and continental Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, well before Darwin proposed his theory of Evolution, there was already underway a scientific movement to examine the “geological record” and from doing so compute the great age of the earth. Darwin’s colleague and friend Sir Charles Lyell was one of the prime movers of the “scientific” analysis and examination of the rocks on the surface of the earth with the intention of making statements about how old these rocks were.

There were many scientists involved in this effort, creating the academic disciplines of Geology and Paleontology. I will pick on Charles Lyell since he is a good example of the men who created mass delusions about the age of the earth, which were just as un-provable as the competing theological mass delusions including that the earth was created in 4004 BC.

lyell 2 Sir Charles Lyell

The mass delusions created by Sir Charles Lyell and his colleagues and successors persist until today as scientific fact, and they are just as un-provable and inaccurate now as they were then. It is time now to dispel the mass delusions of geological time and paleontologists which are held as gospel by our scientists even now, and are just as inaccurate and fantastic as the mass delusion dispelled by Darwin that all organic beings were created by God at one time in the exact form as they now exist.

I am giving here an historical narrative which I obviously obtained from published sources. In this blog I will not overcome the reader with masses of footnotes, yet I will say that I have the references for each of the facts stated, and I believe that my facts are accurate.

Sir Charles Lyell’s work generated the field of stratigraphy, which judges the age of a rock from its placement within a visible pile of rocks. In exposed areas of rock, the newest rocks are on the top and the oldest are on the bottom. In 1828 and1829, long before Darwin became active, Lyell traveled with Roderick Murchison, another prominent geologist, to the Auvergne volcanic district of France, and to Italy, to examine visually some large rock faces.

In these areas of Europe he concluded that the recent strata (rock layers) could be categorized according to the number and proportion of fossil specimens encased within. Based on this concept, he proposed dividing the Tertiary period into three parts, which he named the Pliocene, Miocene, and Eocene. He also renamed the traditional Primary, Secondary and Tertiary periods (now called eras) to Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic, which nomenclature was gradually accepted worldwide over the next few years.

Sir Charles Lyell and other geologists of the time stated as a scientific fact, based on their observations of visible rock strata, that the combined Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic time periods reached back in time 550 million years, not only in Europe but world-wide. This scientific canon was accepted throughout the nineteenth century, and is still accepted as such today. Yet we are confining ourselves to the nineteenth century.

Now how is it that by observing a few visible rock faces, anyone can say that this or that piece of rock is 550 million years old? How can we even say that it is a million years old, or give any age at all for a common piece of rock; or know whether the rocks in one place on earth are the same or a different age as those in another? Remember, there were absolutely no scientific instruments available which would provide any semblance whatsoever for a rational basis for assigning a particular age to any piece of rock.

Sir Charles Lyell did his own observations, and in addition he reviewed articles written by other geological explorers in different parts of the world, and had conversations with his colleagues who had also gone out and looked at rocks. This is how he came to the conclusion that his aging of the earth was valid worldwide and could be determined with great precision.

Now let’s do a thought experiment to see if the observations of Lyell and his colleagues were detailed enough, and went deep enough, to decide on the age of the planet back to at least 550 million years. You’ll have to trust me on these computations. I researched from at least thirty sources to get these numbers. I have the references on my computer, yet I will not deluge you with footnotes. If anyone disagrees with my numbers, please show me and I’ll revise them. I’m fairly sure they are correct, though.

The total cubic volume of the planet earth is 38.3 septillion cubic feet, from the surface to the center.

The total land surface area of the earth is 57,788,200 square miles. We will reduce that surface area by regions which were in the nineteenth century (and are now today) largely geologically unexplored; which are Antarctica, remote parts of Siberia, the Northwest Territories, and Greenland. With these reductions we find that the total land surface area of the earth which is able to be explored is 48,852,200 square miles.

We can very generously for purposes of argument assume that in nineteenth century half this area had been explored to a depth or height of one-half mile. This comes to 12,213,050 square miles of land surface at one-half a cubic mile of depth, which results in 1.7 quintillion cubic feet of land surface which was capable of being explored in the nineteenth century (and today as well). The 1.7 quintillion cubic feet also works out to 1.7 quintillion linear feet if measured only on the surface of each of those cubic feet.

Now remember that Sir Charles Lyell and his colleagues were observing these areas by sight only and basing their scientific conclusions on the history of the world on what they saw with their eyes. To be generous let’s assume that one man can hold in his vision maybe twenty linear feet of space side to side at any one time. So in order to view the whole linear surface of the earth would require the visual examination of 85 quadrillion separate views with the eyes. Lyell and his colleagues would have had to be very fast men to view even a small portion of the surface of the earth.

Of course what I’m saying is that Lyell’s conclusions, after observing such a beyond-minuscule sample of the rocks of the earth, without any instrument other than the eyes, would not pass any test of scientific reliability as far as I can see. He has no basis whatsoever to form any conclusions whatsoever about the nature of any of the rocks other than those actually seen, or about the age of the earth. The conclusions drawn by Lyell and his colleagues were based entirely on their imagination. There is no other explanation for what these men did with the paltry amount of information they had.

The mass delusions created by such men as Sir Charles Lyell were based on the magnificent intellectual arrogance of the nineteenth century British and European geological and paleontological researchers, who deeply desired to make a scientific discipline out of what was actually pure speculation. Some of these “scientists” may have even been jealous of the truths propounded by Darwin, and were desperate to come up with some “truths” of their own, even if they had to fudge the facts a lot.

How did Sir Charles Lyell and his colleagues in the 1820’s even come up with the concept of geological time in the millions of years arise? Likely we will never know. Yet please allow me to speculate on the subject. Even Sir Isaac Newton was a mystic, as were many of the British thinkers who followed. One mystical idea which was brought back to England by merchants of The British East India Company from the 17th century onward included the principles of Hinduism, including a belief in reincarnation over millions of lifetimes.

In fact the Hindu scriptures, which were written over 2,000 years ago, specifically refer to the earth being 4.5 billion years old. Other parts of these ancient scriptures refer to periods of time describing the birth and expansion of the universe equaling 311.04 trillion years. I got these numbers from an uncertain source, and so I’ll give you this source since I have no independent information on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrics_of_time_in_Hinduism

Here once again I’m speculating. Sir Charles Lyell was a practicing lawyer for a few years before turning full-time to geology. He probably met and worked with merchants returning from India who brought with them stories of the Hindus and their concepts of time. He was a very gregarious man so he would have drawn from his clients all the stories of their days in India. So his thinking may have been expanded to include the ancientness of time by hearing of the Hindu concepts of time.

I find no evidence that Lyell himself was a mystic, yet the times he lived in in England were rife with extravagant mystical beliefs, which included spiritualism and past-life regression and words from the departed. He probably believed he had discovered something in the Hindu concepts. All he had to do was to wrap this mystical time line in a flashy packaging, in a way which would ensure its distribution throughout the world. If that’s what he did, it worked.

It bears repeating what Charles Darwin, a fervent and accurate observer of the natural world, said about the age of the earth:

But we continually overrate the perfection of the geological record…. We continually forget how large the world is, compared with the area over which our geological formations have been carefully examined…. It seems to me to be about as rash to dogmatize on the [ancient] succession of organic forms throughout the world, as it would be for a naturalist to land for five minutes on a barren point in Australia, and then to discuss the number and range of its productions…. We should not forget that only a small portion of the world is known with accuracy.

So it is not just me saying that the observations of geological scientists are rash and inaccurate. I am supported in this proposition by one of the greatest natural scientists of the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin.

The conclusions of these eminent nineteenth century geological scientists were accepted in the general culture as well as in the learned community as being valid and accurate. The “scientist” would simply look at a rock and then make a pronouncement as to how many millions of years ago this fossil was alive or this sediment was solidified. People wanted to believe we could see millions or billions of years into the past. They did then, and they still do now, just as people believe they can see their destiny in an astrological chart prepared by a Trained Astrologer.

It was almost inevitable that after 1859 these imaginers of the “geological record” and “paleontological dating” jumped onto the Darwinian bandwagon of evolution with a passion. They took Darwin’s work and twisted it in the latter part of the nineteenth century to mean that evolution proves conclusively that the earth is at least 500 million years old (and at least 4.3 billion years old as is now imagined). Our scientists of today are still riding on the horse stolen from Darwin, and they are still horse thieves, with no use other than to be thrown into a scientific jail.

In spite of the metaphor I just used, I’m not implying that any of these earnest men and women of science are bad people. They were and are doing the best they could with what they had. All around them the scientific establishment had incorporated so much fiction into the scientific canon with which they had been educated. It’s no wonder they had (have) no eyes to see or ears to hear the unrealistic qualities of what they’d (they’ve) been taught; and of what they were (are) passing on as teachers to the next generation.

Human consciousness must have its delusions, superstitions and creation myths. In wiping away a very dysfunctional older set of superstitious delusions, Darwin unintentionally created a hole in the ever-questing human imagination. This hole was filled by others, with the “most extremely modern views” of the nineteenth century, the new mass delusion. These men of science tied the mutability of species, including humans, with the developing myth of “geological time” (which was later morphed by other scientists to include “space-time”).

In so doing, they planted and perpetuated a new set of superstitions and gave them the credibility of Science. These new mass delusions persist until the present day. These mass delusions will continue to exist until someone comes up with a better set of concepts which will move hard scientific progress forward to the next level.

Fortunately, the set of geological and paleontological delusions which raged throughout the nineteenth century, and have continued until now, has generated much progress and done very little actual harm. The time is upon us, though, to consider the idea that progress in science is being impeded by the fantastical amount of time very brilliant scientists are spending on the delusional “evolutionary” thinking of the present day. The best efforts of these highly educated and motivated individuals are needed in other areas if science is to move to the next level.

So, it’s time to create a new description of time and geological age, one which will supplant the superstitions of the present and allow further material progress to move to the next level. The theory I propose is that we cannot know the age or the history of the planet Earth farther back than carbon dating allows, or any of its creatures including man any further back than the written record allows. (Further, we cannot know what is happening outside of our solar system, which is as far as we can see with any reliability. To be described later.) Further, in our lifetimes we will likely never know any of these things, no matter how hard we try.

Let me make it clear that I am not saying that the earth is not 500 million, or 4.5 billion, years old. It may be. The earth is probably at a minimum millions of years old. The point is that we literally don’t know the age of the earth, and we don’t know any timeline of the earth’s development. Those who claim we do know are engaged in delusional mythmaking and cannot claim any scientific accuracy for their claims. There is simply no evidence laying on the surface of the earth which can give any clues as to the actual age of the earth or how it came into being.

The advantage of new thinking is that our scientists can stop with their mystical speculations on the distant origins of man and other species and vastly remote geological time, and focus their energies solely on things which can be known by observation and experiment. With all this scientific energy focused on the material world which we can see, hear, and touch, there will be many scientific breakthroughs which now can only be imagined.

I’m not suggesting a return to the doctrine of logical positivism, which says that what is not verifiable by experiment is meaningless. I’m saying that men and women of genius often think they can understand things that are not understandable. I’m saying we should not spend our scientific time on things we can never know no matter how hard we try. I’m saying that two areas, the age of the earth and the age and structure of the universe, are unknowable at this time. Anyone who says they can scientifically describe these two items or any part thereof is participating in a mass superstitious delusion which impedes clear thinking.

For example, what if all the scientists who now spend their time concocting cosmological and geological fantasies were to focus their time and energy on how to actually feed the exploding population of our globe? What if all the scientists who now spend their time sitting at telescopes or digging and age-testing geological and fossil specimens were to focus their time and energy on how to locate supplies of minerals and ores which are needed in commerce, and increase the supply of fuels from the ground; and eventually meet the actual energy needs of our globe in a sustainable and non-polluting manner?

So while it is true that all these speculating and myth-creating scientists are doing no harm by their fantastic theorizing, there actually may be better ways they could spend their time, which could benefit all of us residents of the third planet from the Sun.

I believe that one of the reasons fewer American students are going into scientific careers is that at some level they can see that they will be binding themselves to careers as the makers of myths and practitioners of cosmological or geological mass delusion. In graduate schools most of these students are force-fed a diet of unreality, and required to buy into it in order to receive the coveted degrees necessary for them to work at the top levels in their fields or to become university professors, researchers, and industrial scientists.

In developing my theory I don’t want to underestimate the power of creative thinking or metaphysical musings, both of which are absolutely essential to the improvement of our knowledge of the world and all that’s in it. What I don’t like is imaginary fantasy stories, and mysticism masquerading as hard scientific truth.

To summarize, in the nineteenth century there was absolutely nothing tangible other than subjective visual location on which the dating of the age of rocks was based. A noble man of science would look at a rock outcropping, stroke his chin in contemplation, and then deliver an unshakable opinion as to the age of the rocks. This opinion would become scientific truth. (Most of these early “scientific truths” are still held to be the scientific truth today, almost without revision.)

To paraphrase the late comedian Fred Allen, “Nineteenth century geologists were people who counted the grains of sand in their bird cage and then tried to tell you how much sand there was on the beach.” All over the world geologists are still doing the same thing today.

When I was young I collected rock and fossil specimens of all kinds, and I still have some of them. So I know the feel of a rock in my hand, and the digging into the side of a mountain cliff. I also know that there was nothing written in the side of a cliff, or on a rock in my hand, which would have told me the geological age of the rock, or the fossil specimen, in my hand.

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Charles Darwin and Geological Time, Part One

8 Feb

From www.mcgeepost.com .Copyright © 2013 Michael H. McGee. All rights reserved. Please feel free to share or re-post all or part non-commercially, hopefully with attribution.

In this series of blogs I intend to examine the stories created in the imagination of scientists to explain the creation and development of the world. It’s necessary to take it in parts, starting with the concept of geological time which was developed by eminent scientists in the nineteenth century, then moving to the creation stories developed in the twentieth century and to the present regarding geological time. It’s a long story and in order to see how things really are it’s necessary to start at the beginning. So bear with me. I’ve tried to make the story as entertaining as possible, while adhering closely to scientific fact and the scientific method.

I am not a scientist, yet I’ve studied science all my life, throughout my career as a lawyer and in the last few years since I have given up the practice of law. Even though not a scientist, I am an expert, from thirty years of law practice, in analyzing evidence and developing proof of a disputed principle or point from a given set of facts. I bring this well-developed strength to my analysis.

As a young man I was an avid rock collector and would dig into the sides of cliffs with a rock hammer to find specimens and layers of rocks. So I’m not entirely ignorant of the science of geology.

Here I will develop proof of my thesis that the concept of geological time is a product of the use of flawed methods of science. The geological myth of the creation of the earth 4.5 billion years ago, and the stages through which the earth has passed from then until now, is purely a myth, with no more provable validity than the Biblical creation myth, or the Asian myth of the earth being supported on the back of a giant turtle. Let me show you how this is so.

Charles_Darwin_1854 Charles Darwin in 1856.

I am first going to tell anew the story of Charles Darwin and his masterful Theory of Evolution. I will emphasize some parts of his story which have perhaps fallen out of favor in science. My information comes directly from reading Darwin’s lengthy works from start to finish. I want you to see Darwin as Darwin saw himself, as an angelic apostle of truth who disregarded the superstitions of organized religion in order to set right the boundaries of our earth and its productions.

While bringing forth his theories of evolution, he at the same time set the boundaries for the earth sciences and geological time which are still valid today. Bear with me as over several posts I lay out these standards and limitations for the study of geological time and paleontology. Darwin’s original and quite sound theories have been hijacked and distorted by geologists and paleontologists for their own ends. Darwin’s almost totally factual and accurate observations have themselves “evolved” into a fantasy world of delusion and science fiction which does not deserve the name of Evolution.

Darwin in 1859 dispelled the mass delusion that all organic forms were formed by God exactly as they exist and are not subject to change. Those who were his contemporaries and who followed throughout the nineteenth century and even to the present, though, created another mass delusion: that the age of the earth is 4.5 billion years, and that the age of various portions of the earth can be determined by the visual observation of rocks on the surface of the earth, or, in the twentieth century, by running simple radiometric tests on rocks on the surface of the earth.

It is time for the mass delusion created after 1859 to be uncovered and tossed into the dust bin of history. It is time that we see the mass delusion of geological time for what it is: a structure created solely from the imagination of men who believed in nothing but their own infallibility. These were good men and true; so were the 19th century creationists good men and true. Yet being good and true is not the same thing as being scientifically accurate and wise in the interpretation of data.

The uses to which this good man Darwin’s words have been put in the years from 1859 to the present are unprecedented in their inaccuracy and speculation. These alterations have supported the egotistical self-aggrandizement of many scientists who had less regard for the truth or accuracy of what they “discovered,” than that what they discovered would make them famous and world-renowned. As I said, they were not bad men, only good men who reached too far.

In 1859 when he published “The Origin of Species,” Charles Darwin did a great service to mankind. He wiped away hundreds of years of fantastic speculations on the nature of creation and opened up a magnificent new way of scientific analysis. Many of the actual physical science developments which have given us a better way of life have come about because Darwin wiped away massive and unsupportable superstitions which impeded clear thinking.

In his own words Darwin described the myth he effectively dismissed. “Until recently the great majority of naturalists believed that species were immutable productions, and had been separately created.” He proved beyond doubt that mutability was a primary characteristic of living organisms, including. He also wiped away the insupportable myth that all these immutable organic productions were created at the same time in 4004 BC. He dismissed the notion that “Man” was not an organic being like other plants and animals. He factually undermined the delusion of the time that Man was created whole and faultless in his present form, and has lived as the pinnacle of creation since this miraculous creation separate from the beasts.

In his first prominent popular work, The Voyage of the Beagle, which was made available to the public in about 1845, Charles Darwin demonstrated the characteristics which would propel him to world fame. One of these characteristics was his ability to write prose in a clear and transparent manner, with great emotion and poetic turns of phrase. His writing style was as timeless as that of Charles Dickens, and almost as modern as that of John Grisham.

The Voyage of the Beagle was a travelogue which recounted sights and deeds both daring and spectacular, and excited the imagination of the most common as well as the most educated reader. At the same time as he provided high entertainment, though, he regaled the reader with thousands of cultural and scientific facts and observations. He never pushed any scientific theory, yet it was obvious to the reader that the degrees of variety of plants, animals, rocks and humans were incredibly diverse at different places in the world. He actually had thousands of specimens and thousands of pages of notes to back up the descriptions in this book.

Another rather unique characteristic of Charles Darwin was that he was an extremely effective observer of nature, and would intently drill down to the very smallest point in any matter which caught his attention as a naturalist, seeking the factual evidence wherever it led. This ability to see all of the parts of a work of nature was evident in The Voyage of the Beagle, and was even more pronounced in each of his later works.

Darwin engaged is the finest application of the scientific method, and few scientists before him had maintained sufficient discipline to examine anything other than the larger picture. During the middle of the nineteenth century, Louis Pasteur was one of the few other natural scientists to make observations with the same level of commitment.  Darwin would dissect and pull apart everything down to the smallest blade of grass or the contents of a handful of sand. Thus he and men such as Louis Pasteur created a whole new paradigm for the scientific method, which has served mankind well ever since.

In his 1859 ground-breaking book The Origin of Species, Darwin was quite cautious about offending the prevailing religious opinions of the day. So he confined himself in this work to analyzing all organic living species other than Man. With this decision made, he pushed his arguments forward with an imposing and confident force, using the thousands of observations he’d made and specimens he’d examined, which he described as far too numerous to include in his book. Even so, he probably used in this 700-page work ten times as much data as was necessary to make his point that organic species were mutable; yet it was Darwin’s nature to collect and collate information all the way to the point of exhaustion. He rarely speculated about anything in these early works, letting the facts speak for themselves.

His beautifully poetic and transparent style of prose was also in full force as he plowed through the difficult feat of writing The Origin of Species. Every word is easy to read and understandable and flows with a rhythm much like a song. Throughout the work he never once made a wrong step or wrote a confusing or boring sentence. The style is, as I have said, comparable with the great authors such as Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, and John Grisham.

Only in Chapters 10, 11 and 12 did Darwin give any expression to speculation, when he wrote about the relationship of the geological or fossil record to the theory of natural selection. Here he was not speculating himself. He was attempting to engage in an acknowledgment of the speculations of the early nineteenth century geologists and paleontologists, most of whom were his friends. These men had constructed a definite geological history going back millions, even billions of years.

Darwin was too much of a gentleman to want to alienate his colleagues or debunk their theories, but he couldn’t help bringing his clear-thinking scientist’s soul to bear on the subject. In addition, he needed to make the simple point that the world was old and that species had evolved over a long period of time. He just hadn’t observed any facts showing how old the world was, only that it was old.

In damning his colleagues with faint praise, he let the reader know he didn’t think much of their very precisely drawn and fantastically ancient geological time periods. He reminds his reader that one Professor Ramsay claimed to have actually measured the thickness of rock crusts in Great Britain to a depth of almost fourteen miles. The irony in the description is thicker and deeper than the supposed fourteen mile hole in the earth’s crust, which is of course even now impossibility.

Here’s more of Darwin’s faint acknowledgment of the ancient geological periods which were being presented as facts by his colleagues, from The Origin of Species:

But we continually overrate the perfection of the geological record…. We continually forget how large the world is, compared with the area over which our geological formations have been carefully examined…. It seems to me to be about as rash to dogmatize on the [ancient] succession of organic forms throughout the world, as it would be for a naturalist to land for five minutes on a barren point in Australia, and then to discuss the number and range of its productions…. We should not forget that only a small portion of the world is known with accuracy.

And in another place in the same book:

I look on the geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept…. Of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines.

By readily admitting to the great antiquity of the earth, Darwin successfully refuted the then predominant creationists who spoke of 4004 BC as the beginning of time. Nevertheless, he correctly spoke of this antiquity in general terms. When getting specific he mostly referred to the periods as recent in time as the mastodons, which was about 14,000 years ago and could be confirmed by the presence of frozen animal specimens.

So Darwin was a man of science who proceeded based on observable facts, and he saw very few observable facts in the geological and paleontological speculations on ancient times which were in vogue in his day as proven fact. We will return to the subject of paleontology and the accuracy of the geological record after a few more useful digressions.

First, in his 1859 work, The Origin of Species, he avoided any discussion of the lineage and mutability of mankind. The principle was nevertheless implicit in the text, yet the connection was so subtle that the average Victorian would not make the intellectual leap (or get angry). The proven premise is that all organic beings are subject to change due to natural selection and evolution. Mankind is an organic being. Therefore mankind is subject to the same change as any pigeon or blade of grass. The logic is flawless, yet Darwin couldn’t bring himself to say it out loud.

When he finally found it necessary to publish The Descent of Man twelve years later in 1871, he admitted to having been studying the subject of the mutability of mankind since the 1840’s, yet had felt it was too controversial and uncertain to write about. When he finally did write, his prose was unusually turgid and quite boring, as though he was agitated, or too overly restrained, to reach the poetic high notes of his earlier works. It was difficult for him to assert that man was descended from the apes, even though he had good scientific proof that this was so.

He did, though, in this book, depart from his usual practice. There was a high degree of speculation in his discussions regarding the nature of the influences which may have brought man by natural selection from the stage of a beast to the present condition of humanity. It’s interesting to note that his strict scientific method based solely on observation largely deserted him when discussing the descent of himself and his fellow man.

Nevertheless, he did take pains to point out each instance where he was speculating or imagining as opposed to stating a known fact. And he continued to base most of his arguments on currently observable comparisons between savage societies and civilized man, and current comparisons between the structure and behavior of apes and the structure and behavior of man.

Once again, though, he correctly asserted that the geological record was too thin to make sweeping “genealogical” statements about the prehistoric descent of man in the far distant geological past. Once again, he was firmly in touch with reality, and rather intolerant of those who were not so grounded.

Darwin, as I said, was uncomfortable in his speculations about the origins of mankind, and he should have been, and he was. It was clear to him that mankind evolved from earlier mammalian forms of life, yet he couldn’t explain why mankind was endowed with a spirit and soul so conspicuously absent in the other plants and animals of the earth. We must remember that Darwin was an atheist, and as such was unable to admit that there was a time in the history of earth when mankind was touched with the spirit of God and humanity and self-awareness, and became something more than the other organic productions of the earth.

In part two of this essay I am going to shift gears and get into how Darwin’s almost totally factual and accurate observations have themselves “evolved” into a fantasy world of delusion and science fiction which does not deserve the name of Evolution.

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SIDEBAR COMMENT:

Please allow me to make a few comments which are not a part of the thesis of this series of essays, in the interest of full disclosure of my personal bias. I am a Christian and at the same time I am a great admirer of the original work of Charles Darwin. As a Christian, I believe that God did at some time in the recent history of the earth, perhaps in the last 14,000 years, endow mankind with a spirit which was wholly separate from the forms of the physically remote predecessor bodies described by Darwin. I also, along with most Christians and Jews, have a different interpretation of the Book of Genesis than that held by those creationists who insist that the world was formed in 4004 BC and that Adam was the first man.

The first part of the interpretation is to assume that the Biblical description of the seven days of creation are symbolic, in that they represent the various stages of the evolution of the earth over an unstated period of time up until the creation of mankind. If read with a clear eye, Genesis 1: 26-28 describes the creation of human beings of all kinds on the sixth day of creation: well before Adam was created. These human beings, male and female, were made in the image of God and were given dominion over the other creatures of the earth, and went forth and multiplied throughout the earth.

The seven days of Genesis clearly describe an evolution from fish and birds to plants to animals, all the way to the pinnacle of God’s creation, human beings, who resembled Him. Thus there was a recapitulation of a gradual increase in the species until the recent times when human beings were specifically endowed with the spirit of God. Except for his atheism, Darwin may in his works have been describing the book of Genesis in his Origin of the Species and The Descent of Man. The two are not entirely incompatible.

The creation of Adam and Eve in Chapter 2 of Genesis thus has nothing whatsoever to do with the “creation of human beings, male and female,” which was completed in Chapter 1 on the sixth day of the general creation. What the Bible seems to be doing in Chapter 2 and following was to create in Adam and Eve a special Chosen People, who were intended to put forth and represent the principle of one God all powerful, the Judeo-Christian God who carried through the entire Old Testament.

The connection of the Chosen People within the New Testament is gained by the recitation of the lineage of Jesus directly from Abraham, who was descended from Noah (Genesis 10 and 11), who was descended directly from Adam (Genesis 5). Thus the Judeo-Christian Bible is a description of the lives of the Chosen People. It is not a description of all human beings, who resembled God and peopled the whole earth, after God had animated all human beings with spirit and a soul.

The Bible was never meant to be a description of the progress of all of mankind. The various races and degrees of civilization of human beings were evolving at their own pace throughout the whole of the planet. What we have in the Bible is a record of the evolution of the Chosen People of the Judeo-Christian world, in which I and those around me live.

We know for sure that there were more creations in heaven and earth than the Judeo-Christian people. It is not good to be intentionally blind to the different peoples of the earth, and the differing ways which they picture God or do not picture a deity.

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