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Chapter 1, Note # 1 The account of Er is in Plato (1974 ed, 447)
on line 614b in the universal Stephanus notation. The reader should be
aware that the chapter headings and the italicized notes in the dialogues
have been added by the commentator and, therefore, are to be regarded as
opinions. The account of Er, for example, is found under the heading of
"myth", but Plato does not regard it as such and specifically says, "It
is not like Odysseus' tale to Alcinous" (p. 448).
Chapter 1, Note # 2 Bible resuscitations: 2 Kings 4:18-37; 2
Kings 13:20-21; Matthew 9:18-26; Luke 7:11-18; John 4:46-53; John 11:11-46;
Acts 9:36-43; and Acts 20:9-12.
Chapter 1, Note # 3 Belief in the supernatural presents no problem
to children, a fact well recognized by the adult population, which is seemingly
dedicated to filling the child's mind with unlikely stories of tooth fairies,
ghosts, and goblins. The unlikeliness of these stories is crucial. Taken
as representing the supernatural, the stories have to lose all credibility,
say, before high school, so that allusion to dimensions beyond the natural
can be met then with the greatest skepticism. Nevertheless, people have
an amazing resilience, and many still manage to retain a childlike curiosity
for things beyond the natural world.
Chapter 1, Note # 4 In his biography of Socrates, A.E. Taylor
(1975) says: "Socrates had heard a divine 'voice' since childhood and experience
showed him that neglect of its warnings commonly led to unpleasant consequences"
(p.45). "Convinced of the soul's immortality, Socrates believed he had
a mission to preach to all men the single duty of 'tending the soul' and
'making it as good as possible' " (p. 146).
Chapter 1, Note # 5 Plato's phrase (p.420, line 592b) reflects
his ideas of ideal forms in heaven and was expressed four hundred years
later by the writer of Hebrews (9:23).
Chapter 1, Note # 6 The translator (Plato 1974 ed., 41) comments
that the Republic is the temporal and only a shadow of the eternal. This
same thought is found in 2 Corinthians 4:18.
Chapter 1, Note # 7 In his introduction to The Republic (1974
ed.) the translator agrees that "Plato was not a good nineteenth century
liberal" (p. 51).
Chapter 1, Note # 8 The humanist Blackham (1976) writes, "The
thinking of Plato and Aristotle proved congenial to the eventual triumphant
Christian theologians established by the Roman State. The tradition established
by Democritus and Protagoras was anathema to the Christians.... From the
humanist point of view Plato is the enemy and Democritus ... is the champion"
(p. 105). The book is dedicated to Democritus and Protagoras.
Chapter 1, Note # 9 Young (1974) shows that historians Lynn White
and Arnold Toynbee have added the weight of scholarship to the accusation
that the Christian church is responsible for today's pollution. Young comments
that White's paper, presented to the American Association for the Advancement
of Science in 1966, may have been welcome to divert the blame for our ecological
crises from science to the church, but shows that the claims are unfounded.
Toynbee blames Judeo monotheism and Specifically Genesis 1:28 for the world's
ills and suggests the remedy lies in reverting from the Weltanschauung
of monotheism to the Weltanschauung of pantheism! Young points out that,
in the first place, polytheism and pantheism are not the same thing.
Chapter 1, Note # 10 Constantine, when preparing his troops for
the key battle for Rome at Milvian Bridge in A.D. 312, saw the cross of
Jesus superimposed over the evening sun. A voice, such as the one heard
by Socrates and by Saul on the road to Damascus spoke, saying, "In hoc
signo vinces"--In this sign you will conquer. He went into battle with
the sign, the cross, painted on the shields and won. The initial letters
of the Latin have been contracted to IHS and are often found appended to
the crucifix.
Chapter 1, Note # 11 Shotwell (1923) exposed Origen (A.D. 185-254)
as an early liberal among the fathers of the Church: "Interpretation of
the Scriptures by allegory is not, in Origen's eyes, an unwarranted liberty....
He not only denied the literal truth of much of Genesis and ... was a modern
among the moderns--many a sermon upon the reconciliation of science and
religion ... might be taken bodily from Origen" (p.292).
Chapter 1, Note # 12 Leonardo Bigollo Fibonacci was perhaps the
greatest mathematician of the Middle Ages. His name is associated principally
with the numerical sequence in which each succeeding term is the sum of
the two immediately preceding. Born in 1179, he traveled to Algiers and
from the Arabs learned the Hindu system of numerals from 1 to 9. He is
credited with having introduced these to Europe, where calculations were
still being made by the clumsy Roman numerals and Greek letters. The zero
was, however, purely an Arab device and was introduced to Europe as part
of the "Arabic" numeral system we use today.
Chapter 1, Note # 13 Thomas Aquinas wrote Summa Contra Gentiles,
(1258-60) as a theological defense of Christian doctrine against the
Jewish and Arab philosophers of the day. Aquinas wrote Summa theologica
(1265-74)
as a grand summary of all Christian doctrine. In it he claimed it was necessary
to subject Christian wisdom to the discipline of "the Philosopher", by
which he meant Aristotle. An English version of both works in summary form
may be found in Magill (1963).
Chapter 1, Note # 14 Wyclif (or Wycliffe) followers, known as
Wycliffites or Lollards--which may mean "mutterer" or "mumbler"--had by
1395 become an organized and well-supported group. They spread across Europe,
and a revival began in Czechoslovakia under Jan Hus. Persecution was directed
from Rome, and in England many Lollards were burned at the stake; Hus met
the same death at Constance in 1415.
Chapter 1, Note # 15 Campanella (1963) gives eleven arguments
for and against Galileo but finishes by refuting the idea that the earth
moves around a stationary sun. He cites the following Scriptures that were
seen to be violated by Galileo: Joshua 10:13; Judges 5:20; Psalm 93:1,
Psalm 104:5; Ecclesiastes 1:4-6; and Isaiah 38:8.
Chapter 1, Note # 16 Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, written
about 1300, consists of three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.
The latter-day Roman doctrine of Purgatory was fixed in the medieval mind
by Dante's poetic and imaginative capture of Latin scriptural interpretation,
and then secured visually in the Victorian mind by the Gustave Doré
engravings made in the 1860s to illustrate a republished edition of Dante's
work.
Chapter 1, Note # 17 The Dutch spectacle makers had invented
the "spy-glass" in 1608 and by means of a "newsletter", Galileo then constructed
several instruments of his own. He began observations in 1610 and studied
the movement of sunspots and the moon and discovered the four largest moons
of Jupiter. He reported these observations in The starry messenger (1611),
which is today regarded as a classic piece of scientific reporting. Continuing
his observations, Galileo published The assayer in 1623, in which
he pointed out that the three comets that had caused so much controversy
in 1618 had passed effortlessly through one "crystalline sphere" and into
the next, so that it was evident that the "spheres" were purely imaginary.
The hollow spheres had originally been conceived as a means of enabling
the planets, but principally the fixed stars, to rotate in unison about
a stationary earth. Even so, Galileo had only disproved the presence of
the spheres but had offered no proof for his argument for heliocentricity.
Interestingly, to this day, since there is no known stationary reference
point in space, absolute motion cannot be determined. Thus Galileo's and
subsequently our own view of the solar system is based less on fact and
more on what seems most rational.
The assayer expressed Galileo's
more rational view in a very complete way. It was this aspect that came
into conflict with the Church's theological view of the universe.
Chapter 1, Note # 18 Gutenberg's printing press was developed
about 1460. By 1480 the process was becoming "commercial", and the first
recorded biblical text to be printed was a Pentateuch in Hebrew at Bologna
in 1482. By 1497 a small "porn" market had evolved in the printing trade,
since it is on record that Savonarola introduced a feature to Florence's
religious festival that year to collect and burn "souvenirs of regretted
wickedness"--cards, dice, nude pictures, and spicy books such as the Decameron;
Savonarola
was burned at the stake for his efforts by a fanatical mob the following
year.
Chapter 1, Note # 19 Hermes Trismegistus of ancient Egypt set
out the philosophy that there is a harmony and correspondence among all
different kinds of manifestations in the universe--the circling of the
planets, the tides of the earth, the growth of vegetation, the lives of
animals and people. Discovery of the periodicities in nature was said to
indicate certain ratios found to be in harmony and believed to be under
the divine control of a universal music. These ratios lead, for example,
to a "sacred geometry" used by the Greek architects so that their temples
would resonate with the life forms of the universe and thus enhance life.
Some of the "dark practices" involved music based on the harmonies constructed
from the "sacred ratios" in order to receive knowledge of the secrets of
the universe.
Chapter 1, Note # 20 The classic work of Michelson and Morley
to measure the speed of light was carried out in 1887. D.C. Miller repeated
this work many times from 1902-26, confirming the work of 1887 and showing
that this does not support Einstein's theory of relativity reported in
1905. Miller presented the results to the American Physical Society on
December 1925, but from that day to this nothing has been done, and Polanyi
(1955) points out that every standard textbook con-tinues the myth that
the speed of light experiments confirm the theory of relativity.
Chapter 1, Note # 21 Webster (1924, 120) shows that Francis Bacon
had an influence among the Rosicrucians and was associated with freemasonry.
At that time, in the 1620s, both organizations were involved in some "dark
practices" not approved of by the church, and, as head of the church and
a strong Christian, James I would have had little choice but to terminate
Bacon; bribery was possibly the lesser charge.
Chapter 1, Note # 22 Brown (1977) states "the famous Cogito
ergo sum of Descartes was not a logical deduction that the person actually
exists from the fact of thinking, since the premise of the argument already
contained the conclusion. At its best it is an affirmation of personal
existence but not strictly proof. The argument is really saying the same
thing twice over in different words" (p. 488).
Chapter 1, Note # 23 The Greek Anaxagoras (about 500 B.C.) is
said to be the originator of the doctrine of dualism, which holds that
mind and matter exist as two distinct entities. Following its reintroduction
by Descartes and an understanding of the laws of conservation of mass,
of energy, and of momentum, the chief drawback of dualism is seen to be
the problem of how a non-physical entity, the soul, which has no mass,
can influence the body, which does have mass. Psychology has proposed a
number of alternative theories such as radical behaviorism, logical behaviorism,
and central-state identity, all of which totally rule out the existence
of the soul or spirit within man.
Chapter 1, Note # 24 Details of Rousseau's sordid sex life including
his exhibitionism are in Vol. 1 of his Confession, while the abandonment
of his children at the Paris Foundling Hospital is mentioned in Vol. 2,
pp. 74 and 89.
Chapter 1, Note # 25 The seven day week, so closely identified
with the first chapter of Genesis, has always been a source of irritation
to atheistic governments. The governments of France in 1793, of Russia
in 1918, and that of Sri Lanka during the 1960s all unsuccessfully tried
to change the seven day week.
Chapter 2, Note # 1 In fairness to Alfonso, King of Castille,
he made this remark after studying the earth-centered Ptolemaic solar system,
which was later shown by Copernicus and Galileo to be fundamentally wrong.
Chapter 2, Note # 2 Eighth line of the preface to the poem "Milton".
Chapter 2, Note # 3 A mechanical device found in 1902 by marine
archaeology at Antikythera, Greece, was discovered by gamma-ray techniques
in 1973 to be a mechanism of unbelievable sophistication containing an
epicyclic differential gear system. The mechanism was dated at 87 B.C.
and, thus, the differential gear that we find in the back axle of the automobile
today and which was believed to have been invented during the Industrial
Revolution for textile machines was actually known to the Greeks eighteen
centuries earlier.
Chapter 2, Note # 4 Remains of wet batteries were discovered
in 1939, by Wilhelm Konig, near Baghdad. It is believed that the batteries
were used for electroplating gold onto jewelry and were more than two thousand
years old; rediscovery of this process was not made until the eighteenth
century A.D.
Chapter 2, Note # 5 The extensive article by Wertime (1973) deals
with the controversy regarding the beginnings of iron smelting from ores.
Iron artifacts have been found which date as early as 2500 B.C. but this
is disturbing for the usual textbook sequence of Stone Age, Bronze Age,
and Iron Age. The author points out that the Black Sea coast is lined with
self-fluxing sands containing 77 percent magnetite, which could permit
smelting to be carried out at the unusually low temperature of 900°C.
Chapter 2, Note # 6 A 1967 investigation showed that a sophisticated
casting technique had been employed which it was believed had been developed
in the fourteenth century A.D. Although the horse had been dated at 470
B.C., because of the use of this casting technique, it was declared to
be a fake. In 1973 another investigation, using a recently developed thermoluminescence
technique for dating, showed without doubt that the horse was very ancient;
it has since been reinstated as genuine. The Greek casting technique was
evidently lost and only rediscovered in the fourteenth century. From Zimmerman
et al. (1974).
Chapter 2, Note # 7 According to Raven (1942), John Ray had a
distant though important influence on Charles Darwin. One of Ray's most
significant works was The Wisdom of God manifested in the works of Creation
published
in 1691 and republished in at least ten editions. This work departed from
the then traditional view of God held by the church in that although Ray
gave great respect to design in nature and to a Designer, he could not
accept the miraculous or the Genesis Flood (Raven p. 450). The theologian
William Paley borrowed extensively from Ray's Wisdom of God and
incorporated it into his Natural theology (1802), which Darwin read
and enjoyed so much as a student at Cambridge (see Chapter Five). Raven
concludes about Ray's Wisdom of God: "More than any other single
book it initiated the true adventure of modern science, and is the ancestor
of the
Origin of Species or of L'Évolution Creatrice."
(See Chapter Fourteen.)
Chapter 2, Note # 8 This is Osborn's (1929, 187) translation
of the Latin from Linnaeus'
Philosophia botanica, 1751. Other authors
translate slightly differently although with the same meaning, e.g. Barber
(1980, 52) and Himmelfarb (1968, 170).
Chapter 2, Note # 9 Himmelfarb (1968, 170) quotes Knut Hagberg's
Carl
Linnaeus (London: 1952, 197) who in turn quotes from Linnaeus'
Dissertation
on Perloris
(1744) to show that Linnaeus conceded that it was "possible
for new species to arise", and Himmelfarb adds that Linnaeus was held suspect
by orthodox Christians for saying so.
Chapter 2, Note # 10 Linnean Society. This spelling in preference
to Linnaean was officially adopted in 1802.
Chapter 2, Note # 11 Eulogy to Lamarck delivered to the French
Academy in 1832 by Cuvier: "A system resting on such foundations may amuse
the imaginations of a poet ... but it cannot for a moment bear the examination
of anyone who has dissected the hand, the viscera, or even a feather" (p.
47).
Chapter 2, Note # 12 In a footnote Weismann (1891) mentions Jewish
circumcision, then adds, "Among nations which practice circumcision as
a ritual, children are sometimes born with a rudimentary prepuce [foreskin],
however rather extensive statistical investigation has shown that this
does not occur more frequently than in other nations in which circumcision
is not performed" (1:447).
Chapter 2, Note # 13 Gorczynski and Steele (1981) were experimenting
with mice and observed some apparently inherited reactions to certain drugs.
The article aroused editorial comments such as "too soon for the rehabilitation
of Lamarck" and "biological heresy". (See also Science 81 May issue.)
Chapter 2, Note # 14 Weismann (1891) describes the classic experiment
started in 1887 with white mice, beginning with seven females and five
males. A total of 901 mice were produced in five generations. All had their
tails removed before breeding and all had been born with normal tails (1:444).
Chapter 2, Note # 15 Coleman (1964) says of Cuvier, "His system
was, if anything, 'extinctive', eliminating by catastrophe, and not 'progressive',
creating (through God) new and higher creatures as an aftermath of catastrophe.
There had been a succession of discrete populations, each more or less
complete, and each neatly perishing by the action of some remote catastrophe"
(p. 51).
Chapter 2, Note # 16 Nordenskiold (1928) states: "The assertion
that so often occurs in literature that, in his (Cuvier's) view, life had
been created anew after each catastrophe is utterly incorrect; on the contrary
he points out that isolated parts of the earth may have been spared on
each occasion when it was laid waste, and that living creatures had propagated
their species anew from these cases, which indeed he expressly applies
to the human race" (p. 338).
Chapter 3, Note # 1 French historian Halévy (1937-8) writing
in the nineteenth century clearly saw that the presence of the Evangelical
movement in England prevented a socialist revolution such as had occurred
in France. "We shall explain by [the Evangelical revival] the extraordinary
stability which English society was destined to enjoy throughout a period
of revolution and crises; what we may truly term the miracle of modern
England, anarchist but orderly, practical and businesslike, but religious,
and even pietist" (p. 10). Halévy saw this as providential; left-wing
historians have labelled this a conservative prop for an economically oppressive
society.
Chapter 3, Note # 2 Richie-Calder (1982) exposes just some of
the connections between the French revolutionaries and the Lunar Society.
Richard Edgeworth, a member of the Lunar Society, was on visiting terms
with Rousseau, while Benjamin Franklin was a friend of Matthew Boulton
of Birmingham and frequently visited Paris to meet his friends Voltaire
and Rousseau. Voltaire lived for some years in exile in England (p. 142).
Chapter 3, Note # 3 Webster (1924) comments on J.G. Findel's
History of Freemasonry (1866, 131): "Findel frankly admits that the New
Atlantis contained unmistakable allusions to Freemasonry and that Bacon
contributed to its final transformation" (p. 120). Webster pointed out
that one of the earliest and most eminent precursors of Freemasonry is
said to have been Francis Bacon, who is also recognized to have been a
Rosicrucian; the Rosicrucian and Freemason orders were closely allied and
may have had a common source.
Chapter 3, Note # 4 Letter from C. Darwin to J.D. Hooker, July
1860. Found in F. Darwin 1887, 2:324.
Chapter 3, Note # 5 In 1782 Joseph Priestley published An history
of the corruptions of Christianity. By "corruptions" Priestley was referring
to the New Testament miracles. Priestley's output of theological works
from the Unitarian viewpoint was phenomenal, considering that at the same
time he was a notable scientist. Schofield (1963) estimates that he published
eleven volumes of religious history, fourteen volumes of polemical theology,
seven volumes of sermons, as well as numerous tracts and Unitarian hymns.
In his History of early opinions (1786), he tried to demonstrate that the
earliest Christians had not held the view that Jesus was the eternal Son
of God but that this had been introduced later. Priestley's disbelief in
the Bible miracles was no doubt quite sincere, but he actively promoted
his ideas and thus generated unbelief in others. The Bible-believing public
was enraged, and when he showed his sympathies to the French socialist
revolutionaries in 1791, they burned his house to the ground. He left England
and died in America in 1804.
Chapter 3, Note # 6 This passage discovered by Himmelfarb (1968,
387) was penned by Darwin in October 1873 and reveals the completely irreligious
nature of the man. Passages such as this have not been generally made available
to the public and are part of a vast body of correspondence which, to this
day, remains unpublished, confined to the archives of the Cambridge University
Library.
Chapter 3, Note # 7 Although Zoönomia was placed
on the Index in 1817, none of Charles Darwin's works, including The
Descent of Man (1871), were ever placed on the Catholic Index. The
Index
librorum prohibitorum
(Index of Forbidden Books) was initiated at the
Council of Trent in 1557, revised under Benedict (1757) and Leo (1900),
reevaluated at Vatican II, and abolished in 1966.
Chapter 3, Note # 8 According to Simpkins (1974) and most commentaries,
Malthus received his inspiration from three sources: Godwin, W. 1793. An
enquiry concerning political justice and its function on general virtue
and happiness. London. Godwin, W. 1797. The enquirer: Reflections
on education, manners and literature. Dublin-London. Condorcet, ed.
1795. Outlines of an historical view of the progress of the human mind.
Translated
from the French. London.
Chapter 3, Note # 9 Polanyi (1957) quotes extensively from Joseph
Townsend 1786. Dissertation on the poor law. Beginning with a story
of goats and dogs from Condorcet, which was at most apocryphal, Malthus
had elevated it to the status of a scientific principle, later expressed
by Herbert Spencer as "survival of the fittest", a principle that became
the coincident inspiration for both Wallace and Darwin's theory of evolution
by natural selection.
Chapter 3, Note # 10 Playfair's work (1970) is the only biography
of Hutton, but readers should be aware that Playfair was very sympathetic
to Hutton's views and deals in a most cursory manner with such matters
as the charge of atheism. Others were also sympathetic to Hutton's rather
socialist views, including the Edinburgh Review, an organ of Edinburgh
University.
Chapter 3, Note # 11 Lyell (1830-33) assumed that events in the
past had taken place at the same rate as are observed today. He then argued
that for the many small and necessarily disconnected unusual events (minor
catastrophes) to have occurred all at the same time (thereby resulting
in a single major catastrophe) would be a coincidence far beyond all chance
of ever happening (1:80). This argument is pure sophistry since it is based
on the assumption that uniformitarianism is true.
Chapter 3, Note # 12 A worldwide distribution of volcanic ash
was reported by Kennett et al. (1975) from 320 deep-sea sections drilled
during the Deep Sea Drilling Project. The results indicated that there
has been a much higher rate of volcanism in the past than has previously
been expected.
Chapter 3, Note # 13 Brian Sullivan of The Philadelphia Inquirer
(2
January 1981) reported that at the 147th national meeting of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science held in Toronto, evolution was
"voted-in" as a scientific law.
Chapter 3, Note # 14 In a letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker, Darwin
referred to Lyell and Hooker's conspiracy as the "delicate arrangement".
Brackman (1980, xi) took this as the title for his revealing book.
Chapter 3, Note # 15 Colp (1977) draws from several unpublished
papers and letters of Charles Darwin at the university library, Cambridge,
to show that during March and April 1851, while being treated by Dr. Gully
at Malvern, Darwin consulted a clairvoyant. She told Darwin that "the mischief
"was in his stomach and lungs and described to him "a most appalling picture
of the horrors which she saw in his inside" (p. 44). Darwin had witnessed
many forms of the occult during the journey of the Beagle. In the
Indian Ocean, among the Cocos Islands, he had attended a black magic ritual
which, however, he contemptuously described as a "foolish spectacle" (footnote
in Brackman 1980, 279). Wallace had a disagreement with Darwin centered
on this area of spiritism. Wallace was convinced that man had a soul or
spirit; Darwin was evidently not at all convinced. The argument ran that
since animals do not possess a soul, then at some point in the supposed
ancestral lineage of man, the belief in the soul required God to have given
it. Wallace, for all his irreligion, considered this to have been necessary.
Darwin was opposed and thus by implication denied the existence of the
human soul.
Chapter 3, Note # 16 Brackman (1980) has quoted this now famous
moment of revelation from Wallace's The wonderful century, written
in 1898. However, there seem to be a number of versions: Bronowski (1973,
306) has another version but no reference, while Himmelfarb (1968, 246)
quotes from Wallace's My life
(1905, 1:362) with a third version.
Each version contains the expression, "suddenly flashed upon me the idea".
Brackman (1980) makes the interesting observation that at the time of his
revelation Wallace had malarial fever which leaves the victim temporarily
"high" (p. 198).
Chapter 3, Note # 17 This line appears in Tennyson's (1974) In
memoriam A.H.H. (Canto 56): "Man...who trusted God was love indeed/
and love Creation's final law--/ Tho' nature, red in tooth and claw,/ with
ravine, shriek'd against his creed" (p. 105).
Chapter 4, Note # 1 In his letter to Mantel, 29 October 1841.
Lyell states the purpose of his first visit to Niagara: "As I shall send
a paper on the proofs of their [Niagara Falls] recession to the Geological
Society, I will not dwell on them now" (in K. Lyell 1881, 2:58).
Chapter 4, Note # 2 In his letter to Horner 13 June 1842. During
his second visit to Niagara, Lyell says: "I have found some additional
evidence of value to my mind, in favour of recession of the Falls" (in
K. Lyell 1881, 2:60).
Chapter 4, Note # 3 In the tenth edition of his Principles,
Lyell
(1867) states: "But after the most careful enquiries which I was able to
make during my visit to the spot in 1841-2, I came to the conclusion that
the average of one foot a year would be a much more probable conjecture.
In that case it would have required 35,000 years for the retreat of the
Fall" (1:361).
Chapter 4, Note # 4 The biased nature of Lyell's estimate is
entirely lost from view in Bailey's (1962, 149) biography.
Chapter 4, Note # 5 In the Royal Ontario Museum Publication,
Tovell (1979, 16) gives a summary of the published rates of recession of
Niagara Falls from 1842 to 1927. The average value is 4 feet (1.2 m) per
year. Discounting four very low values, the average becomes 5 feet (1.5
m) per year. Footnote to the table indicates that the falls have now been
"stabilized" and recession in recent years is reduced to 1 foot (0.3 m)
per year.
Chapter 4, Note # 6 Ronov (1959) states: "The quantity of carbonate
sediments [limestone] deposited in a given post pre-Cambrian epoch was
directly proportional to the intensity of volcanism and to the area of
distribution of inland seas" (p. 497).
Chapter 4, Note # 7 Both papers report surveys by depth sounder
and piston cores in the tropical Pacific revealed a layer of white ash
evidently laid down rapidly and believed to be volcanic in origin. The
layer is correlated with white ash in other locations and is believed to
have been caused by worldwide volcanism.
Chapter 4, Note # 8 HMS Challenger, a corvette of 2,306 tons,
was fitted out with laboratories and a scientific team. In three and a
half years, from 1873-76, it traveled 69,000 miles taking samples from
the ocean bottom around the world. For a delightful summary of this massive
work see Schlee (1971).
Chapter 4, Note # 9 Pettersson (1950, 44) reports the thickest
ocean bottom sediment found was thirteen thousand feet in the Atlantic.
Chapter 4, Note # 10 Brues (1951) presents a series of photographs
of insects trapped in gum from pine trees, which are thus perfectly preserved.
Alleged to be thirty to ninety million years old, the insects appear to
be identical to those found today.
Chapter 4, Note # 11 Andrews (1926) makes the following statements:
"These eggs were in a great deposit full of dinosaur skeletons" (p. 229).
"Most interesting of all was the fact that in two eggs that had been broken
in half we could plainly detect the delicate bone of the embryonic dinosaurs"
(p.231).
Chapter 4, Note # 12 Miller (1841) points out that in Britain
over an area of ten thousand square miles fish remains are found bearing
"unequivocally the marks of violent death. The figures are contorted, contracted,
curved; the tail in many instances is bent around the head; the spines
stick out; the fins are spread to the full, as in fish that die in convulsions"
(p. 232).
Chapter 4, Note # 13 George C. Page museum information sheet:
"Specimens have thus far been found of some 3,000 individual wolves. The
remains of approximately 2,500 saber-tooths [tigers] rank second" (p.4).
Chapter 4, Note # 14 The discovery in 1914 of a human skeleton
of modern appearance among Pleistocene animals at six to ten feet below
the surface sparked heated controversy. Boule and Vallois (1957, 478) cite
professor Merriam's explanation, which relies more on imagination than
fact, to totally discount the evidence.
Chapter 4, Note # 15 The discovery by Irving (1973) of the jawbone
of a teenage child among Pleistocene animals in North America caused a
dilemma. A variety of radiocarbon test dates taken from associated pieces
of wood were available. However, the investigators were uncertain whether
to choose the ages of about 40,000 years to satisfy the geologists, or
choose the ages about 10,000 years to satisfy the archaeologists, who surmise
that man arrived in North America relatively recently. An age of 27,000
years was selected. Interestingly, in the footnote to reference 5 it is
noted that repeat radiocarbon tests were carried out but, "when it became
apparent that the radioactivity was equivalent to a date of about 4,000
years, the counting was stopped" (see Chapter Twelve). The discovery in
text and picture for general public consumption was reported in National
Geographic 1979, 156 (September): 330-363.
Chapter 4, Note # 16 Laverdiere (1950) describes the most recent
whale discovery in 1947 at between 275 and 300 feet (84-92 m) above sea
level. This paper is a convenient summary of seventeen other fossil whales
previously reported and found in the hills surrounding the St. Lawrence
River valley. Hills in Vermont (U.S.) rise to 500 feet above sea level,
and a whale fossil was discovered there in 1907.
Chapter 4, Note # 17 Hallam (1963) gives five examples to show
what he believes to be cyclic changes in Jurassic sedimentation caused
by cyclic rising and falling of sea level. No mechanism is given, and the
explanation does not explain ancient sedimentations and beaches tilted
from the horizontal. This paper is only one of many that require multiple
vertical movements over vast lengths of time. A typical presentation of
the rising and falling of continents and sea levels is found in Dunbar
1960, 395.
Chapter 4, Note # 18 Doumanai and Long (1962) write, "The most
striking testimony to the richness of this [fossil] record are the numerous
coal beds as much as 13 feet thick.... Large petrified tree trunks as much
as 24 feet long and 2 feet in diameter...are embedded in the sandstone.
Coal measures... have been known in Antarctica since 1901" (p. 175).
Chapter 4, Note # 19 In the discussion to this lengthy and detailed
presentation by Whitley (1910), Sir Henry Howarth said that many of the
facts were to be found in his book The mammoth and the flood (1887).
Howarth's book is today a rarity and Whitley's paper is likely to be more
readily available; both speak of many thousands of buried mammoths.
Chapter 4, Note # 20 Farrand (1961) presents a typical Lyellian
argument to explain the frozen mammoths, saying that those found were victims
of tundra life, i.e. fell into a bog, and thus no catastrophe is admitted.
The author downplays the number of mammoth specimens found claiming only
"about 39". In his letter reply to Farrand (1961), Lippman (1962) reports:
"Lydekker reports in the Smithsonian Reports for 1899, that about 20,000
pairs of tusks in perfect condition were exported for the ivory trade in
the few decades preceding 1899. 'Buried ivory' was apparently a world-trade
even in Aristotle's time" (p. 361).
Chapter 4, Note # 21 Early in 1859 Darwin bought a billiard table
for himself (Colp 1977, 65).
Chapter 4, Note # 22 The massive and highly documented work of
Dillow (1981) provides more details than will be found in the older works
and should be more readily available.
Chapter 4, Note # 23 Hertz (1904) soberly describes the erect
genital: "In the afternoon we succeeded in exposing ... the protruded male
genital, 86centimeters long above and 105 centimeters long below; 10 centimeters
above the urinary meatus; the diameter of the flattened-out penis is 19
centimeters" (p. 623). See also Digby 1926, 132.
Chapter 4, Note # 24 Gow (1972) took ice core samples from nine
Antarctic glaciers; cores were 7,100 feet long. He found more than two
thousand individual volcanic ash falls interbedded with the ice, which
suggests to some that volcanic eruptions brought about the Ice Age. On
the other hand, this does not preclude the possibility that the proximity
of a comet caused simultaneous volcanic activity.
Chapter 4, Note # 25 Sears reports that more than 1,300 meteorites
have been found in Antarctica. This is very unusual, since the world's
museums only boast of 2,000 collected throughout the rest of the world,
their occurrence being quite rare. There may be meteorites at the sea bottom
of the Arctic. This would indicate that the source of the ice was extraterrestrial
as was the source of the meteorites. (See Chapter Twelve.)
Chapter 4, Note # 26 A series of ocean-bottom core samples described
by Hough (1950) showed that ice was absent from Antarctica's Ross Sea six
thousand years ago and only extended to its present limit four thousand
years ago.
Chapter 4, Note # 27 The famous Heart Mountain thrust fault in
Wyoming has perplexed geologists for years. According to fossil dating,
"old" rock 1,500-1,800 feet thick and thirty by sixty miles is situated
on top of "younger rock". It is argued that the "old" rock was uplifted
and pushed across the "new" rock, but Pierce (1957) admits this orthodox
explanation is fantastic and is at a loss to provide an alternative explanation.
Chapter 4, Note # 28 Corliss (1978) has fully documented more
than four hundred articles from orthodox scientific journals, published
in English since about 1850 to the most recent, relating to discoveries
of ancient man either as actual skeletons or artifacts found in geologically
unexpected places. At 786 pages this is a massive confrontation to today's
geological and anthropological sciences.
Chapter 4, Note # 29 The petrified human skull was found in the
coal deposit at the Freiberg (East Germany) mine. Following the opening
of East Germany to the West in 1990, this skull was located and examined
and found to be simply a carving of a human head using coal as the medium;
it is not believed to have been a deliberate hoax.
Chapter 4, Note # 30 O'Rourke (1976) concludes: "The charge of
circular reasoning in stratigraphy can be handled in several ways. It can
be ignored, as not the proper concern of the public. It can be denied,
by
calling down the Law of Evolution. Fossils date rocks, not vice-versa,
and that's that. It can be admitted, as a common practice ... or
it can be avoided by pragmatic reasoning" (p. 54. Emphasis in original.)
Chapter 4, Note # 31 Students sometimes have held before them
the example of pitch at room temperature. Although very brittle under a
rapidly applied load (struck with a hammer), it will bend easily even under
its own weight over a period of several days. This analogy is seldom found
in print, however, as it is quite false: pitch is an amorphous solid whereas
rock has a crystalline structure.
Chapter 4, Note # 32 Ellis (1995) gives details of a number
of "fossil" creatures found to be living, such as the Paleozoic Coelacanth
in 1938 and the Miocene Okapi (giraffid) in 1901.
Chapter 4, Note # 33 Apart from brief mention in newspapers during
late July 1977, this article by Koster (1977) was the only full and objective
published report in the English-speaking press. (See also Chapter Fifteen.)
Chapter 4, Note # 34 Alvarez and others (1980) propose an extraterrestrial
cause for dinosaur extinction. Commented on in Science News, 1979,
115:356.
Chapter 4, Note # 35 Vertebrate paleontologist Roland Bird (1939)
of the American Museum of Natural History describes dinosaur and human-like
tracks at the Paluxy River.
Chapter 4, Note # 36 Roland Bird (1954) describes removal of
the dinosaur tracks from the Paluxy riverbed and installation at the American
Museum of Natural History.
Chapter 4, Note # 37 Paluxy River. June 1982. More than one hundred
people representing the press and school teachers were invited as witnesses
while TV cameras recorded the removal of tons of rock from the Paluxy riverbed
following a trail of existing dinosaur tracks. The excavation revealed
thirty-six fresh dinosaur prints together with twelve human-like footprints
and a human-like handprint. Any possibility of fraud under these conditions
was completely ruled out.
Chapter 4, Note # 38 Human-like tracks appear in limestone of
the Carboniferous era -- that is, long before the appearance of mammals!
They have been found from Virginia and Pennsylvania through Kentucky, Illinois,
Missouri, and into the Rocky Mountains. Ingalls (1940) points out that
they cannot all be carvings and even if they were made by an ancestor of
man then modern geology is completely wrong.
Chapter 4, Note # 39 Derek Ager (1973) spends more than one hundred
pages giving evidence that refutes Lyellian geology yet he cannot accept
special Creation and the Noachian Flood. The result is an interesting attempt
to be honest to science on the one hand while being loyal to the creed
of evolution on the other.
Chapter 4, Note # 40 Cowen's (1975) book is an attempt to be
honest to science but loyal to evolution. Such books as this and Ager's
(1973) must eventually bring about the realization that there is something
fundamentally wrong with Lyellian geology.
Chapter 4, Note # 41 Here Lyell (1845, 2:155) describes the fossil
trees at South Joggins, Nova Scotia.
Chapter 5, Note # 1 Francis Darwin's (1887) The life and letters
of Charles Darwin contained the autobiography of Charles Darwin, but until
the publication of Lady Barlow's restored version in 1958, it was not generally
known just how much of Darwin's irreligious nature had been edited out
of the 1887 version.
Chapter 5, Note # 2 Brackman (1980, 32) provides details of Leonard
G. Wilson's discovery of seven of Lyell's notebooks at Kinnordy House,
Kirriemuir, Scotland, in 1961. It is clear that within forty-eight hours
of receiving Wallace's Sarawak Law in 1856, Lyell began to keep his own
"transmutation notebook".
Chapter 5, Note # 3 The context of Darwin's note given in Barlow
(1958, 30) that his father was a Freemason is in reference to the blood
rites of initiation to that organization. There is no evidence that Charles
Darwin had followed his grandfather Erasmus or his father Robert into Freemasonry.
Chapter 5, Note # 4 Expanded to four volumes in the third edition
in 1801, Erasmus Darwin's Zoönomia was a massive work, which Darwin
admitted in his Autobiography was full of speculation.
Chapter 5, Note # 5 Charles Darwin had this biography translated
from German into English by W.S. Dallas. He wrote a very lengthy introduction
and, in a footnote (p. 61), mentions that his grandfather Erasmus had two
illegitimate daughters.
Chapter 5, Note # 6 The footnote in Barlow (1958, 22) is Francis
Darwin's note that both Charles and his brother Erasmus were christened
and intended to belong to the Church of England.
Chapter 5, Note # 7 Henrietta Litchfield (1915) wrote: "Kitty
Wedgwood ... died in 1823. Dr. Darwin used to say that she was the only
woman he ever knew who thought for herself in matters of religion" (1:164).
This has clearly been edited by either Emma (or her daughter Henrietta),
because Himmelfarb (1968:11) points out that the original letter, held
at Cambridge, states, "Dr. Darwin used to say that ... so clear-sighted
a woman could not be a believer."
Chapter 5, Note # 8 Cambridge University Calendar for 1824 specifies
that the ordinary B.A. course embraced three fields: (a) Natural Philosophy
including Euclid's Elements, the principles of Algebra, plane and sphere
trigonometry, mechanics, hydrostatics, optics, astronomy, and Newton's
Principia (calculus); (b) Theology and Moral Philosophy covered by Beausobre's
Introduction, Doddridge's and Paley's Evidences, Butler's Analogy, Paley's
Moral Philosophy, Locke's Essay, Duncan's Logic, and the Greek New Testament;
(c) Belles Lettres covered by "the most celebrated Greek and Latin classics".
The Bible, as such, was not included. Darwin received the M.A., as was
customary, two years after receiving the B.A.
Chapter 5, Note # 9 As an eighteenth century theologian, Paley
did not have to face such problems as trying to reconcile Genesis with
geology, which was the major concern in the nineteenth century. However,
T.H. Huxley was able to claim that he "proleptically accepted the modern
doctrine of evolution" (F. Darwin 1887, 2:202). Here Huxley was referring
to a paragraph in Paley's Natural theology (1972 ,314). Although the central
theme of Paley's work is acknowledgment of an intelligent designing author,
careful reading shows that he was inclined towards a liberal view in which
having once created life God then retired to let matters develop by chance
processes.
Chapter 5, Note # 10 Keynes (1933) recognized Paley's merits
when he classed him with Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Bentham, Darwin, and
Mill as belonging to a tradition of humane science "marked by a most noble
lucidity, by a prosaic sanity free from sentiment or metaphysic, and by
an immense disinterestedness and public spirit" (p. 120).
Chapter 5, Note # 11 The well-referenced account by Eiseley (1959)
of developments of evolutionary biology before 1859 reproduces in full
the papers of Edward Blyth published in 1835 and 1837. See also H.M. Vickers
1911. Nature
85:510.
Chapter 5, Note # 12 Galton's (1869) thesis is summed up in his
statement, "to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better
chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable ... the word eugenics
would sufficiently express the idea" (p.24).
Chapter 5, Note # 13 The conspiracy to obtain priority for Darwin
is fully outlined following p. 58 of Brackman (1980). Central to Brackman's
thesis is the Darwin to Gray Letter of 5 September 1857. However, having
got this far, he then misses the point. So far, all the published versions
of this letter are of Darwin's edited copy and contain item six, which
deals with the vital divergence principle, but the question is, Did the
copy received by Gray contain this item? Gray's correspondence for this
period was also missing, and the published version is again taken from
Darwin's edited version.
Chapter 5, Note # 14 Gray's widow, Jane (1939), partially reproduced
a letter from Darwin to Gray of 5 September 1857, but it is from Darwin's
edited version and not the original received by Asa Gray. The abstract
states, "enclosed six principles of Natural selection, in another handwriting"
(p. 10).
Chapter 5, Note # 15 Sarton's (1930) article contains facsimile copies of:
1.) Darwin's unpublished sketch of 1839, copied in 1844.
2.) Abstract of Darwin to Gray letter of 5 September 1857 (edited version).
3.) Wallace's Ternate paper of February 1858.
Chapter 5, Note # 16 Published the year he died, Keith (1955)
had evidently revealed a little too much of Darwin for the time, and his
book Darwin revalued
never appeared on publishers' lists; it is
something of a rarity today. The information on Darwin's finances appear
in the chapter "The man of business" (p.231).
Chapter 5, Note # 17 Charles Darwin's influence on psychology
is expressed by Zusne (1975): "To psychology, his books The Origin of
Species (1859), The Descent of Man (1871) are of particular
importance. They spell out the basic assumption underlying psychology,
namely that man is on a continuum with the rest of the animal world, and
that, since animals can be studied by the scientific method, so can man....
The evolutionary viewpoint concerning the development of both structure
and function, including the mental processes, is now the accepted and pervasive
point of view in psychology" (p. 112).
Chapter 5, Note # 18 Darwin (1965) describes sneering defiance
in man and the uncovering of the canine teeth on p. 247 ff.
Chapter 5, Note # 19 Bell (1844) actually calls the Levator
labii proprius that uncover the canine teeth in man the "muscles of
snarling" (p. 131). However, as acknowledged by Darwin, Bell believed that
they had been specially created for the sake of expression.
Chapter 5, Note # 20 One of the most recent articles on this
theme appeared under the title "Darwin went home to the Bible" in the tabloid
The National Educator
(Fullerton, Calif.) for July 1975. This article
in turn sparked off a number of religious tracts distributed by well-meaning
but misled individuals.
Chapter 5, Note # 21 Lady Hope: Recent correspondence has revealed
that Elizabeth Reid Stapleton-Cotton married Adm. Sir James Hope. Although
she remarried after his death, she preferred to be known as Lady Hope until
her death. However, there is no evidence that she ever visited Darwin,
and none of this changes the evidence of the Darwin correspondence.
Chapter 5, Note # 22 A footnote in Barlow (1958, 93) consists
of a letter from Darwin's widow, Emma, to his son, Francis, dated 1885
and refers to a passage in his autobiography in which he equates the child's
belief in God with the monkey's instinctive fear and hatred of a snake.
Emma requested that this passage be removed to "avoid giving pain to your
father's religious friends". Only time will tell how many other irreligious
statements of this sort made by Darwin remain in the Cambridge University
Library Archives.
Chapter 6, Note # 1 The four separate origins of man are depicted
monumentally in Frederick Hart's "The Creation" unveiled on October 1982
at Washington Cathedral (Episcopalian). The sculpture is eighteen feet
tall and twenty-four feet wide and conveys the instant when humankind emerged
from a swirl of dust or smoke. This is at complete variance with the biblical
description of the creation of Adam and yet still appeals to the miraculous.
Chapter 6, Note # 2 The work of observation (not breeding experiments)
was conducted in 1939 and first reported by David Lack in 1947. A summary
by Lack may be found in
Scientific American, 1953, 88 (April): 67.
Chapter 6, Note # 3 Darwin's (1845) only mention of the finches
was as follows: "Seeing this gradation and diversity of structures in one
small, intimately related group of birds one might really fancy, that from
an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been
taken and modified for different ends" (p. 380).
Chapter 6, Note # 4 Darwin confessed to the absence of transition
fossils in the Origin
(1859): "Why then is not every geological
formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly
does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps,
is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my
theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection
of the geological record" (p. 280).
Chapter 6, Note # 5 Paleontologist Kitts (1974) makes the confession:
"Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of 'seeing'
evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists,
the most notorious of which is the presence of 'gaps' in the fossil record.
Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology
does not provide them" (p. 467).
Chapter 6, Note # 6 Typical of the many theories put forward
to explain the extinction of the dinosaur, Russell (1982) suggests that
a huge meteorite changed the earth's climate 63 million years ago.
Chapter 6, Note # 7 In his Sarawak law (1855), Wallace cites
the case of the "scaly flapper of the penguin". Found in Brackman (1980,
325).
Chapter 6, Note # 8 From this review of literature on reptile
to mammal jawbone transition (Manley 1972), the reader may gain some insight
into the monumental amount of effort expended on this hypothetical notion.
Chapter 6, Note # 9 In Darwin's copy of Vestiges of creation
was pinned a slip of paper with the memorandum: "Never use the word(s)
higher and lower" (found in F. Darwin and A.C. Seward 1903, 1:114).
Chapter 6, Note # 10 Mayr (1972) explains Darwin's memorandum
to himself on the basis of chance variation which can sometimes result
in what can be interpreted as progress. The reader should be aware that
this is simply playing with words, because without progress there would
be no evolution.
Chapter 6, Note # 11 "Die Mutationstheorie" of Hugo de Vries
was not accepted by European or English biologists of the day. Hugo de
Vries introduced it to America in 1904 in a lecture at the University of
California. Prof. MacDougal of the Carnegie Institution then became the
apostle of the new gospel of mutation and evangelized the notion. By 1914
it was being taught in U.S. schools and colleges, and, despite refutation
by Jeffrey (1914) in the U.S. and Bateson in England, the idea that mutation
is responsible for one species to diverge to become another is still taught
as dogma today.
Chapter 6, Note # 12 Nobel Prize winner Szent-Gyoryi (1977) acknowledges
that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a great obstacle to synthetic
evolution and he proposes "syntropy" or negative entropy to explain evolution
from the simple to the complex.
Chapter 6, Note # 13 Interestingly, Gould (1977b) refused the
author permission to quote his statements in full from this revealing article.
Chapter 6, Note # 14 Often misquoted, Darwin's letter to Asa
Gray of 3 April 1860 is found in the following context: "It is curious
that I remember well times when the thought of the eye made me cold all
over but I have got over this stage of the complaint, and now small trifling
particulars of structure often make me uncomfortable. The sight of a feather
in a peacock's tail whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick" (F. Darwin 1887,
2:296).
Chapter 6, Note # 15 Spencer introduced his phrase "survival
of the fittest" in his Principles of Biology (1865): "It cannot
but happen ... that those will survive whose functions happen to be most
nearly in equilibrium with the modified aggregate of external forces....
This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest" (1:164).
Chapter 6, Note # 16 Darwin (1872) acknowledged Herbert Spencer
as the father of the phrase "survival of the fittest": "I have called this
principle ... by the term Natural Selection.... But the expression often
used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate,
and is sometimes equally convenient" (p.49).
Chapter 6, Note # 17 Everett (1978) has assembled a collection
of reproductions from such painting masters as John Gould, showing forty-two
types of bird of paradise. The full-page color pictures of these brilliantly
colored birds with their unique breast fan and spiral-tipped tail decorations
stand in mute defiance of any attempt to explain their origin by evolutionary
concepts.
Chapter 7, Note # 1 Haeckel (1879) gives the first phylogenetic
chart of the "Pedigree of Man" depicted as an actual tree in 2:189. See
also Wendt 1972, 78.
Chapter 7, Note # 2 James A. Jensen's discovery of Paleopteryx
thomsoni, the world's oldest bird dated at 140 million years, was announced
in The New York Times 15 November 1981:39. See also Science News
24 September 1977, 112:198.
Chapter 7, Note # 3 A wonderful confession by Gould and Eldredge
(1977) states: "Smooth intermediates between Baupläne are almost
impossible to construct, even in thought experiments; there is certainly
no evidence for them in the fossil record (curious mosaics like Archaeopteryx
do not count)", p. 147.
Chapter 7, Note # 4 The "organized element" reproduced as a drawing
on p. 88 of Pfeiffer's (1964) volume in the Time-Life Science Library series
was taken from the photograph on p. 45 of Mason (1963). Mason had explained
that this supposed elemental life-form found in the Orgueil meteorite resembles
nothing more than an hexagonal crystal of troilite or iron sulphide. Further
details may be found in Mason's book Meteorites.
1962. New York:
John Wiley, p.95.
Chapter 7, Note # 5 Referring to a 1961 report by B.S. Nagy et
al., Mason (1963) reports: "These authors found similar spectra to those
of the hydrocarbons in butter and in recent terrestrial sediments" (p.
45).
Chapter 7, Note # 6 Typically, the press reported to the public
only the most newsworthy aspects of the meteorite controversy and headline:
"Space life on earth: bacteria-like cells from meteorites". In Science
Newsletter, 1961, 79 (15 April): 227, and in Science Digest, 1961,
49 (June): 13. All these claims are now discounted, but it is hardly newsworthy
now to correct the false impression left in the public mind. See also Scientific
American 208 (March 1963): 43.
Chapter 7, Note # 7 Bolsche (1906), a thoroughgoing Haeckelean,
glossed over, omitted, and even denied the seamier aspects of Haeckel's
life. The biography makes no mention of Haeckel's five-year love affair.
Chapter 7, Note # 8 In his letter to F. von Altenhausen, 22 February
1898, Haeckel explains how he began as a Christian but after studying evolution
became a freethinker and pantheist (p.28; see note 10).
Chapter 7, Note # 9 Plate 1 of Gasman (1971) has been reproduced
from Klemm's (1968) Der Ketzer' and shows a Berlin lecture hall
complete with a huge backdrop of charts and skeletons for Haeckel's Sunday
evening public lecture.
Chapter 7, Note # 10 Haeckel's mistress is given as Franziska
von Altenhausen, but this was simply to conceal her real identity, which
was Frida von Uslar-Gleichen. In Werner (1930).
Chapter 7, Note # 11 Haeckel (1868) occupied seventy-three pages
of a prestigious scientific journal with pure speculation, including more
than thirty figures of his imaginary Monera. Pages 104-7 show the Protamoeba
primitivia, which he claimed reproduced itself by a process of fission.
All these elementary life particles were entirely nonexistent.
Chapter 7, Note # 12 T.H. Huxley (1868): "I propose to confer
upon this new 'Moner' the generic name of Bathybius, and to call
it after the eminent Professor of Zoology in the University of Jena, B.
haeckelii" (p.210). An illustration is given in plate 4.
Chapter 7, Note # 13 Haeckel's most popular work, The history
of creation (1876), reproduced in both German and English for more
than half a century, was built on the supposition that the Monera existed
and led in the final chapters to the evolution of man.
Chapter 7, Note # 14 The moment of truth for Bathybius haeckelii
was reported by Murray (1875-76): "Mr. Buchanan [the chemist] determined
that the flocculent matter was simply the amorphous sulphate of lime precipitated
by spirit from the sea-water" (p.530).
Chapter 7, Note # 15 Buchanan (1875, 604) gives the complete
analytical procedure. The amorphous sulphate of lime was actually a clear,
jelly-like substance, and suspended within this mass were small discoidal
shapes; these were later found to be the exoskeletons of minute sea creatures.
Chapter 7, Note # 16 Rupke (1971, 178) cites the French paper
by A. deLapparent in Revue des questions scientifiques III, 1878,
pt. 1, p. 67, and gives an English translation of critical comments.
Chapter 7, Note # 17 Concerning the X club, Bibby (1972,3) shows
that the X club aimed at making worldwide disciples. Bibby (p. 58) lists
the nine members as: Busk, Frankland, Hirst, Hooker, Huxley, Lub-bock,
Spencer, Spottiswoode, and Tyndall.
Chapter 7, Note # 18 Haeckel was still stoutly defending his
Bathybius in 1877, two years after it had been exposed as gypsum
by Buchanan (1875). Pictures of Bathybius
continued to appear in
Haeckel's popular History of Creation (1876) until the final edition
in 1923.
Chapter 7, Note # 19 Footnote 13 of Hoyt (1976, 338) shows that
Lowell's evolutionary thinking came from Ernst Haeckel's (1906) Last
words on evolution (London), a copy of which, autographed to Lowell
from Haeckel, was found in Lowell's library.
Chapter 7, Note # 20 Pickering (1896, 113) points out that Schiaparelli
wrote in Italian, which was little understood by English-speaking people,
but the French astronomer Flammarion translated it into French, and Pickering's
paper comments on the version in L'Astronomie 1882, 1:217.
Chapter 7, Note # 21 Serviss (1901) gives an English translation
of the French version of Schiaparelli's paper on the Martian "canali",
which appeared in L'Astronomie,
1882, 1:217.
Chapter 7, Note # 22 The Wellsian theme of life on other planets
was carried forward by Edgar Rice Burroughs, who began a series of science
fiction novels in 1912 and was joined later by a host of other writers.
The television and film media have more recently exploited this theme,
while its popularity is undoubtedly due to fulfilling Haeckel's need to
provide an explanation for the origin of life without appeal to the miraculous.
Chapter 7, Note # 23 Pioneer 10 was the first spacecraft to leave
our solar system, in 1972. The Sagans and Drake (1972) first point out
the high probability of there being intelligent life in the universe, then
describe the message carried on the Pioneer to would-be extraterrestrial
discoverers. Carl Sagan is carrying Percival Lowell's banner today.
Chapter 7, Note # 24 Barnard's star has been observed to have
an irregularity which, it is speculated, may be due to a "dark companion",
that is, a planet. However, it would have to be an immense planet, and
there is no direct evidence that it exists.
Chapter 7, Note # 25 The authors Crick and Orgel (1973) acknowledge
that the Swedish scientist Svente Arrhenius had first proposed the idea
of panspermia in his book
Worlds in the making in 1908. However,
it was not then generally accepted because science was too ignorant of
the complexity of the "simple" cell, and Darwinism demanded spontaneous
generation of life on earth. Crick has since published the panspermia proposal
in his Life itself: Its origin and nature. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1981. See also Time
(New York), 1973, 102 (10 September): 53.
Chapter 7, Note # 26 Clark (1968, 144 and 283) describes the
Oparin-Haldane connection and their Communist sympathies.
Chapter 7, Note # 27 Emile Borel (1962) was one of the world's
foremost experts on mathematical probability. In chapter three he explores
those circumstances in which remote theoretical probability becomes a practical
impossibility, and he attaches numerical values to these transitions: "Probabilities
which are negligible on the Cosmic Scale. A phenomenon with a probability
of 10-50 will therefore never occur, or at least never be observed"
(p.28). This probability value may be expressed as one chance in one followed
by fifty zeroes.
Chapter 7, Note # 28 In his abstract, Yockey (1977) says: "Geological
evidence for the 'warm little period' is missing." He concludes that, "belief
in currently accepted scenarios of spontaneous biogenesis is based on faith,
contrary to conventional wisdom" (p. 377).
Chapter 7, Note # 29 Dr. Murray Eden (1967) of M.I.T.: "Without
such a biological and deterministic mechanism the process of recombination
would almost always lead to nonsense" (p.9). Eden is saying that without
intelligent design, random combinations of biological elements could not
produce complex organisms. On p. 110 Eden emphasizes that the Darwinian
notion of random chance must be reduced to a non-crucial role in any evolutionary
model.
Chapter 7, Note # 30 Salisbury (1969) points out the contradiction
in modern biology that if life really depends on each gene being as unique
as it appears to be, then it is too unique to come into being by chance
mutations. In other words, there will be nothing for natural selection
to act on.
Chapter 8, Note # 1 In this edition of Hesiod (1948), lines 106-201,
entitled by the editors "The five ages of man", trace the gradual increase
of evil through successive stages in the decline of man (p. 104).
Chapter 8, Note # 2 The text of West (1978) is in Greek but the
extensive English commentary is well worth reading. The commentary on the
Pandora story (lines 47-105) is on p. 165 while the commentary on the Gold,
Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and Iron ages, where the life span of man decreases
as moral integrity breaks down and life becomes harder (lines 106-201)
is on p. 172. The editor entitles this section "The myth of ages", but
Hesiod relates the episode historically.
Chapter 8, Note # 3 Paraphrase of Plato's (1933 ed.) The Statesman (p. 23): It is said that there was once an earthborn race that the Deity himself tended and watched over. They had fruit in abundance from many different trees, not grown by tilling, but given spontaneously by the earth. They lived, too, for the most part naked -- the temperament of the seasons not being painful to them. Theirs were soft beds of grass, springing up without grudging from the soil. The men of that time were ten thousand fold happier than those of the present.
Written about 370 B.C., this is remarkably similar to the first four
chapters of Genesis. The Fall of Man from the Age of Innocence is described
on p. 24.
Chapter 8, Note # 4 Unlike the Greek and Roman works, Paradise
Lost is mainly concerned with theological aspects such as the Fall
of Satan and eternal punishment for the unredeemed. Nevertheless, the overall
theme is of the Fall of Man. A modern edition of Milton's Paradise Lost
is by Eberhart (1969).
Chapter 8, Note # 5 Ellegard (1958, 303) relates the discussions
held at the British Association meetings of 1867 and 1869, in which the
one camp, led by the Duke of Argyll and including A.R. Wallace, proposed
that early man was civilized morally in spite of material backwardness.
The opposing Darwinian camp was led by Sir John Lubbock, a member of the
X club (see Bibby 1972). The reader should be aware that Ellegard's publication
was funded by a humanist foundation and is thereby antithetical to the
orthodox Christian position.
Chapter 8, Note # 6 Boule and Vallois (1957, 201, 213, and 241)
give all the details pertinent to the La Chapelle-aux-Saints fossil and
Boule's reconstruction of Neanderthal man.
Chapter 8, Note # 7 Brace (1979, 21) states that the earlier
view of Neanderthal man by Boule was incorrect.
Chapter 8, Note # 8 Buettner-Janusch (1973) clearly states "...all
Neanderthals are best considered representatives of an allopatric, allochronic
species -- Homo sapiens"
(p. 253); on p. 259 he explains that there
is as great a variation in Neanderthal skulls as in modern man.
Chapter 8, Note # 9 The 1908 date of the discovery of a Neanderthal
skeleton beside armor is not particularly early and it was well authenticated,
but it is evidence that does not support the current evolutionary ideas
of the Neanderthal man and so never appears in modern textbooks.
Chapter 8, Note # 10 The skull and body proportions of the living
Neanderthal individual were carefully measured and reported by a responsible
anatomist, who further reports that the Tay Tay people of the Philippine
Islands also display distinctive Neanderthaloid features.
Chapter 8, Note # 11 Whitney (1880) had been faithfully
reporting his work in the
American Journal of Science for almost
twenty years prior to this date; however, this thirty-page report on the
human remains gives some idea of the controversy surrounding the issue
and explains why such an important discovery as the Calaveras skull was
reported in the relative obscurity of the Memorandum of the Museum of
Harvard College.
Chapter 8, Note # 12 Keen (1977) repeats the explanation offered
by the religious press in 1876 that the Calaveras skull was a hoax, but
characteristically fails to mention its mineralization indicating great
age or the stone bowls and dozens of other human artifacts found in the
same strata.
Chapter 8, Note # 13 Professor Thom (1971) has shown by actual
measurements at the numerous sites that the builders of these megalithic
observatories at least four thousand years ago were extremely well accomplished
in the astronomical and mathematical arts.
Chapter 8, Note # 14 The "mother and daughter" picture found
on page 151 of Cro-Magnon man is acknowledged to have been taken
from Art in the ice-age by H-G. Bandi and J. Maringer, New York:
Praeger 1953:131. Bandi and Maringer in turn acknowledge their source of
this picture simply as "after Breuil" and describe it as having been found
in a cave at Minateda, Spain. Breuil, a well-respected authority on ancient
man, published Les roches peintes de Minateda in Paris in 1920.
Chapter 8, Note # 15 Keith (1911) has provided a summary and
comments on the Selenka-Trinil expedition reported in German in 1911; no
English translation is available.
Chapter 8, Note # 16 In his introduction to the centennial edition
of the Origin, Professor Thompson (1958) said: "The success of Darwinism
was accompanied by a decline in scientific integrity." Thompson then mentions
as examples the reckless statements of Haeckel; the shifting, devious,
and histrionic arguments of T.H. Huxley; the Piltdown fraud; and Dubois'
Pithecanthropus, p.xxi.
Chapter 8, Note # 17 Much of the information on Piltdown man
has been taken from Reader (1981).
Chapter 8, Note # 18 Gould (1979) makes out a very convincing
case for Teilhard de Chardin's being the culprit. Bowden (1977) had earlier
drawn the same conclusion.
Chapter 8, Note # 19 Although discovered in 1921, the Rhodesian
man caused some difficulties in interpretation and was not reported by
the British Museum until 1928.
Chapter 8, Note # 20 Far from the present reckoning of 30,000-40,000
years, Klein (1973) points out that from the associated fauna and radiometric
dating it should be closer to 125,000 years.
Chapter 8, Note # 21 It can most charitably be said of Osborn
that he was deceived himself before he deceived others. Nevertheless, the
reader should be aware that deception was a natural outcome of his particular
worldview. He had strong Marxist leanings and an atheistic outlook evident
from the preface to his
The Origin and evolution of life: "In truth,
from the period of the earliest stages of Greek thought man has been eager
to discover some natural cause of evolution, and to abandon the idea of
supernatural intervention in the order of nature" (Osborn 1918, ix).
Chapter 8, Note # 22 An article in Science 122 (1 July
1955):23 comments that although the Scopes trial was instigated by the
American Civil Liberties Union, when it came time to pay for the defense,
this had to be raised by an appeal to the American Association for the
Advancement of Science. The same article quotes from The New York Herald
Tribune, which pointed out that the issue in the Scopes trial was "the
right to think versus the right of State to make laws prohibiting discussion".
Exactly that situation exists today! Davidheiser (1971) corrects the false
view of the trial imposed upon the public by the popular press and the
movie "Inherit the Wind" by presenting the facts according to the stenographic
record. Scopes (1967, 60) confessed in his autobiography that the trial
was an arranged affair in which he had agreed to say that he had taught
evolution although he wasn't sure that he ever had! This confession, made
forty-two years after the trial, completely negates the popular image of
Scopes as a crusader of the truth.
Chapter 8, Note # 23 The living peccary was named Catagonus
ameghino but was admitted to be of the same species as the extinct
Pleistocene peccary Catagonus wagneri.
Chapter 9, Note # 1 T.H. Huxley (1901): "No one is more strongly
convinced ... etc" (7:153). Interestingly, this passage has been omitted
from the Huxley essay reprinted in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica's Gateway
to the Great Books (1963, 8:204).
Chapter 9, Note # 2 Ralph von Koenigswald (1956, 63) describes
how he found the fossil teeth in a Peking drugstore, but it is not necessary
to go to China to contribute to the heady science of paleoanthropology.
At the time of writing, the author found "Dragon's teeth" (ask for Loong
nhar) in a downtown Toronto Chinese herbal center where the going price
was five dollars an ounce. The Chinese use the fossil teeth ground to powder
with herbs in a medicinal decoction as a cure for insomnia.
Chapter 9, Note # 3 As is so often the case, Hood (1964, 33)
records that a single book read during Black's early manhood set the goal
for his life.
Chapter 9, Note # 4 Teilhard de Chardin's (1965) first impression
of the Peking man skull: "Viewed from the back ... the Sinanthropus
skull has a roughly triangular shape like that of the simians [apes]
rather than an ovoid one like that of present day men. Zoologically Sinanthroepus
deserves a species to himself" (p. 65). First published in Revue
des questions scientifiques
(Louvain, Belgium) 98 (20 July 1930).
Chapter 9, Note # 5 Weidenreich (1943) gives a description of
all the fossil finds at Chou K'ou Tien to 1943. There were said to be fourteen
skulls, but other authorities speak of sixteen or even forty.
Chapter 9, Note # 6 Teilhard de Chardin's (1965) previous view
(note 4 above) that Sinanthropus
was an ape is now abandoned, and,
far from disagreeing with Black's estimate of 964 cubic centimeters, he
is now prepared to accept 1,200 and assign the creature to the status of
"hominian". First published in Etudes
(Paris) 92 (5 July 937).
Chapter 9, Note # 7 For the first lime in a modern and semi-popular
article, these Chinese authors admit to the existence of an ash heap six
meters deep (1983, 93).
Chapter 9, Note # 8 Dunbar (1960,447) begins by saying that about
forty individuals were recovered, when in fact Weidenreich (1943) had only
reported fourteen.
Chapter 9, Note # 9 Weidenreich (1938) refuted Dubois' (1935)
confession that the Java man skullcap was that of a large ape. To this
day Java man remains in museums and textbooks as part of the canon of faith.
Chapter 9, Note # 10 The first section of Breuil's (1932) paper
describes the fire at Chou K'ou Tien.
Chapter 9, Note # 11 Bowden (1977, 93) shows how Breuil's paper
in L'Anthropologie
(March 1932) was not mentioned in the formal
report by Black and Teilhard of May 1933.
Chapter 9, Note # 12 Boule and Vallois (1957) play down the extent
of the fire by their statement, "Sinanthropus kindled fire and did
so frequently" (p. 144).
Chapter 9, Note # 13 Referring to Dart's claim that the Taung
is in the Lineage of Man, Keith (1925a) flatly said "The claim is preposterous"
(p. 11).
Chapter 9, Note # 14 Reader (1981) quotes newspaper headlines
of the day: "Missing Link 5,000,000 years old"; "Missing-link that could
speak"; "Birth of Mankind"; etc. (p. 89).
Chapter 9, Note # 15 Reader (1981, 157) discovered that the 600,000
years claimed at first for Zinjanthropus was a guess made by G.
Mortelmans, a science writer. I am indebted to John Reader for many such
details included in his book.
Chapter 9, Note # 16 This work for Leakey et al. (1961) introduced
the potassium-argon radiometric dating method to paleoanthropology.
Chapter 9, Note # 17 This paper by Leakey et al. (1968) contains
a table summary of the ages for each of the Olduvai Gorge beds.
Chapter 9, Note # 18 Reck reported his find in a German scientific
paper in 1914. Bowden (1977) gives the reference (actually, footnote 135
in Bowden's notation and not 136) and a summary in English.
Chapter 9, Note # 19 Authors Straus and Hunt (1962) say that
until all the contradictory dates and the existence and duration of the
geological unconformities are resolved, the dates are of doubtful value
in formulating hypotheses about the rates of evolution of man and his culture.
Chapter 9, Note # 20 For further articles on Zinjanthropus
see National Geographic,1961, 120 (October): 564, 590.
Chapter 9, Note # 21 Homo habilis. Various ages are reported
according to the rock samples submitted for radiometric analysis, but the
consensus is that since these remains were found in the same stratigraphic
level as the Zinjanthropus,
they must be the same age, that is,
about 1.7 million years. See Leakey et al., 1968.
Chapter 9, Note # 22 Homo habilis -- handyman -- is announced
in this paper by Leakey et al. (1964).
Chapter 9, Note # 23 Payne (1965, 215) says Homo habilis is
the same age as Zinjanthropus boisie. See also Time magazine
110 (7 November 1977): 36.
Chapter 9, Note # 24 Louis Leakey (1961) describes a "rich living
floor" twenty feet higher than the level of his Zinjanthropus discovery,
but still in bed I.
Chapter 9, Note # 25 Fitch and Miller (1970) reported an age
of 2.6 million plus or minus 260,000 years.
Chapter 9, Note # 26 Richard Leakey (1971) declares his belief
that two distinct hominids, the Australopithecus and the Homo
habilis, lived at the same time in East Africa. The
Australopithecus
became extinct and the
Homo habilis went on to become man.
Chapter 9, Note # 27 The age of "Lucy" is given as 3.0-3.4 million
years by Johanson and Edey (1981, 187). Bowden (1977, 185) notes that there
are considerable discrepancies in the ages obtained for "Lucy". Given a
choice of figures, there would be a natural tendency to select the larger
number and thus claim the distinction of having discovered the oldest missing
link.
Chapter 9, Note # 28 Pilbeam (1970b) points out that a living
baboon today, Theropithecus galada, found in Ethiopia, has "man-like"
features and dentition just like Ramapithecus. He adds that there
is no need to suppose that
Ramapithecus
was a hominid, but that
in all probability it was simply an ape like the T. galada.
Chapter 9, Note # 29 In The first American, Ceram (1971b,
282) gives a good account of the Laguna-girl discovery in California in
1933. Carbon 14 analysis indicated it to be seventeen thousand years old.
References given.
Chapter 9, Note # 30 Coon's (1965) plates 1, 6, and 66 are photographs
of living individuals having massive eyebrow ridges (supraorbital torus)
characteristic of Neanderthal man.
Chapter 9, Note # 31 T.H. Huxley's (1901) essay "On the relations
of Man to the lower animals" is an excellent summary of the anatomical
similarities and differences between man and ape (7:77).
Chapter 9, Note # 32 Terrace (1979) exposes many of the experimental
procedures in which it is claimed that apes have communicated with humans
and vice versa. In the same issue, J.V. Sebek (p. 78) explains the "Clever
Hans" effect whereby performing animals appear to communicate.
Chapter 10, Note # 1 Haller's (1971) book is one of a number
of important books documenting what has long been suspected: the ingrained,
firm, and almost unanimous racism of North American men of science during
the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.
Chapter 10, Note # 2 Photographs of the Weidenreich reconstruction
appear in virtually every book concerned with fossil man. It should be
borne in mind that the reconstruction leaves an impression of Sinanthropus
being "near human" but the early descriptions were of its being "near
ape". None of the original fossil pieces now exist, so it is not possible
to refute or confirm the reconstruction and acceptance of this as evidence
of man's evolution thereby becomes a matter of faith.
Chapter 10, Note # 3 In the first edition of the Origin, Darwin
spoke of rudimentary, atrophied, or aborted organs in the sense of their
being regressive; that is, they had at one time been fully functional but
through disuse had become smaller or even absent. Later researchers, such
as Wiedersheim, realized that a small and useless organ might, in fact,
be progressive or nascent--that is, might be on the evolutionary road to
becoming fully functional. This led then to the difficulty of knowing when
a seemingly useless organ was either regressive or progressive.
Chapter 10, Note # 4 This modern school biology textbook contains
the amazing statement, "There are more than 100 such vestigial organs including
appendix, the coccyx, wisdom teeth, nictitating membrane of the eye, body
hair, muscles that move the ears and nose" (p. 773). Incredibly, this author
includes an illustration of male nipples. As a final insult to the reader's
intelligence a reproduction of Haeckel's fraudulent drawings of the embryos
of the fish, chick, pig, and human is shown on p. 776.
Chapter 10, Note # 5 Darwin (1871) claimed that the human male
nipples were rudimentary rather than nascent, and states: "These in several
instances have become well developed, and have yielded a copious supply
of milk" (1:31).
Chapter 10, Note # 6 Concerning the so-called vestigial human
ear muscles compared to the horse, Darwin (1871) actually said, "Consequently
we ought frankly to admit their community of descent" (1:32).
Chapter 10, Note # 7 The Lamarckian overtones in Darwin's (1859)
thinking can frequently be seen in such statements as: "...bearing in mind
how strong is the principle of inheritance...' (p.457).
Chapter 10, Note # 8 Carpenter et al. (1978) begins with the
presupposition, "The vestigial posterior appendages (spurs or claws)...",
and goes on to describe how the male snakes use these retractable spurs
in combat. Since they have a useful function, how can they be vestigial?
Chapter 10, Note # 9 Biological Sciences Curriculum Study:
A molecular approach (1980, 238) cites the yolk sac of the human embryo
as vestigial. Biological Sciences Curriculum Study: An enquiry into
life (1980, 279): cites the human appendix as vestigial while on p.
282 a redrawn version of Haeckel's embryos of dog, bat, rabbit, and man
taken from Romanes (1892) is given as evidence of the long-discredited
Biogenetic Law.
Chapter 10, Note # 10 Metchnikoff (1907), the great medical authority,
made the following incredible statements: "Some very large parts of our
alimentary canal must be regarded as useless inheritances, bequeathed to
us by our animal ancestors" (p. 69).
Chapter 10, Note # 11 The perceived problems of bacterium in
the human intestine are discussed on p.248ff. and Metchnikoff concludes
that removal of this bacterium, if necessary by the removal of the intestine,
would greatly lengthen the human life span!
Chapter 10, Note # 12 Interestingly, like Rudolph Virchow in
Germany, Lane became involved in socialist issues in his later years. In
1926 he gave up a successful practice to found the New Health Society (Tanner
1946, 126)
Chapter 10, Note # 13 It was the rise of Mendelian genetics that
caused Haeckel's Biogenetic law to be abandoned early in this century.
Gould's (1977c) book on the history of the subject and its ramifications
to the social sciences is said to be the first published in fifty years.
Chapter 10, Note # 14 Drawings of the dog and human embryo appear
in Haeckel's (1868) History of creation. 1:309-11.
Chapter 10, Note # 15 The now familiar engraving of the development
of the embryos of a dog, bat, rabbit, and man taken from Haeckel's Anthropogenie
(1874) appear on p. 153 of Romanes (1892).
Chapter 10, Note # 16 In Winchester's (1971, 83) school biology
textbook, Haeckel's fraudulent illustration of embryos has been reproduced
as evidence of evolution and enhanced by color tinting. The author makes
no mention that the theory was discredited half a century earlier.
Chapter 10, Note # 17 In a step-by-step manner, Rifkin (1983,
111-56) exposes the faulty logic of the theory of evolution.
Chapter 11, Note # 1 Shakespeare's (1599) line given to Rosalind
addressing Orlando in
As you like it (4, 1:90) was an unquestioned
truth in the sixteenth century.
Chapter 11, Note # 2 Referring to Genesis 1:26 Lightfoot (1825)
says, "Man created by the Trinity about the third hour of the day, or nine
of the clock in the morning" (2:335). A man of great scholarly ability,
John Lightfoot's (1602-75) over-enthusiastic exegesis has been far from
"harmless" in its latter-day use by critics who have taken the "nine of
the clock" statement out of context to use it to discredit the Ussher date
for the time of Creation.
Chapter 11, Note # 3 Having given the figures for the rate of
sediment deposition, Dunbar (1960) then assures his readers that "these
deposits are only a surface veneer of the great delta built by the Nile"
(p. 18). However, this cannot be true since Lyell (see 1914,29) states
that the highest point on the delta is only seventy-two feet above sea
level.
Chapter 11, Note # 4 Lyell (1914) describes the work of measuring
sediment thickness in the Nile delta and the human artifacts that were
continually brought up by the boring tools on pp. 26-30. Lyell concludes,
"In a boring 72 feet deep, being 2 or 3 feet below the level of the Mediterranean,
in the parallel of the apex of the [Nile] delta...M. Rosière had
estimated the mean rate of deposit of sediment in the delta at 2 1/4 inches
in a century; were we to take 2 1/2 inches, a work of art [a brick] 72
feet deep must have been buried more than 30,000 years ago" (p.29).
Chapter 11, Note # 5 Joly (1922) was long occupied with finding
the age of the earth by the concept of "denudation of the continents" --
that is, measuring the salts in the oceans and the rate of addition; as
well as measuring sediments. He concluded the earth to be no more than
200 million years and in this paper gives a valuable criticism of the radiometric
methods, which, at that time, were giving ages ten times as long. On p.
482 he gives a lengthy argument to show that the halo phenomenon does not
support the long radiometric ages.
Chapter 11, Note # 6 During the past few decades Israel's National
Water Carrier and Jordan's Ghor canal have siphoned off about eight hundred
cubic meters of water daily from the River Jordan. The result is that with
continuing evaporation, the level of the Dead Sea is dropping and the salt,
which was at the saturation point (28 percent), is beginning to precipitate
out.
Chapter 11, Note # 7 Koczy (1954) concludes: "2 x 10-14
grams of uranium is added each year to each millilitre of sea water. Therefore,
if no uranium is removed from sea water, its uranium content should be
doubled in the course of 60,000 years, which is an improbably short time
from a geological point of view" (p. 126).
Chapter 11, Note # 8 University of Toronto's Macallam (1903)
explains: "... the proportions [of salts] in plasma are an ancestral feature
derived from a form which had its habitat in the ocean in the earlier geological
periods when the ocean water was very much less rich in salts of magnesia
than it is now" (p. 234).
Chapter 11, Note # 9 Immanuel Kant published his Allgemeine
Natürgeshichte und Theorie des Himmels in 1756. In it he expressed
an evolutionary system of cosmology. This system was given authority when
in 1796 Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace, defended it in his Exposition
du systéme du monde. Laplace expanded on this theme in 1825
in his Traité de Méchanique Céleste while Robert
Chambers' Vestiges
(1844) popularized the notion among the English-speaking
people. On page 17 of
Vestiges
Chambers gives his translation of
a key passage from the
Traité:
"Planets all move nearly in
one plane.... Motions of all their axes are in one direction--namely, from
west to east." This statement lent great support to the theory of an evolved
solar system but is factually incorrect. Of the nine planets in our solar
system, three revolve in a retrograde direction and the remainder in the
prograde direction. Of the forty-four satellites (moons) it is known that
twelve revolve in a retrograde direction and twenty-one in a prograde direction.
The direction of rotation of the remainder is at present unknown.
Chapter 11, Note # 10 In his letter to J. Croll, 31 January 1869,
Darwin writes: "I am greatly troubled at the short duration of the world
according to Sir William Thomson for I require for my theoretical views
a very long period before the Cambrian formation" (F. Darwin and A.C. Seward
1903, 2:163).
Chapter 11, Note # 11 Concerning the lack of randomness found
for cobalt 60 and cesium 137 decay, Anderson and Spangler (1973) conclude:
"The evidence is inconsistent with the thesis of decay independence" (p.3120).
Chapter 11, Note # 12 In his abstract Anderson (1972) states:
"The inconsistency ... of radioactive decay raises serious questions relative
to the generality of the independence of radioactive decay."
Chapter 11, Note # 13 Anderson and Spangler (1974) were free
to express their views more explicitly in the journal Pensée,
which is now defunct. The same authors writing in American Physical
Society, Bulletin, 1971, 10:1180 had presented their data in cautiously
worded terms to show that the gamma emission rate of cobalt 60 was significantly
influenced by electrical fields. They concluded that, in this case, radioactive
decay is not independent.
Chapter 11, Note # 14 Radioactive decay. The terms used in expressing
rate of decay are as follows:
1.) Particle count. A sample of known weight is exposed to a Geiger counter for a known period of time, perhaps two days, and the total number of (alpha) particles emitted counted.2.) Specific decay rate. The particle count is divided by the sample weight and by the time to reduce the figure to i) the number of counts or atoms per milligram per hour in the case of the uranium/lead method or, ii) atoms per gram per minute in the case of the carbon 14 method.
3.) Decay constant. This is formed mathematically from the specific decay rate:
IN
= ----- -----
N
where lambda,4.) Half life. This is derived from the decay constant and is the time required for a large number of radioactive atoms of a particular kind in a sample to decay to half the original number.
log 2 0.693= ----- -----
where the half-life is usually denoted by tau,
Chapter 11, Note # 15 Rutherford writes referring to Aston's
(1929) work and concludes, "The uranium in our earth has its origin in
the sun.... It has been decaying since the separation of the earth from
the sun... The earth cannot be older than 3.4 x 109 years" (Nature
1929, 123:313).
Chapter 11, Note # 16 Cosmic rays are shown to be very high energy
protons, some exceeding the mass of helium nuclei by thirteen times. Since
the nuclei of argon 36 are only nine times that of helium, some of these
cosmic rays are, therefore, themselves the nuclei of argon. Moreover, cosmic
bombardment of argon 40 produces argon 36, so that throughout time, argon
36 has been increasing.
Chapter 11, Note # 17 Potassium-argon ages of 3.3 billion years
were reported by Funkhouser and Naughton (1968) for lava thought to be
less than one million years old.
Chapter 11, Note # 18 Emiliani (1958) was one of the first to
estimate ancient ocean temperatures by measuring the oxygen 18 content
of oyster shells taken from drill cores. The results also bore a relationship
to age and caused a significant downward revision of the times for the
ice ages. (See Chapter Twelve, note 4).
Chapter 11, Note # 19 Eldridge (1982, 104) categorically states
the age of moon rocks to be 4.5 billion years, yet, typically for this
type of publication, no references to this source are given.
Chapter 11, Note # 20 Ages of moon rock samples quoted
by S.R. Taylor (1975) range between 3.16 and 4.6 aeons, where the "aeon"
is defined as a billion years (p. 64, 180 and 263). Same reference sources
used as quoted in Whitcomb and DeYoung (1978, 99-100).
Chapter 11, Note # 21 Whitcombe and DeYoung (1978, 99) cite the
following sources for the dating of moon rocks and in their Table IV-4
summarize all the radiometric ages reported. Proceedings of the second,
third, and fourth Lunar Science Conference; Earth and Planetary Science
Letters for 1972-77; Science 1970, 167:462-555.
Chapter 11, Note # 22 Professor of nuclear medicine Dudley's
(1975) criticism of this most sacred aspect of the dogma of uniformitarianism,
i.e. a constant decay rate, was not acceptable to the mainline scientific
journals but appeared in the Chemical and Engineering News and in
full (in English) in the Italian journal Letters al Nuovo Cimento
1972, 5:231.
Chapter 11, Note # 23 Hynek's (1983) short article with a diagram
shows how Roemer made his measurements in 1668 by observing the time between
eclipses of Jupiter's moons from opposite positions of the earth's orbit
around the sun.
Chapter 11, Note # 24 Goldstein et al. (1973) refrain from giving
the actual and corrected velocity but simply conclude by saying that "the
velocity of light did not differ by 0.5% in 1668 to 1678 from the current
value." 0.5 percent beyond the current value turns out to be 301,300 km
per second.
Chapter 11, Note # 25 Strong (1957) asks the question, "Does
c change with the passage of time?" (p. 126).
Chapter 11, Note # 26 Steidl (1982) gives a four-page summary
of the monographs produced by Barry Setterfield, which at the time this
book was going press were not generally available in North America.
Chapter 11, Note # 27 Moon and Spencer (1953) make the following
remarkable statement: "The acceptance of Riemannian space allows us to
reject Einstein's relativity and to keep all the ordinary ideas of time
and all the ideas of Euclidean space out to a distance of a few light years.
Astronomical space remains Euclidean for material bodies, but light is
considered to travel in Riemannian space. In this way, the time required
for light to reach us from the most distant stars is only 15 years" (p.
635).
Chapter 12, Note # 1 Loren Eiseley (1961, 239) in Darwin's
century, uses this quote as an example of Huxley's sophistry, that
is, his deceptive argument that appears to be correct but is actually invalid;
in this case because it assumes evolution to be proven.
Chapter 12, Note # 2 An excellent descriptive paper of
the halo phenomenon was produced by Joly (1917) in which he refers to the
early work conducted in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
Chapter 12, Note # 3 Gentry's (1967, 78) statement,
acceptable to Medical Opinion and Review, is the obvious implication
of Gentry's work but could not be expressed in such terms in the mainline
journals such as Science (organ of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science).
Chapter 12, Note # 4 Emiliani (1956) comments
on the results obtained by the oxygen 18 dating method applied to oyster
shells taken from seabed core samples: "This chronology is considerably
shorter than the chronologies usually suggested in the literature. If correlation
between core stages and continental stratigraphy is correct, the Pleistocene
time since beginning of the Günz age appears to be only about 300,000
years" (p.924). Loren Eiseley (1961) in his Darwin's century (New
York: Doubleday) refers to Emiliani's work and cautiously adds, "The million-year
age of the Pleistocene period may be shortened by new studies" (p. 139).
It was shortened by more than half, and so another article in the canon
of yesterday's faith quietly became discredited. (See also Chapter Eleven,
note 18).
Chapter 12, Note # 5 One of the unsolved mysteries
of Antarctica is the mummified bodies of crab-eater seals found thirty
miles in-land and up to three thousand feet above sea level in ice-free
areas. Described by Dort (1971), their age is unknown. Further details
by L. Péwé and N. Rivard in Science 1959, 130 (18
September): 716.
Chapter 12, Note # 6 In explaining the delayed
introduction of the new high-energy spectrometry, Grootes (1980) said:
"For C14 counting by accelerator... it is not yet exactly known
where the background counts come from." He suggested that "background counts
originate in the accelerator in parts of the system that are not occasionally
cleaned or changed" (p. 793). The sequel to this little insight into the
heady workings of nuclear physics passed from the ridiculous to the bizarre
when the new high-energy accelerator was installed at a well-known Canadian
university (1983). The C14 results obtained using previously
analyzed samples again gave ages that were too young, i.e., more C14
was found than expected from the alleged age; furthermore, there could
be no question of contamination. Rather than question the long ages demanded
by Lyellian uniformitarianism, the physicists in charge seriously believed
that some new particle mimicking C14 had been generated! (Private
discussion with author.)
Chapter 12, Note # 7 In 1952 Kulp described the carbon 14 method:
"There are two basic assumptions in the carbon 14 method. One is that the
carbon 14 concentration in the carbon-dioxide cycle is constant.
The other is that the cosmic ray flux has been essentially constant" (p.
261). These sweeping assumptions established the method in the 1950s but
have since been modified significantly.
Chapter 12, Note # 8 By 1965 it was being recognized that the
production of C14 was not uniform and Suess (1965) states: "The
oceans as a whole cannot, of course, be considered a well-mixed reservoir"
(p.5947).
Chapter 12, Note # 9 Stansfield (1977): "It
now appears that the C14 decay rate in living organisms is about 30 percent
less than its production rate in the upper atmosphere.... Creationists
argue that since C14 has not yet reached its equilibrium rate, the age
of the atmosphere must be less than 20,000 years" (p. 83). Stansfield obtained
the 30 percent figure from the work of R. Lingenfelter, 1963. Reviews
of Geophysics (Washington) 1:1.
Chapter 12, Note # 10 According to Dillow (1981, 146) the surface
atmospheric pressure of the pre-flood world was 2.18 atmospheres of 32
pounds per square inch.
Chapter 12, Note # 11 The pterosaur fossil was found in
non-marine rock of flat topography and Lawson (1975) suggests that in some
way the creature had to be capable of powered flight since it could not
soar from clifftops. See also G.G. Shor, Science, 1975, 188 (16
May): 677.
Chapter 12, Note # 12 Jueneman (1972) points out the inconsistencies
in results when C14 is calibrated against the bristle-cone pine
and suggests something is radically wrong. The situation has led to divided
schools of opinion. For the European school, see G.W. Pearson et al. 1977.
Nature 270 (3 November): 25. For the American school, see H.E. Suess.
1976. Antiquity 50 (March): 61.
Chapter 12, Note # 13 Helmholtz (1856, 506) sets forth the question
of the contracting sun and all the pertinent calculations in the appendix
to his article.
Chapter 12, Note # 14 Yockey (1977) boldly exposes the whole
problem of the absent neutrinos and points out that "the neutrino was originally
an ad hoc assumption [by Wolfgang Pauli in 1931] to save the principle
of conservation of energy in decay" (p.395). His statement "the measured
flux is less than one fifth of the predicted value and may be zero" was
derived from the published data of Bahcall and Davis (1976). Bahcall and
Davis (1976) state: "The Ar37 production rate ... is 0.13 ... atoms per
day.... The cosmic ray production rate ... is 0.09 Ar37 per day....
There is no evidence for a solar neutrino capture rate of 1.5 units [per
day]" (p.266).
Chapter 12, Note # 15 Wittmann (1980) provides additional data
to indicate a shrinking sun, while the July 1980 issue of Sky and Telescope
(p. 10) contains a diagram showing all of Eddy and Boornazian's data.
Although there is scatter, there seems little doubt of their downward trend.
Chapter 12, Note # 16 Parkinson (1980) takes the data obtained
between 1836 and 1954 and points out that there were six observers and
two telescopes, which introduced bias. He admits the absence of neutrinos
is a problem but cannot accept that the sun is shrinking.
Chapter 12, Note # 17 Stephenson (1982) wants an open-ended beginning
for our solar system and states: "The data provide fairly strong evidence
that the diameter of the sun oscillates. The period of oscillation is some
80 years and its amplitude is about 0.025 percent" (p. 172). Eddy and Boornazian's
(1979) conclusion of secular decrease was discounted but the same data
is used by Stephenson to justify oscillation!
Chapter 12, Note # 18 Thwaites and Awbury (1982) explain: "If
one extrapolates back in time 4.6 billion years with the accepted estimate
of 0.005 second per year per year, one gets a fourteen-hour day" (p. 19).
With further explanation, the authors show how one second per year corrections
need to be made at the 20th, 28th, 35th, 40th, 45th, 49th, 53rd, and 57th
years, and soon (continuing to two second per year corrections starting
at the 214th year after the correction system is begun). The system used
today was actually back-dated to 1900, but the authors failed to mention
why two second a year corrections have been made since 1981. See The
Astronomical Almanac.
Chapter 12, Note # 19 Challinor (1971) studied data from 1956
to 1969 and concluded there were three types of variation in the rate of
rotation of the earth: seasonal, irregular, and long-term.
Chapter 12, Note # 20 Table B5 of The Astronomical Almanac
(1983) shows leap seconds have always been added, never subtracted,
on the following dates: January 1, July 1, 1972; every January 1 from 1973
to 1980; then January 1 and July 1, 1981, 1982, and 1983.
Chapter 12, Note # 21 Oort's notion for the origin of comets
is dismissed by Brady (1970) in the statement: "With this sort of evidence
it seems unnecessary to reopen the question of interstellar origins [of
comets] and the view established by Strömgren (1914) and now generally
accepted that these comets all approach the planetary system in elliptical
orbits of a very long period, is still unassailable" (p. 1064).
Chapter 12, Note # 22 The Australian tektites have given rise
to a lot of controversy since they are found in a stratigraphic horizon
near the Pleistocene-Holocene boundary which is dated at 7,000 to 20,000
years B.P. However, potassium-argon and fission track radiometric methods
have given dates of 700,000 years and older. No one wants to give up the
stratigraphic dating, and no one wants to give up the radiometric method!
See also R.O. Chalmers et al.
Geological Society of America: Bulletin
Part 1 1979. 90 (May): 508, where the argument still rages.
Chapter 12, Note # 23 Gold (1955) speculates, "From the nickel
content of the deep ocean deposits ... the quantity of material currently
deposited on the Earth is ... one million tons per year. This estimate
would imply that the Moon is acquiring a layer one centimeter in thickness
every 107 years" (p. 598). (In 4.5 billion years this would
amount to eighteen inches.) Gold continues, "Fine dust particles on the
[Moon's] surface ... move only at such a speed that the maria can be filled
to an average depth of perhaps a thousand feet in a period that may be
three thousand million years" (p. 599). Lyttleton (1956), a British enthusiast,
predicted a layer of dust on the moon "several miles in thickness" (p.72).
Chapter 12, Note # 24 Bender et al. (1973) say: "The lunar laser
ranging measurements ... have an accuracy of 1 nsec in round trip travel
time. This corresponds to 15 cm in the one-way distance" (p. 237). Writing
in 1975, S.R. Taylor in
Lunar science: A post-Apollo view (New York:
Pergamon) added that "further improvements have enabled the distance to
be measured to within 2 to 3 cm" (p.3).
Chapter 12, Note # 25 Baldwin (1965) frankly confesses that the
origin of the moon is a mystery: "There is no existing theory of the origin
of the moon which gives a satisfactory explanation of the earth-moon systems
as we now have it. The moon is not an optical illusion or mirage. It exists
and is associated with the earth. Before 4.5 billions of years ago the
earth did not exist. Somehow, in this period of time, the two bodies were
formed and became partners. But how?" (p.42).
Chapter 12, Note # 26 William Thomson (1865) opposed Darwin's
long ages in three fundamental areas: (l) The luminosity of the sun, (2)
the rotation of the earth, and (3) the heat of the earth. The rate of heat
flow through the surface of the earth is given in the statement: "The increase
of temperature downwards may be taken as roughly averaging 1 degree Centigrade
per 30 meters" (p.513).
Chapter 12, Note # 27 Curie temperatures are: pure iron, 750°C;
haematite, Fe203, 675°C; magnetite, Fe304,
578°C.
Chapter 12, Note # 28 Lamb (1883) was an extremely able scientist
yet in his biography in the Encyclopaedia Britannica or Scribner's
Dictionary of scientific biography,
no mention is made of Lamb's
classic work on terrestrial magnetism. Jacobs (1967) says of Lamb's work:
"H. Lamb showed in 1883 that ... this time is of the order of 105
years, whereas the age of the earth is more than 4 x 109 years"
(p. 430).
Chapter 12, Note # 29 Gauss (1834) was instrumental in forming
the Magnetic Association in 1835 to which workers submitted their results.
Magnetic measuring stations were located at Greenwich (U.K.), Dublin, Capetown,
Hobart (Tasmania), Toronto, St. Helena Island, and other stations throughout
the East India Company. (Gauss adopted the name Charles as the French equivalent
of his given name Karl for this French publication.)
Chapter 12, Note # 30 McDonald and Gunst (1967) conclude that
the earth's magnetic field is decaying "5 per-cent per one hundred years"
(p. 1), while their Table 3 lists the magnetic moment measurements made
from 1835 to 1965 (reproduced in Appendix K).
Chapter 12, Note # 31 The data from the 1979/80 satellite showed
that the overall intensity of the earth's magnetic field was declining
at a rate of twenty-six nanoteslars per year with a half-life of just 830
years. Extrapolation of the data shows that the magnetic field will have
entirely disappeared in 1,200 years.
Chapter 12, Note # 32 Earth's heat. The power (P) consumed by
electrical devices is rated in terms of watts where this is given by the
electrical resistance (R) multiplied by the current (I) squared: P=RI2.
The resistance (R) of the hot rocks within the earth will be essentially
constant, but as the cur-rent (I) increases in the past, as indicated by
the greater magnetic field, the power (P) and thus the heat generated will
increase as the square of the current. For example, if R is constant at
10 and I increases arithmetically 2, 4, 6, 8, etc., then P will increase
as follows: 40, 160, 360, 640, etc. The total power produced by the current
in the earth beneath us is given by multiplying P by the constant 8.13
x 108, which gives a colossal number of megawatts. However,
to go back only ten thousand years in the past would mean increasing this
figure millions of times and at this point the heat generated would be
loo great for life to exist on the earth's surface.
Chapter 12, Note # 33 Carrigan and Gubbins (1979) complain, "No
one has developed an explanation of why the sign reversals take place.
The apparently random reversals of the earth's dipolar field has remained
inscrutable" (p. 125).
Chapter 12, Note # 34 In New Scientist 1964, 24 (3 December):
631, the anonymous author cautiously points to a beginning of "no more
than a few million years ago" and asks the question "where is the earth's
radiogenic helium?"
Chapter 12, Note # 35 A photograph appears in this National
Geographic article showing a bat entombed in a stalagmite, clearly
indicating that growth during this period must have been over a few days,
or weeks at most.
Chapter 12, Note # 36 Dickey et al. (1968) have noted that evolutionary
theory requiring millions of years cannot explain the enormous pressure
differences which exist in adjacent rock strata: "The significance of this
observation to structural geology is very great. It means that pore water
has been able to move across the bedding planes of shale hardly al all
in spile of a pressure gradient exceeding ten pounds per square per foot
during scores of millions of years. Obviously shales have small but appreciable
permeability to water; otherwise how could compaction occur?" (p. 612).
Chapter 12, Note # 37 Books and articles continue to appear containing
extrapolated ventures into frightening population statistics. Two examples
are Vogt (1960) and Hauser (1970).
Chapter 12, Note # 38 Langer (1964) shows that between A.D. 1348
and 1350 at least a quarter of the population of Europe died of the plague;
however, within three hundred years, the normal rise in population had
been resumed.
Chapter 12, Note # 39 Stansfield (1977) gives a typical evolutionary
explanation: "The size of a population may fluctuate over various lengths
of time, but the long-term picture is one of stability" (p. 82). This author
appeals to an oscillating population in order to leave an open-ended past.
Chapter 13, Note # 1 This little book, which records Keith's 1925 Conway memorial lecture, gently draws aside the veil that hides the inner sanctum of the human mind to reveal the altar upon which we place our most treasured and s
