Richard Milton (author)
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Richard Milton (born 1943) is a British journalist and amateur archaeologist.[1] An engineer by training,[2] he has written on the topics of popular history, business, and alternative science, and he has published one novel.
Work and reception
Milton's books, especially those on scientific controversies, have been roundly rejected. To his critics, Milton is a contrarian who engages in controversy for its own sake, while to his supporters, he is a writer unafraid to tackle uncomfortable subjects and orthodoxies that have become dogmas. Milton is shunned in the field of evolution, as he is a neo-Lamarckian who has supported the experiments of Paul Kammerer.[3]
His first book, The Facts of Life: Shattering the Myths of Darwinism (1993), is a non-religious creationist[4] attack on evolutionary biology, following the arguments of "creation science".[4] It presents an "idiosyncratic collection of scientific anomalies purported to support the fallacies of Darwinism", referencing fringe figures such as Rupert Sheldrake.[5] It has been met with intense criticism from many mainstream academic reviewers. In the New Statesman, Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins described it as "twaddle that betrays, on almost every page, complete and total pig-ignorance of the subject at hand", characterising its central thesis as being as silly as "a claim that the Romans never existed and the Latin language is a cunning Victorian fabrication to keep schoolmasters employed".[6] In a review in Third Way, Douglas Spanner, while suggesting that the book should be taken seriously by orthodox Darwinism, is dubious about Milton's attempts to dispute traditional methods of estimating the Earth's age and says, "on matters of biological importance he can be off-course at times".[2]
Reviewing Milton's second book, Forbidden Science: Suppressed Research That Could Change Our Lives (1996) in New Scientist, Harry Collins was generally positive about much of the book but criticised Milton's failure to "draw a line between what might be worth a shot and what is simply daft": Template:Quote
Milton's claims have been criticised as pseudoscience by philosophy professor Robert Carroll.[7] Milton appeared on The Mysterious Origins of Man, a television special arguing that mankind has lived on Earth for tens of millions of years and that mainstream scientists have suppressed supporting evidence.[8]
His claims on the age of mankind have also been criticised for scientific inaccuracy.[9]
Publications
Nonfiction
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- published as Il Mystero Della Vita, Editoriale Armenia, 1993 (Italy)
- published by Sinkosha Publishing, 1995 (Japan)
- published as O Mythos tou Darwinismou 1996 (Greece), Park Street Press, 1997 (US Hardback, US Paperback)
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- published as Verbotene Wissenschaften, Zweitausendeins, 1996 (Germany)
- republished as Verbotene Wissenschaften, Kopp Verlag, 2014 (Germany)
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Fiction
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See also
References
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- ↑ Milton in Forbidden Science, p. 229 discussing evidence for Neo-Lamarckism
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- ↑ Book Review of Facts of Life in the Independent Newspaper
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- ↑ The Mysterious Origins of Man
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