Both Darwinism and Neo-Darwinian theory are dead, even if the scientists are still reluctant to openly admit it. But it’s a death that has been in the making for at least the last 30 years:
Richard Milton’s Shattering the Myths of Darwinism arrived in 1992 like a stone through the stained glass window of scientific orthodoxy. Here was a science journalist, not a creationist or religious fundamentalist, methodically documenting how the central theory of modern biology had become less a scientific framework than a kind of secular religion, complete with its own dogmas, heresies, and inquisitions. Milton discovered what anyone who dares to look closely at Darwin’s theory finds: that “survival of the fittest” is actually a meaningless tautology—those who survive are defined as fit because they survived—and that the entire edifice of evolutionary theory rests not on empirical evidence but on a series of circular arguments, unexamined assumptions, and what W.R. Thompson called “fragile towers of hypothesis on hypothesis.” The book wasn’t just another critique of evolution; it was an exposé of how science itself had been corrupted, transformed from a method of inquiry into an instrument of ideological enforcement.
The depth of Milton’s investigation reveals something far more troubling than mere scientific error. When he traces how radiometric dating actually works—or doesn’t—he uncovers a shell game where rocks are dated by the fossils they contain while fossils are dated by the rocks they’re found in, with neither discipline possessing any independent method of verification. When he examines the probability calculations for even a single protein forming by chance (1 in 10^65), he finds odds so astronomical that they’re equivalent to winning the lottery every week for a thousand years with the same numbers. When he looks for the transitional fossils that Darwin himself said must exist in countless numbers for his theory to be true, he finds instead what paleontologists call “the trade secret of paleontology”—they simply don’t exist. Every major group appears suddenly in the fossil record, fully formed, remains unchanged, then disappears without transforming into anything else. The Cambrian explosion alone, where nearly all animal phyla appeared simultaneously without precursors, should have ended the debate, but instead it’s been explained away through increasingly creative interpretations that preserve the theory at the expense of the evidence.
What Milton exposes, and what Liam Scheff so brilliantly articulated before his untimely death, is that Darwinism was never really a scientific theory at all—it was an anti-religion, born from Victorian intellectuals’ desperate need to escape the suffocating grip of church authority. As Scheff puts it, the entire project was about destroying the Christian “Yahweh-driven” model, replacing one kind of god with another they called “Nature,” which somehow “selects” the “fit” to “survive” through processes no one can actually define or measure. This ideological motivation explains why Darwinism survived despite its failures: it served a cultural and political purpose that had nothing to do with understanding how life actually works. The theory gave us eugenics and forced sterilizations—all conducted as medical and scientific projects in the name of helping the “fit” survive. When science becomes dogma, when questioning is forbidden, when careers are destroyed for publishing contradictory evidence, we’re no longer doing science; we’re enforcing a state religion. Milton documents case after case of scientific censorship, from Warwick Collins being blacklisted for questioning sexual selection to Forrest Mims losing his Scientific American column simply for admitting he didn’t believe in Darwinism.
The implications stretch far beyond academic debates about fossils and dating methods. Milton’s work, alongside voices like Stephen Meyer and Michael Behe, reveals that the entire materialist worldview of the twentieth century rests on a foundation of sand.
It was obvious from the time of the 1967 symposium held by the Wistar Institute that evolution was not a real science. Evolution has been effectively dead since Mendel, it’s just that we didn’t have the genetic science to comprehensively diprove it until quite recently.