Richard Milton (scientific researcher)

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Richard Milton is a British engineer and science journalist.

He is probably best-known as the researcher and author of the best selling book The Facts of Life: Shattering the Myths of Darwinism.^[1]

In the book, Milton argues that there are fundamental flaws in a wide variety of scientific fields, calling into question accurate radiometric dating, uniformitarian geology, the gradualist fossil record, natural selection, transitional fossils, biogenetic law, vestigial organs, homology, and the missing link.

Milton asserts that he has no religious beliefs and stresses that he is not a creationist.

He also runs a website called www.alternativescience,com where he writes on topics outside the prevalent reductionistic/mechanistic paradigm in science. In the early 1990s, BBC TV ran a series called Heretics about people in history who had shown the temerity to speak out against the scientific ideas of their time. Milton was a consultant.

[edit] Criticisms

Noted scientist Richard Dawkins described^[2] The Facts of Life as "twaddle that betrays, on almost every page, complete and total pig-ignorance of the subject at hand." He also said there that its "loony" author was in need of "psychiatric help". All this in response to purely scientific reporting.

In the introduction to subsequent editions of his book, Milton observed that these were not the words of a scientist. They were the words of a religious fanatic whose creed had been profaned. When challenged to debate Darwinism with Milton (or indeed with anyone) Dawkins has run away. On the one occasion when he did debate it at an Oxford College in the early 1990s, he lost. As Milton points out at his website, www.alternativescience.com , in a supposedly open and liberal society, criticism of neo-Darwinian theory is still taboo, and details an incident where, after the Times Higher Education Supplement announced that they would be publishing an article by him criticising the Darwinian theory, Richard Dawkins lobbied the editor, Auriol Stephens, and put pressure upon her to kill the piece. She caved in and did so, offering Milton a fee in compensation. Milton declined the fee but put the article on the internet as an indication of the lengths to which people like Dawkins will go in order to prevent their creed, Darwinism, from being subjected to rational critique.