Occupation writer and journalist Subject Controversies Nationality British Name Richard Milton | Citizenship British Role Journalist Period Contemporary | |
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Genre Fiction and non fiction Movies A Question of Origins: Creation or Evolution Books Shattering the myths of Darwin, Alternative science, Forbidden Science, Dead Secret, Do Your Own PR | ||
Richard Milton (born 1943) is a British journalist and writer who deals with often highly controversial subjects. Milton, an engineer by training, has published on the topics of popular history, business, scientific controversies and alternative science and has published a novel.
Contents
Books
The Facts of Life: Shattering the Myths of Darwinism is a re-evaluation of the Darwinist evolutionary mechanism of the natural selection of genetic mutations. It reports on research in many fields by professional scientists that cast doubt on accepted ideas, which it describes as having become a dogma. In the first edition of the book Milton was supportive of alternative evolutionary mechanisms such as Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics. Milton has criticised neo-Darwinism. Milton also claimed in his book that the earth may be as young as 175,000 years old, based on the amount of helium in the atmosphere. In a review in Third Way Magazine Douglas Spanner, while suggesting that it should be taken seriously by orthodox Darwinism, was dubious about his attempts to dispute traditional methods of estimating the earth's age and said "on matters of biological importance he can be off-course at times".
Controversy
His 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.
The Facts of Life was met with intense criticism from many mainstream academic reviewers. Reviewing it 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".
Milton's claims have been criticised as pseudoscience by philosophy professor Robert Carroll. Milton appeared on The Mysterious Origins of Man, a television special arguing that mankind has lived on the Earth for tens of millions of years, and that mainstream scientists have suppressed supporting evidence.
Milton's claims on the age of mankind have also been criticised for scientific inaccuracy.