Our campus library sends around a monthly list of recent acquisitions as a service to the academic departments. This past month a book called Evolution and the Humanities materialized on the list. Given my posts on the local Committee on the History and Philosophy of Science and the special task force striving to redefine the goals of a University of California education (including "scientizing the humanists" as well as "humanizing the scientists"), I literally ran to the library to find out what this book was about.

For many years, creationist Robert Gentry has claimed that he's uncovered scientific evidence of a miraculous event. Gentry says that this evidence, halos of a very short-lived isotope (Polonium 218) which lack the inner halo of a longer-lived radioactive parent, undermines the uniformitarian principle. He believes that these halos, "God's fingerprint," demonstrate that natural laws were suspended in the past. He also claims that other miracles occurred in four "singularities," or sets of miraculous events, which are described in the Bible.

What if somebody published a 592-page book to answer all the critics of his previous book? That's what Michael Cremo does in Forbidden Archaeology's Impact. In 1993, Cremo and Richard Thompson published Forbidden Archaeology (FA), a voluminous exposé of "anomalous archaeological artifacts" that suggested modern people possibly lived on earth almost as long as the world existed, some 4.3 billion years ago.