Omphalos (book)

Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot is a book by Philip Gosse, written in 1857 (two years before Darwin's On the Origin of Species), in which he argues that the fossil record is not evidence of evolution, but rather that it is an act of creation inevitably made so that the world would appear to be older than it is. The reasoning parallels the reasoning that Gosse chose to explain why Adam (who would have had no mother) had a navel: Though Adam would have had no need of a navel, God gave him one anyway to give him the appearance of having a human ancestry. Thus, the name of the book, Omphalos, which means 'navel' in Greek. Darwin is mentioned several times within the book, but always with considerable respect. Gosse had attended meetings at the Royal Society where evolutionary theory was tested by Darwin before the publication of Origin—and had even made similar observations himself about variation of species in his own studies into marine biology—and considered Darwin's reasoning scientifically sound.

The book was widely rejected at the time, sold few copies, and had almost no supporters. Though the publisher was able to use in advertising an extract from the Natural History Review: "We have no hesitation in pronouncing this book to be the most important and best written that has yet appeared on the very interesting question with which it deals. We believe the logic of the book to be unanswerable, its laws fully deduced", the rest of the sentence in the review reads "and the whole, considered as a play of metaphysical subtlety, absolutely complete; and yet we venture to predict that its conclusions will not be accepted as probable by one in ten thousand readers." The reviewer concluded that Omphalos contained "idle speculations, fit only to please a philosopher in his hours of relaxation, but hardly worthy of the serious attention of any man, whether scientific or not". The geologist Joseph Beete Jukes was more scathing in a later issue: "To a man of a really serious and religious turn of mind, this treatment is far more repulsive than that even of the author of Vestiges of Creation. and the Lamarckian School". The Rev. Charles Kingsley, author of The Water Babies and a friend of Gosse, was asked to review Gosse's book. Refusing, he wrote to Gosse:

For a long time, apart from the discussion in his biography of his father, the only widely read though oblique references to the book were to be found in Father and Son, the psychological portrait of Philip Gosse by his son Edmund Gosse published in 1907. He wrote:

Martin Gardner, in his 1952 book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, observed: "Not the least of its remarkable virtues is that although it won not a single convert, it presented a theory so logically perfect, and so in accord with geological facts that no amount of scientific evidence will ever be able to refute it Not a single truth of geology need be abandoned, yet
the harmony with Genesis is complete". This internal consistency was also discussed by the American biologist Stephen Jay Gould in a 1987 article entitled "Adam's Navel", which has since been republished as a mini book. He comments:

It had earlier been referred to in a short work by Jorge Luis Borges. Roizen has suggested that "perhaps the rejection of Omphalos is a measure of how much—even before the publication of Darwin's earthshaking book—the theological system of assumptions had already waned." In the 1820s and 30s the scriptural geologists had fought a battle against the rise of uniformitarianism and indeed Gosse suggests in his preface that Granville Penn had captured the essence of his argument 30 years previously. The theory presented in the book is now called the omphalos hypothesis: that the world and everything in it could have been created at any time, even mere moments ago, with even our own memories being false indications of its age. This is a largely philosophical position, not a scientific one.