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Piltdown Man
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Not to be confused with The Piltdown Men.
"Piltdown" redirects here. For the village in East Sussex, see Piltdown, East Sussex.
Group portrait by John Cooke, 1915. Back row (from left): F O Barlow, G ****** Smith, Charles Dawson, Arthur Smith Woodward. Front row: A S Underwood, Arthur Keith, W P Pycraft, and Sir Ray Lankester.
The Piltdown Man was a paleoanthropological hoax in which bone fragments were presented as the fossilised remains of a previously unknown early human. These fragments consisted of parts of a skulland jawbone, said to have been collected in 1912 from a gravel pit atPiltdown, East Sussex, England. The Latin name Eoanthropus dawsoni ("Dawson's dawn-man", after the collector Charles Dawson) was given to the specimen. The significance of the specimen remained the subject of controversy until it was exposed in 1953 as a forgery, consisting of the lower jawbone of an orangutan deliberately combined with the cranium of a fully developed modern human.
The Piltdown hoax is perhaps the most famous paleoanthropological hoax ever to have been perpetrated. It is prominent for two reasons: the attention paid to the issue of human evolution, and the length of time (more than 40 years) that elapsed from its discovery to its full exposure as a forgery.
More failure.
Archaeological Forgeries
There is no fossil evidence to support the "ape-man" image, which is unceasingly promulgated by the media and evolutionist academic circles. With brushes in their hands, evolutionists produce imaginary creatures, nevertheless, the fact that these drawings correspond to no matching fossils cons utes a serious problem for them. Despite the fact that no complete "transitional form" fossil has ever been found, the theory of evolution is taught more than ever in classrooms around the world. We keep finding more and more huge burial sites of dinosaurs, which are supposedly 65 million years old, yet we cannot find a single skeleton of a half man, half ape, pre-human being. Such fossils should stand a much better chance of being preserved, since they would only be maybe tens of thousands of years old, not millions as with the dinosaurs (in the evolutionist's timeline). Now why do you suppose this is? Maybe simply because evolution never happened? If evolution were true, we would find at least thousands of skeletons of the "transitional" skeletons shown in the evolutionist drawing below. Now if I were a believer in evolution, I would need to seriously question my faith in the absence of any such skeletons.
But since there aren't any such skeletons, one of the interesting methods evolutionists employ to overcome this problem is to "produce" the fossils they cannot find.
Evolutionists present much of their finds as if they were compelling and factual explanations to human evolution. In fact, they base their conclusions on mere speculation and often the flimsiest of 'finds'. Many discoveries of supposed hominids consist of only a mouth fragment, a leg bone, a hip bone, or a knee joint. On this alone, they have considered it to be a hominid. They even name it, reconstruct what it looked like, and present it to the public as a fact. Some of these finds have turned out to be those of a pig, donkey, or the result of a hoax.
Piltdown Man, which may be the biggest scandal in the history of science, is a typical example of this method.
Piltdown Man
In 1912, a well-known doctor and amateur paleoanthropologist named Charles Dawson came out with the assertion that he had found a jawbone and a cranial fragment in a pit in Piltdown, England. Even though the jawbone was more ape-like, the teeth and the skull were like a man's. These specimens were labelled the "Piltdown man". Alleged to be 500,000 years old, they were displayed as an absolute proof of human evolution in several museums. For more than 40 years, many scientific articles were written on "Piltdown man", many interpretations and drawings were made, and the fossil was presented as important evidence for human evolution. No fewer than 500 doctoral theses were written on the subject. While visiting the British Museum in 1921, leading American paleoanthropologist Henry Fairfield Osborn said "We have to be reminded over and over again that Nature is full of paradoxes" and proclaimed Piltdown "a discovery of transcendent importance to the prehistory of man.
In 1949, Kenneth Oakley from the British Museum's Paleontology Department, attempted to use "fluorine testing", a new test used for determining the date of fossils. A trial was made on the fossil of the Piltdown man. The result was astonishing. During the test, it was realised that the jawbone of Piltdown Man did not contain any fluorine. This indicated that it had remained buried no more than a few years. The skull, which contained only a small amount of fluorine, showed that it was not older than a few thousand years old.
It was determined that the teeth in the jawbone belonging to an orangutan, had been worn down artificially and that the "primitive" tools discovered with the fossils were simple imitations that had been sharpened with steel implements.65 In the detailed analysis completed by Joseph Weiner, this forgery was revealed to the public in 1953. The skull belonged to a 500-year-old man, and the jaw bone belonged to a recently deceased ape! The teeth had been specially arranged in a particular way and added to the jaw, and the molar surfaces were filed in order to resemble those of a man. Then all these pieces were stained with potassium dichromate to give them an old appearance. These stains began to disappear when dipped in acid. Sir Wilfred Le Gros Clark, who was in the team that uncovered the forgery, could not hide his astonishment at this situation and said: "The evidences of artificial abrasion immediately sprang to the eye. Indeed so obvious did they seem it may well be asked-how was it that they had escaped notice before?"66 In the wake of all this, "Piltdown man" was hurriedly removed from the British Museum where it had been displayed for more than 40 years.
Nebraska Man
In 1922, Henry Fairfield Osborn, the director of the American Museum of Natural History, declared that he had found a fossil molar tooth belonging to the Pliocene period in western Nebraska near Snake Brook. This tooth allegedly bore common characteristics of both man and ape. An extensive scientific debate began surrounding this fossil, which came to be called "Nebraska man", in which some interpreted this tooth as belonging to Pithecanthropus erectus, while others claimed it was closer to human beings. Nebraska man was also immediately given a "scientific name", Hesperopithecus haroldcooki.
Many authorities gave Osborn their support. Based on this single tooth, reconstructions of the Nebraska man's head and body were drawn. Moreover, Nebraska man was even pictured along with his wife and children, as a whole family in a natural setting.
All of these scenarios were developed from just one tooth. Evolutionist circles placed such faith in this "ghost man" that when a researcher named William Bryan opposed these biased conclusions relying on a single tooth, he was harshly criticised.
In 1927, other parts of the skeleton were also found. According to these newly discovered pieces, the tooth belonged neither to a man nor to an ape. It was realised that it belonged to an extinct species of wild American pig called Prosthennops. William Gregory en led the article published in Science in which he announced the truth, "Hesperopithecus: Apparently Not an ape Nor a man. Then all the drawings of Hesperopithecus haroldcooki and his "family" were hurriedly removed from evolutionary literature.
Ota Benga
After Darwin advanced the claim with his book The Descent of Man that man evolved from ape-like living beings, he started to seek fossils to support this contention. However, some evolutionists believed that "half-man half-ape" creatures were to be found not only in the fossil record, but also alive in various parts of the world. In the early 20th century, these pursuits for "living transitional links" led to unfortunate incidents, one of the cruellest of which is the story of a Pygmy by the name of Ota Benga.
Ota Benga was captured in 1904 by an evolutionist researcher in the Congo. In his own tongue, his name meant "friend". He had a wife and two children. Chained and caged like an animal, he was taken to the USA where evolutionist scientists displayed him to the public in the St Louis World Fair along with other ape species and introduced him as "the closest transitional link to man". Two years later, they took him to the Bronx Zoo in New York and there they exhibited him under the denomination of "ancient ancestors of man" along with a few chimpanzees, a gorilla named Dinah, and an orang-utan called Dohung. Dr William T. Hornaday, the zoo's evolutionist director gave long speeches on how proud he was to have this exceptional "transitional form" in his zoo and treated caged Ota Benga as if he were an ordinary animal. Unable to bear the treatment he was subjected to, Ota Benga eventually committed suicide.68
Piltdown Man, Nebraska Man, Ota Benga... These scandals demonstrate that evolutionist scientists do not hesitate to employ any kind of unscientific method to prove their theory. Bearing this point in mind, when we look at the other so-called evidence of the "human evolution" myth, we confront a similar situation. Here there are a fictional story and an army of volunteers ready to try everything to verify this story.
Java Man - Pekin Man
Fossils discovered on the islands of Java in 1891 and 1892 were given the name Java Man (Pithecanthropus erectus). Fossils discovered near Peking (Beijing) in 1923-1927 were given the name Pekin Man (Sinanthropus pekinensis). In 1939, however, two experts, Ralph von Koenigswald and Franz Weidenreich, revealed that both were actually normal human beings. And Ernst Mayr from Harvard University had classified both as human in 1944.
Neanderthal Man
After the first specimens were discovered in the Neander Valley in 1856, evolutionists suggested that Neanderthals were primitive ape-men. Subsequent archaeological discoveries, however, revealed that there was no scientific basis to that claim. Erik Trinkhaus, an expert on the subject of the Neanderthals and also an evolutionist, has admitted that, “Detailed comparisons of Neanderthal skeletal remains with those of modern humans have shown that there is nothing in Neanderthal anatomy that conclusively indicates locomotor, manipulative, intellectual, or linguistic abilities inferior to those of modern humans.”
In addition, the size of the Neanderthal Man skull—200 cubic centimeters greater than that of present-day humans—reveals the invalidity of the claim that it was an intermediate form between humans and apes.
The Taung Child
A fossil skull discovered by Raymond Dart in South Africa in 1924 was initially depicted as a supposed ancestor of man. However, contemporary evolutionists can no longer maintain that it represents such an ancestor—because it subsequently transpired that the skull belonged to a young gorilla! The famous anatomist Bernard Wood stated that this fossil cons utes no evidence in favor of evolution in an article published in New Scientist magazine.
Ramapithecus
A partial jawbone, consisting of two parts, was discovered by G.E. Lewis in India in the 1930s. Based on these two jaw bone fragments, claimed to be 14 million years old, evolutionists reconstructed Ramapithecus’s family and supposed natural habitat. For fifty years, the fossil was portrayed as an ancestor of Man but following the results of a 1981 anatomical comparison with a baboon skeleton, evolutionists were forced to quietly set it aside.
Australopithecines
Australopithecines are a group of extinct apes closely related to modern chimpanzees and orangutans. Although many evolutionists use the remains of these extinct apes to try to prove human evolution, the weight of scientific evidence indicates clearly that australopithecines, such as Ardipithecus (ARDI) and Australopithecus Afarensis (LUCY), were only primeval apes and not the evolutionary ancestors of humankind.
Lucy
This fossil, discovered in Africa in 1974, was widely esteemed by evolutionists and was the subject of some of the most intensive speculation. Recently however, it has been revealed that Lucy (A. afarensis) had an anatomy ideally suited to climbing trees and was no different from other apes we are familiar with. The French scientific journal Science et Vie covered the story in 1999 under the headline “Adieu, Lucy.” One study, performed in 2000, discovered a locking system in Lucy’s forearms enabling it to walk using the knuckles, in the same way as modern-day chimps.In a recent study, Tel Aviv University anthropologists determined that Lucy’s lower jaw bone is some kind of gorilla jaw bone. Other parts of the skeleton are just like the bones of knuckle-dragging, tree-climbing gorillas. Yet Lucy has been Evolutionism's poster child. Very creatively designed sculptures of Lucy appear in tax-funded museums, and these sculptures are hoaxes, not following the obvious ape-like bone structures, but rather dishonestly presenting Lucy as if she had human-like bone structures. This is typical Evolutionary flim-flam. Evolutionists fool themselves first because of their confirmation bias. Everything looks like part of the evolutionary dream, because or Evolutionism's presupposition.
As a result, the evolutionary researchers concluded that Lucy should no longer be considered man’s direct ancestor. As is typically the case in the field of human evolution, a single bone structure overturns years of grossly exaggerated claims. In the face of all these findings, many evolutionist experts declared that Lucy could not have been a forerunner of man.
See creation.com/no-more-love-for-lucy for more info.
So at the end of the day I was right and RG was wrong about a parent being responsible for their child.
Read up on the idiots running the Jehovah's Witness cult:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watch_T...ed_predictions
You can't make this up.
They have, rightly, shut the up about "jesus is juuust around the corner" recently, though.
The kinds of bull excuse-making required to still believe this bunch is credible explains Churchlady Bob's penchant for ignoring and making excuses.
Avante pining for a pat on the head for a thread he barely participated in
By Editorial Staff
Published December 22, 2007
The science of finding and identifying man’s “prehistoric ancestors” runs in a predictable pattern. A press conference is announced, the discovery of an ape-like “ancestor” revealed with an artist’s impression of what the creature looks like, and the discoverer becomes famous, earning money on lecture tours. The actual fossil bones are scanty and the imagination runs wild. Later, when more evidence is found, the “ancestor” turns out to be totally human or totally ape. The Neanderthal man is an example of one find that turns out to be totally human. Once this find is removed as an intermediate form, you can expect another great discovery to save the day. The latest discovery is “Lucy.”
If you are of the impression that there are many intermediate ancestors to man, take notice of the following statement by an expert in the field: “The fossils that decorate our family tree are so scarce that there are still more scientists than specimens. The remarkable fact is that all the physical evidence we have for human evolution can still be placed with room to spare inside a single coffin.“1
This is still an exaggeration since it concedes that various specimens are part of human evolution. Australopithecines, for example, are not considered transitional forms anymore, but a branch of the primate evolutionary tree. True transitional forms are still missing. (“Transitional forms” refer to those creatures which represent intermediate states of development for a supposed ape-like ancestor down to man.)
But what about Lucy? This most recent discovery in Africa is being heralded by many as a true transitional form, typically a replacement for the outmoded australopithecines. Could this be hasty judgment? Let’s examine the evidence. Lucy is a partial fossil skeleton, about the size of a chimpanzee, supposedly female, discovered by paleontologist Dr. Donald Johanson on November 30, 1974, in Hadar, Ethiopia. It is more complete than most fossil finds in that about 40 percent of the bones of the body have been recovered.
The age is “estimated” to be 3.2 million years. The find includes a V-shaped jaw, part of hip and large bones, and other assorted bones with very little skull fragments.2 There were other finds at the same location, other skulls and U-shaped jawbones.
What evidence makes this creature a transitional form? According to Dr. Johanson, she walked upright! Her brain size is still small, ape-like in proportion, and most of the other features are predominantly ape-like. Some say that anatomically it is not different than a modern chimpanzee. The jaw, in particular, is distinct in that it is V-shaped, totally unlike human jaws.
And what evidence supports the idea that this creature walked upright? The angle that the upper leg bone makes with the lower leg bone at the knee. Looking head on, chimpanzee and gorilla legs have an angle of 0 degrees. Humans have an angle of about 9 degrees. If the angle is much greater it gives a “knocked kneed” condition in humans. Lucy and the australophithecines have a larger angle of about 15 degrees.3
Does this make her an upright walker? Present day orangutan and spider monkeys have the same angle as humans yet are extremely adept tree climbers. Some experts argue that the higher angle makes her a better climber.4 This appears to be a knee-jerk reaction rather than clear scientific thinking.
But hold on, the story gets better. Dr. Johanson gave a lecture at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, Nov. 20, 1986, on Lucy and why he thinks she is our ancestor. It included the ideas already mentioned and that Lucy’s femur and pelvis were more robust than most chimps and therefore, “could have” walked upright. After the lecture he opened the meeting for questions. The audience of approximately 800 was quiet so some creationists asked questions. Roy Holt asked; “How far away from Lucy did you find the knee?” (The knee bones were actually discovered about a year earlier than the rest of Lucy). Dr. Johanson answered (reluctantly) about 200 feet lower (!) and two to three kilometers away (about 1.5 miles!). Continuing, Holt asked, “Then why are you sure it belonged to Lucy?” Dr. Johanson: “Anatomical similarity.” (Bears and dogs have anatomical similarities).
After the meeting, the creationists talked with Dr. Johanson and continued the questions. Dr. Johanson argued that logy (particularly DNA logy) is good proof for evolution. Tom Willis responded that “similar structures nearly always have similar plans, (like) similar bridges have similar blue prints.” After more discussion along this line, Dr. Johanson gave this amazing reply: “If you don’t believe logy, then you don’t believe evolution, and evolution is a fact!“5
What about Lucy? Just another partial find of some primate, put together to look like a human ancestor? Could the wide separation of Lucy’s bones (200 feet by 1 mile) better point to a catastrophic scenario – such as a world wide flood?
What about Dr. Johanson’s credibility? To his credit, he does talk about the tentative nature of this type of science. But another evolutionary writer says this about the search for humanlike ( nid) bones; “When it comes to finding a new ‘star’ as our animal ancestor, there is no business like bone business.“6
Tom Willis, the creationist who attended the U. of Missouri lecture puts it this way, “By any reasonable standards, Johanson misrepresented the evidence and he did so for money! A businessman who made claims like those to sell his products would be charged with fraud rather than be paid an honorarium.“7 Regardless of the motives involved for finding our evolutionary “ancestor”, we can be sure that when Lucy is acknowledged as an evolutionary dead end, there will be another press conference with another knee-jerk explanation.
scientists never claim to get it right every time.Science, so stupid. Always getting wrong. See how easy that is?
But the Bible does.
And it's always getting wrong.
The Stone Age Discoveries of Shinichi Fujimura, 2000
As a young man, Shinichi Fujimura developed an interest in Japan's pre-history and taught himself archaeology. Soon he was making spectacular finds that caught the attention of researchers around the world. By the age of 50, he had established himself as one of Japan's leading archaeologists.
One of the 'smoking gun' photographs that showed Fujimura burying artifacts
Fujimura's first major discovery occurred in 1981 when he found stoneware that dated back 40,000 years — the oldest stoneware ever found in Japan. After this discovery his career, and reputation, took off. During the following years, he worked on over 150 archaeological projects around Japan, managing to consistently find increasingly older artifacts that pushed back the limits of Japan's known pre-history. His skill at finding ancient artifacts was so great that a rumor began to spread that he had "divine hands."
Fujimura's career was buoyed by the popularity of archaeology in Japan. Japanese book shops have entire sections devoted to Stone Age Japan, and archaeological discoveries frequently make the front pages of newspapers. School children were taught about Fujimura's finds, and many textbooks contained photographs of Stone Age artifacts discovered by him.
In 2000, Fujimura was excavating a prehistoric site near the town of Tsukidate in the Miyagi Prefecture, about 186 miles northeast of Tokyo. Work at the dig had been proceeding for a while, and a number of important finds had already been made. The town of Tsukidate was enjoying the tourism trade the site attracted. It had created a signature drink, "Early Man," that it sold to tourists, and it had changed its official slogan to "The town with the same skies viewed by early man."
On October 22, 2000 Fujimura and his team announced the discovery of a cluster of stone pieces they believed to be the work of primitive people. They also found several holes that, they hypothesized, had held pillars supporting primitive dwellings. The stones and holes were believed to be over 600,000 years old, making them one of the oldest signs of human habitation in the world. For this reason, the discovery drew international attention.
But on November 5 the Mainichi Shimbun published three pictures on its front page showing Fujimura digging holes at the site and burying artifacts he later dug up and announced as major finds. The artifacts were supposedly Stone Age rocks that had been modified by humans for cutting and scraping. The Mainichi Shimbun had taken the photographs in secret, but did not publish them until it confirmed with Fujimura that he had indeed buried the artifacts himself.
At a press conference on November 5 Fujimura confessed he had planted Stone Age artifacts at the site, and had faked many discoveries. He kept his head bowed in shame during the conference and said, "I was tempted by the Devil. I don't know how I can apologise for what I did... I wanted to be known as the person who excavated the oldest stoneware in Japan."
Fujimura admitted he had planted 27 of the 31 pieces found at the Miyagi site. He also admitted he had planted all 29 pieces found earlier in the year at the Soshinfudozaka archeological site in Shintotsugawa, in the north of Japan. Su ion was immediately cast over all the sites he had ever worked on in Japan.
The revelations shocked the nation and angered Fujimura's colleagues. Hiroshi Kajiwara, a professor at Tohoku Fukushi University, said, "My 20 years of research are ruined . . . Why on earth did he do such a stupid thing?"
Inevitably the question was raised of how Fujimura could have gotten away with such an elaborate deception for so long. Part of the reason lay in the difficulty of dating stone implements. They can only be dated by the stratum in which they are found, meaning that it is almost impossible to differentiate between planted artifacts and real ones.
Some researchers did claim they had noticed that Fujimura's discoveries did not appear to be adequately stained considering their supposed internment for thousands of years. But they had been reluctant to challenge Fujimura on this point because of his strong reputation.
In the wake of the revelations, Fujimura was dismissed from his position as a senior researcher at the Tohoku Paleolithic Ins ute. Publishers frantically tried to find and correct the pictures of his artifacts they had included in their textbooks.
This was not the first time the Japanese archaeological community had been fooled by a hoax. In 1931 it was duped by an amateur archaeologist named Nobuo Naora who discovered what he claimed was the hip bone of a primitive man. Naora even got round to giving his find an official name: 'Akashi Genjin,' after the location where he supposedly found it in the Hyogo Prefecture.
The Piltdown Chicken, 1999
The National Geographic Society held a press conference on October 15, 1999 to announce a major discovery: It had found a 125-million-year-old fossil in northeastern China that appeared to be the long-sought missing link between dinosaurs and birds. For over twenty years paleontologists had debated whether birds were descended from dinosaurs. This fossil seemed to provide conclusive proof they were.
The Piltdown Chicken
(artist's reconstruction)
In addition to the press conference, held at the National Geographic's corporate headquarters, the Society simultaneously published a glossy article about the find in its well-known magazine.
The fossil bird, when living, would have been about the size of a large chicken, or a turkey. But it would have been a turkey that bore the long tail of a dinosaur. It was this mixture of dinosaur and bird parts that made researchers believe they had found the dinosaur-bird missing link. As Christopher Sloan, author of the National Geographic article, enthusiastically wrote, "Its long arms and small body scream 'Bird!' Its long, stiff tail... screams 'Dinosaur!'"
What Sloan didn't realize at the time, was that the body and tail together should have screamed 'Fake!'
Xu Xing, a Chinese scientist who had initially helped to identify the fossil, eventually realized it was a fraud when he found a second fossil containing an exact, mirror-image duplicate of the Archaeoraptor's tail, but attached to a different body. Fossil stones, when taken from the ground, often cleave in two, producing two mirror-image sets of fossil slabs. Evidently someone had taken one of the slabs bearing the tail fossil and affixed it to a fossil of a bird, thereby producing a hybrid dinosaur-bird creature.
National Geographic published an admission of its mistake in March 2000 and a fuller analysis of how it had been duped in October of that year. It admitted red flags had been raised about the discovery at various points, but that it had failed to see them. More seriously, it acknowledged rushing its find into publication before more scholarly journals had the chance to peer-review the data.
U.S. News & World Report was the first to refer to the Archaeoraptor Liaoningensis forgery as the case of the Piltdown Chicken, alluding to the infamous Piltdown Man hoax of 1912.
^ slow
The Sokal Hoax, 1996
An article bearing the portentous le "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" ran in the Spring 1996 issue of the cultural studies journal Social Text. At first glance the article appeared to be an unlikely candidate for controversy. It was written in the typical style of academic articles, slightly overbearing and verbose, and it came armored with a bristling flank of footnotes (more footnotes than actual text). But on the day that the Spring issue of Social Text appeared in print, the author of the article, New York University physics professor Alan Sokal, published a letter in the academic trade publicationLingua Franca revealing his article was actually intended as a parody, a fact which the editorial board of Social Text had failed to recognize.
Social Text, No. 46/47, Spring - Summer, 1996
"Any competent physicist or mathematician (or undergraduate physics or math major) would realize that it is a spoof," Sokal asserted. He suggested that his article's acceptance by the journal pointed to "an apparent decline in the standards of rigor in certan precincts of the academic humanities." He also fumed over "how readily they [Social Text] accepted my implication that the search for truth in science must be subordinated to a political agenda."
The New York Times ran the story of Sokal's revelation on its front page on May 18, and from there the controversy grew.
The New York Times — May 18, 1996
The Article's Content
In his spoof article, Sokal made the case that recent developments in the scientific concept of 'quantum gravity' pointed the way toward a future in which science would be freed from the "tyranny of 'absolute truth' and 'objective reality.'" Or, to put it another way, he argued that the traditional concept of gravity was just a capitalist fiction that would be made irrelevant by the socialist/feminist/relativist theory of 'quantum gravity.'
Alan Sokal
Sokal assumed that this argument should have been self-evidently absurd. An excerpt from the article follows:
Here my aim is to carry these deep analyses one step further, by taking account of recent developments in quantum gravity: the emerging branch of physics in which Heisenberg's quantum mechanics and Einstein's general relativity are at once synthesized and superseded. In quantum gravity, as we shall see, the space-time manifold ceases to exist as an objective physical reality; geometry becomes relational and contextual; and the foundational conceptual categories of prior science — among them, existence itself — become problematized and relativized. This conceptual revolution, I will argue, has profound implications for the content of a future postmodern and liberatory science.Reaction
The hoax elicited many different reactions, but the most common response was laughter.Social Text, and by extension the rest of the cultural studies community, had been made to look like egghead intellectuals adrift in their ivory tower.
Andrew Ross
Social Text responded angrily and self-righteously to the parody, but only succeeded in digging itself deeper into the hole that it had fallen into.
Social Text prided itself on its embrace of radical politics and controversial views. Since its founding in 1979 it had published a variety of articles that were highly influential within the cultural studies community, including pieces by intellectual luminaries such as Cornel West and Michel de Certeau. Its editor, Andrew Ross, who cultivated an image as a hip, radical, intellectual celebrity, set the tone that the journal followed. Nevertheless, the truth was that the journal was not used to receiving much attention outside of its readership base, which was a small, elite group of academics numbering in the hundreds. It was certainly totally unprepared when Sokal's article landed it at the center of an international whirlwind of controversy.
The Social Constructionist Controversy
One of Sokal's specific targets that he designed his hoax to ridicule was the cultural studies concept of "social construction." Cultural studies, he claimed, advanced a destabilizing idea of cultural relativity that professed all forms of knowledge (voodoo, astrology, chemistry, etc.) to be of equal worth, because all were 'socially constructed.' The cultural studies community fiercely objected to this characterization of their ideas, but generally their objections were ignored.
In this way, the Sokal hoax brought to light the cultural schism that had come to separate the humanities from the sciences in the American university system. Humanities departments had grown progresively more radical and liberal since the 1960s, flirting with and often openly embracing ideas such as socialism and cultural relativity. The sciences, on the other hand, fed by massive Cold War funds funneled to them through the Department of Defense, had remained far more conservative (though only in comparison to their counterparts in the humanities). The two had, for the most part, lived peacefully side by side until the humanities began turning their analytical tools upon the sciences themselves. When this happened, the scientists fought back. The Spring issue of Social Text in which Sokal's article appeared had, in fact, been devoted to a study of the so-called 'Science Wars' between the sciences and the humanities.
The Sokal hoax recalled the satirical tactics that had been used to discredit modernizing influences in art and poetry during the early decades of the twentieth century, such as the Spectric poetry hoax of World War One and the Disumbrationist art movement of the 1920s.
So much for doing your own research
Margaret Mead and the Samoans, 1925
In 1925, 24-year-old Margaret Mead traveled to Samoa where she stayed for nine months conducting anthropological research. On her return she wrote Coming of Age in Samoa, which was published in 1928. She portrayed Samoa as a gentle, easy-going society where teenagers grew up free of sexual hang-ups. Premarital sex, she claimed, was common. Rape was unheard of. Young people grew to adulthood without enduring the adolescent trauma typical in western countries. She used these findings to support her thesis that culture, not biology, determines human behavior and personality. The book became an anthropological classic, read by generations of college students.
Margaret Mead (left) poses with the daughter of a chief.
The picture was taken in 1925, during her stay in Samoa.
However, in 1983 New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman published Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, in which he challenged her claims. He argued that the reality of Samoan culture was very different from what Mead had portrayed. Samoans, he insisted, actually had rather puritanical at udes about sex. Rape was common. Men were aggressive. Premarital sex was disapproved of. In fact, a great emphasis was placed upon a woman being a virgin when marrying.
Freeman subsequently suggested that Mead had been the victim of a hoax, played upon her by the teenage girls she had interviewed. They had lied to her, inventing wild tales about premarital sex to impress her. Freeman even tracked down one of her informants (by then an old woman) who admitted exactly this.
The issue remains controversial, though subsequent research has tended to favor Freeman's position. Freeman's supporters point out that Mead knew little of the Samoan language when she did her research, conducting interviews through a translator. She didn't remain in Samoa long enough to become truly familiar with the culture, and she relied on information from a relatively small group of young women.
But Mead's supporters note that Samoan culture changed dramatically between the 1920s and 1980s, becoming much more conservative. Also, it was more likely that the informants would lie to Freeman, a middle-aged man, than to Mead, a young woman close to them in age.
Mead's later ethnographic work, from the 1930s, has also been criticized for having factual errors. For instance, she claimed that the Mountain Arapesh, a tribe of New Guinea yam gardeners, were pacifists, having no knowledge of the concept of war. Other researchers contend that the opposite is true — that approximately half the adult male Arapesh had killed people in battle.
The Case of the Midwife Toad, 1926
If a person acquires a limp during their lifetime, can that limp be passed on to their children? Or if a person acquires a scar, will that scar be hereditary? Modern scientific theory denies this is possible, but a theory called Lamarckianism held that not only was it possible, but it was the means by which evolutionary change occurred.
Paul Kammerer
During the 1920s, Austrian scientist Paul Kammerer designed an experiment involving a species called the Midwife Toad to prove that Lamarckian inheritance was possible.
Most toads mate in water. As a result they have black, scaly bumps on their hindlimbs that help them hang onto each other while they mate. The Midwife Toad, by contrast, mates on land and lacks these bumps. Kammerer wanted to demonstrate that if the Midwife Toad was forced to mate in water, it would eventually acquire the same bumps that naturally water-mating toads possessed — and that the toad's offspring would inherit these bumps via Lamarckian inheritance.
Kammerer filled a fishtank full of water, placed some Midwife Toads in it, and then waited as generations of toads were born and died. Finally he announced success. A generation of Midwife Toads had been born with black scaly marks on their hindlimbs. This appeared to prove that Lamarckian inheritance was possible.
The scientific community was stunned. If true, Kammerer's results would have turned the entire edifice of evolutionary theory on its head, forcing scientists to reevaluate everything they knew about the process of inheritance.
However, when Dr. G.K. Noble, Curator of Reptiles at the American Museum of Natural History, examined Kammerer's famous toads, he discovered that the toads didn't actually possess black, scaly marks on their hindlimbs. Instead, they displayed subcutaneous inkspots where someone had injected black ink beneath the surface of their skin.
When the fraud was unveiled in 1926, Kammerer was humiliated. He insisted he hadn't injected ink into the toads and suggested one of his lab assistants might have done it.
Whoever might have committed the fraud, it was Kammerer that bore the fallout from it. His reputation was ruined. A few days later he committed suicide. With him went the case for Lamarckian inheritance.
Meh. I am happy to admit I get something wrong, and never purposefully make things up.
When corrected I always acknowledge it.
If you want to claim I lie, then you will have to show exactly how.
Your claim, your burden of proof.
My prediction:
You won't, since you are a lazy . Prove I'm lying about that.
The Piltdown Man, 1912
During the early twentieth century the scientific community was eagerly searching for the fossil 'missing link' that would prove an evolutionary relationship between man and apes. In 1907 a jawbone was found in Germany that displayed characteristics of both species. This was the best evidence for a missing link yet, but scientists still wanted something better, something more definitive.
Woodward's reconstruction of the Piltdown man skull
Enter Charles Dawson and the Piltdown Man. Charles Dawson was a solicitor who lived in southern England, near Sussex. He was also an enthusiastic amateur paleontologist. In 1908 some workmen, knowing his interest in fossils, presented him with curious bone fragments that they had found while working in a gravel pit near the town of Piltdown. Dawson's interest was piqued and he soon began conducting his own excavation in the pit. Eventually he enlisted the aid of Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of the Department of Geology at the British Museum.
The real excitement begin in 1912 when Dawson, with Woodward working nearby, found two skull fragments and a very curious jawbone. Given the proximity of the skull fragments and the jawbone to each other, Dawson and Woodward concluded they must have belonged together... that, in fact, they must have been part of the very same skull. This made them extremely excited because, taken as a whole, the skull displayed characteristics of both man and ape. The jaw was ape-like, whereas the upper skull fragments were definitely human. If the jaw and skull fragments did come from the same creature, then they had found the missing link.
Presented to the scientific community
In December, 1912 Woodward displayed a reconstruction of the skull at a meeting of the Geological Society of London. Woodward argued that it was the skull of a man, whom he called Piltdown man (after the location where it had been found). He argued that it came from a human who had probably lived about half a million years ago, during the Lower Pleistocene period.
Charles Dawson (right) at the Piltdown site
Woodward's claim immediately caused an enormous stir within the scientific community. Many felt that the jawbone and skull were simply too dissimilar to belong together. The jaw, they said, looked far more apish than one would expect to find attached to a high-vaulted, human skull. But Woodward's backers eventually won out and the new species entered the textbooks as Eoanthropus dawson, or "Dawson's Dawn Man."
Over the next few years more fossil objects continued to turn up in the Piltdown pit: animal bones, an object that looked like a cricket bat, and two more skulls. Then, in 1916, Dawson died, leaving Woodward as the main advocate for the Piltdown man.
Proven to be a fake
For over three decades the Piltdown skull was accepted by the scientific community as an authentic artifact. But as more skeletons of early man were found, it became clear that the Piltdown Man was radically unlike anything else in the fossil record. Therefore in 1953 a team of researchers at the British Museum (Kenneth Oakley, Wilfred Le Gros Clark, and Joseph Weiner) subjected the skull and jawbone to a rigorous series of tests. What they found was shocking. The skull was a fake.
The Piltdown Man Pub in Piltdown, England
Using a fluorine-based test to date the skull, the researchers determined that the upper skull was approximately 50,000 years old. The jawbone, however, was only a few decades old. A second test, using nitrogen analysis, confirmed the first test. They also found that the jaw had been artificially stained with potassium dichromate to make it appear older. The British Museum researchers argued that someone must have taken the jawbone and teeth of a modern ape, probably an orangutan, and stained them in order to make them look ancient. These artifacts, the jaw and skull fragments, must then have been planted at the Piltdown site.
Having proven fraud, the question that remained was who had been responsible for the deception. Woodward had a strong reputation for honesty, and his innocence was generally acknowledged. Dawson, instead, was fingered as the likely culprit. His motive for perpetrating the hoax was complex, since he never profited from it financially. But it seemed likely that he had done it to gain scientific fame and recognition. After the British Museum team published their findings, it was then discovered that Dawson had trafficked in other fake antiquities. This seemed to confirm that he probably was the culprit behind the Piltdown man hoax.
Today most still agree with the verdict that Dawson was the hoaxer, but controversy continues to simmer. Some argue that Dawson worked with an accomplice, perhaps Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a young priest who briefly participated in the dig. Others place the blame elsewhere entirely. Martin Hinton, an employee at the British Museum whom Woodward once refused a job, has been implicated ever since a boxful of artificially stained bones that may have belonged to him was discovered in 1975. Even Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes novels, has been named as a possible suspect. Doyle lived near Piltdown and had a strong interest in paleontology.
Whoever perpetrated the crime, it is considered to be one of the most damaging scientific hoaxes of all time, because it set the development of evolutionary theory back for years while researchers labored pointlessly to integrate a fake skull into the fossil record.
Father God killed his own children
Pissing on the elders in New York seems to have pissed Churchlday Bob off.
I win the internets.
Yay.
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