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*Heidelberg Man Built from a jaw bone that was conceded by many to be quite human.
*Nebraska Man Scientifically built up from one tooth and later found to be the tooth
of an extinct pig
*Piltdown Man The jawbone turned out to belong to a modern ape
*Peking Man 500,000 years old. All evidence has disappeared.
*Neanderthal Man At the Int'l. of Zoology (1958) Dr. A. J. E. Cave said his
examination showed that the famous Neanderthal found in France
over 50 years ago is that of an old man who suffered from arthritis.
*New Guinea Man Dates away back to 1970 . . . The species has been found in the
region just north of Australia.
*Cro-Magnon Man One of the earliest and best established fossils is at least equal in
physique and brain capacity to modern man, so what's the difference?
It's important to remember that even today we vary much in our makeup. If football player and a ballerina died today, was buried, and dug up 100 years from now they would look extremely different. Their height, bone thickness and density, (depending on the race) face structure would vary, yet we all know they are all very human!
An inquest into Piltdown Man doesn't seem to offer much cheer to those of us who think that science is a legitimate enterprise that has drawn a credible chart of human evolution. Anyone conversant with the Piltdown history will readily, if not eagerly, agree that many of the researchers shaped reality to their heart's desire, protecting their theories, their careers, their reputations, all of which they lugged into the pit with them. As for the historians' search for the hoaxer, all the suspects were long dead before the assessments of their culpability began.
It is hard to know which particular mistakes we should pluck out of the cornucopia of error as examples of what went wrong. Dawson had a personal investment in enhancing his wizardry and, among other follies, invented ravenous bacteria to scavenge out a pulp cavity; Woodward stitched a human condyle onto an ape's jaw; Keith and Smith tumbled into a macho confrontation over who was the better reconstructionist of crania;
The fundamentalists generalize from Piltdown Man to the entire study of human evolution. McCann wrote in 1922: "The Piltdown remains disclose the ease with which 'missing links' between apes and men can be fabricated by resort to wide stretches of the imagination in support of pre-conceived theories." In 1967, the Watchtower's Did Man Get Here by [236] Evolution or Creation? shoved Piltdown Man forward as Exhibit A of the way evolutionists manufacture facts. In 1979, Duane Gish, of the Institute for Creation Research, likewise wrote of Piltdown Man: "The success of this monumental hoax served to demonstrate that scientists, just like everyone else, are very prone to find what they are looking for." You can hardly blame the fundamentalist philosophers for occasionally whipping Piltdown Man, the bad boy of evolutionary theory.
The historians Broad and Wade support the view that scientists not only make mistakes but deliberately commit fraud, and not just now and then. Their Betrayers of the Truth (1982) divined that scandalous fudging is epidemic in science. They investigated thirty-four betrayals since the [237] Renaissance, such as Newton's tailoring data to suit his theories on optics, Mendel's making up statistics to prove particulate inheritance, and Piltdown Man. Thirty-four cases doesn't sound like a warehouse, but the authors calculated that, behind every one that becomes public, 100,000 others, major and minor, "lie concealed in the marshy waters of the scientific literature." That means that the waters of the marsh are clogged with 3,400,000 scientific frauds, 100,000 of which are of the Piltdown tribe.
Philosophers whose premise has it that science is irrational also give aid and comfort to fundamentalists. Karl Popper (1934) rejected science as a system that can attain truth or even probability. Science, argued Thomas Kuhn (1962), is dominated by theory. A given theory, or paradigm, acts like a magnet, orienting data into the direction it wants. The paradigm is discarded not because it is found to be untrue but because it grows too cumbersome, or tiresome, or homely. Science is not incremental; it doesn't bring us any closer to any "true account of nature." Paul Feyerabend (1975) went beyond Kuhn as Kuhn went beyond Popper, as though in a contest to see who could be most corrosive. "Science knows no 'bare facts' at all," he declared. Scientists are dogmatic, and their method is "putrid."
Once in a while, the ideas of philosophical irrationalists drift down to flavor the rhetoric of philosophical fundamentalists. Henry Morris, director of the Institute for Creation Research and an incorrigible exponent of creationism, wrote, "The proper term is not 'scientific theory' or even scientific hypothesis, but 'scientific model' or 'paradigm' or some such title" (Morris, 1981). The paradigm that our ancestors had a large brain and an ape's snout directed Edwardian researchers to find specimens with a large brain and an ape's snout. Today's paleontological paradigm directs researchers to find fossil anthropoids with a small brain and a human jaw. And they're found.
Dr. Gary E. Parker, also of the ICR, focused on Piltdown Man as an example of how fleeting evolutionary paradigms are:
At least Piltdown Man answers one often-asked question: "Can virtually all scientists be wrong about such an important matter as human origins?" The answer, most emphatically is, "Yes, and it wouldn't be the first time." Over 500 doctoral dissertations were done on Piltdown, yet all this intense scrutiny failed to expose the fake. Students may rightly wonder what today's "facts of evolution" will turn out to be in another 40 years. (Parker, 1981)
For their two-model program, they can find support in Popper: science isn't objective; in Kuhn: science isn't incremental; and especially in Feyerabend, who warned that the scientists want to take over and not give a chance to those who hold other ideas (such as the ideas that people can levitate and change into wolves). Though an epistemological anarchist whose heart belongs to Dada, Feyerabend nevertheless pled for state intervention. "Ye must stop the scientists from taking over education and from teaching as 'fact' and as 'the one true method' whatever the myth of the day happens to be." In that, he touches on a political program which, though frivolous in prose (the Dadaist is "utterly unimpressed by any serious attitude"), is potentially dangerous.
For close to forty years, Eoanthropus dawsoni, a.k.a. Piltdown Man, was taught as fact. His australopithecine and pithecanthropine relatives are still taught as fact. If they are really as mythical as he was, then it seems the just thing to do would be to give equal time to competing facts or myths.
The exposé incited criticism of evolutionary science. Earnest Hooton feared that its revelation of "calculated dishonesty" would have unpleasant consequences for biological science, heating up latent hostility to the theory of human evolution. "Already the press is flooded with accusations by anti-evolutionists that all the other evidence of man's origin from an ape-like ancestor has been deliberately faked by unscrupulous scientists" (Hooton, 1954).
Gertrude Himmelfarb, in The Darwinian Revolution (1959), wrote that Piltdown Man was a disaster for evolutionary theory because so many scientists either welcomed it or rationalized it into harmony with their prejudices.
Now that he has been kicked out of the family, evolutionary theory is left without "the much desired link, and even without such antiquity as Piltdown offered." Actually, the present inventory of links (or twigs) stores thousands of prehistoric hominid specimens, from frontal bones down to footprints.
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