February 22, 2007
Ad hominem, strawman, poisoning the well, and appeal to ridicule, all abound within the YE Creationist’s repertoire of clever retorts. These are most easily constructed by dredging up eccentric beliefs from over 50-100 years ago. When I recently told a creationist friend that I did not find modern scientists to be “fudging data in order to hide their fear of God,” I was informed: “These are the same people who taught about Piltdown man to Ramapithecus to the theory of recapitulation to … well you get the picture.” Well no, those people are dead; their claims were falsified and repudiated long ago by scientists who believe in evolution.
The Piltdown hoax was put forward early in the 20th century and definitively exposed as a fraud in 1953 when greater access was granted to the putative “fossils” (though many experts believed it was a forgery soon after it was published). It’s still not clear who carried out the forgery; suspects include Arthur Conan Doyle and the Roman Catholic priest Teilhard de Chardin. Most, however, believe it was the initial “discoverer,” Charles Dawson, acting out of a desire to gain prestige (rather than trying to “prove” evolution). Other suspects may have been motivated by British nationalism and racism. In any case, these people have all been dead for a LONG time, so what’s the point? Perhaps it is of value as a cautionary tale. If so, it applies alike to political, religious, business, and scientific institutions. It certainly doesn’t support a claim that modern scientists, as a group, are in a mass conspiracy to foist evolution on the public with falsified evidence!
Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) was a believer in Lamarckian (not Darwinian) evolution who, in 1866, first propounded his “biogenic” theory of “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” i.e., that individual embryonic development retraces the steps of the evolution of species. He apparently embellished embryo drawings to drive home the point. Biology has rejected this view for some time; see Stephen Jay Gould’s 1977 book: Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Haeckel has been dead for nearly a hundred years. And the point is ….?
The classification of Ramapithecus as an ancestor of humans on the basis of a single jawbone find was more mistake than fraud. Biochemical studies and more fossil finds contributed to the reclassification of the specimens as Sivapithecus - a genus of extinct primates. Apparently some anthropology texts were slow to note the change. This is not fraud - just laziness. Shame on those textbook writers!
I guess I must admit that scientists I know are like many in these stories - the ones that repudiated the falsehoods, that is! Science’s greatest strength is the provisionality of its theories - these may be overthrown at any time if contradictory evidence is discovered. By contrast, a hallmark of pseudo-science is to retain belief in a theory despite strong evidence to the contrary. YE creationists are ardent protagonists of disproven theories (e.g., the “Genesis flood”). As we see above, they also dredge up and criticize extremely outdated ideas as if they were current. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the origin of their “theory” is 2-3,000 years old. On that timescale, a mere 50-100 years seems practically like the present!
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