dubois@uwmacc.UUCP (Paul DuBois) (02/21/85)
This is part 4 of my response to Bill Jefferys' reply to SOR #4.
------------------------------
>> [Ray Miller]
>>HUMAN EVOLUTION
>> In 1912, Piltdown Man (Eoanthropus dawsoni) was discovered. For over 40
>>years, Piltdown Man was examined by the world's leading authorities, contribut-
>>ing in some part to over 500 doctoral dissertations. But in the 1950's, it was
>>revealed that Piltdown Man was a complete hoax! The ``fossil'' turned out to
>>be nothing more than fragments of an ape's jaw with a human skull treated to
>>look old. Scientists of the time were so desperate to find support for evolu-
>>tion, that even a fraud was accepted as valid data.
> [Bill Jefferys]
> Kenneth Miller again: "To conclude his attack on human evolution, Dr. Gish
> reminded his audience of the Piltdown Man hoax. This is surprising since the
> hoax was revealed and exposed not by anti-evolutionists but by scientists. The
> same techniques that exposed the Piltdown hoax now verify the authenticity of
> the work done by Johanson and others [on *Australopithecus afarensis*]."
Gertrude Himmelfarb, [1959, p. 310]:
"Nor can it be maintained, as some Darwinians have done, that the
exposure of Piltdown Man leaves them no better and no worse off than
they were before. It does, in fact, weaken their position in regard to
both their theory and their methods. The zeal with which eminent
scientists defended it, the facility with which even those who did not
welcome it managed to accommodate themselves to it, and the way in which
the most respected scientific techniques were soberly and painstakingly
applied to it, with the apparent result of confirming both the
genuineness of the fossils and the truth of evolution, are at the very
least suspicious. However earnestly scientists may now disassociate
themselves and their theory from the Piltdown Man, they cannot entirely
wipe out the memory of forty years of labor expended on a deliberate and
not particularly subtle fraud. And not forty years in the remote past,
but forty years which came to an end only as recently as 1953."
> I want to emphasize a major Creationist inconsistency here, since
> the evidence that proved that Piltdown Man was a hoax relied on precisely
> the same physical dating techniques that Creationists otherwise reject as
> evidence of the antiquity of things!
It is not unusual, when presented with a set of propositions, to accept
one of them for the purpose of showing other members of the set to be
inconsistent with it.
But just how would a creationist go about showing Piltdown a hoax,
anyway? If I showed up at the door sporting my William Jennings Bryan
fan club button, do you honestly think I'd have gotten in even to see
it, let alone test it? Not a chance. Even big shots like Louis Leakey
and Arthur Keith were only allowed to see them for a few minutes at a
time.
>> The Nebraska Man (Hesperopithecus haroldcookii) was used in the 1925
>>Scopes trial to ridicule creationists. Nebraska Man consisted of a single
>>tooth, although evolutionists had reconstructed Nebraska Man's entire appear-
>>ance from that tooth. In 1927, the rest of the fossil was uncovered. Nebraska
>>Man was neither an ape-like man nor a man-like ape, but an extinct pig!
> K. Miller: "Gish also mentioned Nebraska Man, for which the evidence turned
> out to be a number of fossilized pig's teeth. However, what he failed to
> mention was that since the discovery of Nebraska Man in 1922, it was
> contested by scientists worldwide. In fact, in every case that creationists
> have pointed out that scientists made errors, the errors were
> originally discovered by scientists themselves - not by creationists
> who have made no significant contribution to the literature of
> evolution."
I do not think that one would expect creationists to make significant
contributions to the literature of *evolution*. It's bad enough that we
can't support our own side of the argument. Do we now have to support
the other side, too? :-)
>>Since humans already existed, Java Man could not
>>have been their ancestor.
> I have already dealt with this silly idea above. Perhaps the particular
> individual excavated by DuBois wasn't ancestral to modern man, but *Homo
> erectus* certainly was.
As I pointed out in the previous article, this "silly idea" has its
roots in evolutionary thinking.
>> Neanderthal Man was originally classified as Homo neanderthalensis, but
> I would like to see Ray's evidence that *Australopithecus afarensis* was
> "nothing more than an extinct ape". His claims that *A. afarensis* did not
> walk upright are contradicted by the discovery earlier this year of a complete
> individual which, according to the reports, clearly walked upright. One should
> also mention (Futuyama, p. 108) that *A. afarensis* is almost identical with
> *Homo habilis*, differing primarily in a smaller brain (450 cc vs. 600 cc.),
> and that H. habilis is clearly associated with extensive manufacture and use
> of pebble tools, a *typically* human activity. Finally, I want to mention that
> the recent NOVA show on Stephen Jay Gould's work definitely showed A. afarensis
> in the human lineage, although A. africanus and A. Robustus were not.
But Kuperberg (speaking of Gould?) says *no species* is on the main
human lineage.
???
---
References
[1] Gertrude Himmelfarb, "Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution". W W
Norton, New York, 1959.
--
Paul DuBois {allegra,ihnp4,seismo}!uwvax!uwmacc!dubois |
--+--
"It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but |
the honor of kings is to search out a matter" |
Proverbs 25:2