Piltdown and How Science Really Works [Evolution & Creationism]

When one debates creationists (admittedly a questionable, yet often very satisfying, habit), one is bound to run up against the infamous Piltdown forgery. This is the case of an alleged missing link between humans and so-called lower primates, that was found in England (near Piltdown, in fact) and announced to the world on December 18, 1912. The announcement was made by Arthur Smith Woodward, a paleontologist of the British Museum of Natural History, and Charles Dawson, a local amateur paleontologist, the actual discoverer of the fossils.

The problem is-as creadonists never tire to point out-that the "Dawn Man of Piltdown" (scientific name Eoanthropus dawsoni, in honor of its discoverer) turned out to be a fake. Moreover, it took scientists four decades to find out! see what happens when one takes the doctrine of evolution on faith, as one's secular religion? QED.

Many scientists are rather embarrassed by the Piltdown debacle, somehow managing to feel guilty and indirectly responsible for whatever goes wrong in their chosen profession.

And yet, as I shall endeavor to explain, Piltdown should be presented in all introductory biology textbooks as a perfect example of how science actually works! Let us briefly see how the hoax unfolded. A complete and engaging version of the story can be found in the 1955 classic, The Piltdown Forgery by J.S. Weiner (one of the scientists who eventually uncovered the truth), recently re-issued by Oxford University Press with a new introduction and afterword.

Before Piltdown, very little of the human fossil record was known. When Darwin wrote The Descent of Man, he had to rely largely on comparative data from other living species of primates, for only the clearly almost-human Neanderthals were known to paleontologists. A few years before Piltdown, however, two important discoveries were made: that of Java man in 1891 and Heidelberg man in 1907, neither of which were very ancient. When a significantly older set of prehuman remains was allegedly found at Piltdown, the scientific world was simply ready for the discovery. It was what practitioners in the field had expected, something that surely the perpetrator of the hoax knew very well.

Supposed evidence of Piltdown man was found on more than one occasion at two separate sites: fragments of skulls, of a lower jaw, and even of stone tools associated with the "culture" of these predawn men. While there were skeptics from the beginning, the hoax was simply too elaborate and cunningly put together to raise the suspicion of a significant number of paleontologists. National pride probably also played a role in a professional establishment that at the time was dominated by British scientists, with the British Museum being the epicenter of all the activities surrounding the study of the Piltdown fossils.

Yet suspicions about the authenticity of Eoanthropus dawsoni grew, until a group of researchers, including Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, Kenneth Oakley, and Joe Weiner, applied stringent chemical tests to the remains, demonstrating that the "fossils" had been planted and chemically altered to make them seem appropriately ancient: the Dawn Man was nothing but a perfectly ordinary human skull paired up with a somewhat unusually small jaw from an orangutan. What Weiner and colleagues couldn't say for sure was who carried out the hoax, although a strong case was then made by Weiner in his 1955 book that the perpetrator was none other than Dawson himself. [See also review of Miles Russell, Piltdown Man, on p. 50.]

Be that as it may, what does this story tell us about how science works? Well, on the negative side, it is painfully clear that science depends on an assumption of honesty on the part of its practitioners. Peer review is focused on uncovering methodological or reasoning errors, not possible frauds. But since science is, after all, a human activity, egos, money, and the search for glory- however brief-are still to be reckoned with. As Piltdown and other forgeries have shown, scientists are continuously open to the possibility of someone fooling them by not playing by the rules of the game.

On the other hand, science is a social activity unlike any other that human beings engage in: it is a game of discovery played against a powerful but neutral opponent, nature itself. And nature cannot be fooled, at least not for long. The reason suspicions kept mounting about the true origin of the Piltdown remains was that the more paleontologists uncovered about human evolution, the less Dawn Man seem to fit with the rest of the puzzle. In a sense, the very factor that made the acceptance of Eoanthropus dawsoni so fast in the beginning-because it seemed to be the much sought-after "missing link" in human evolution-was also the reason why, four decades later, scientists kept pursuing the possibility that it was not genuine after all.

While four decades of delay may seem an inordinate amount of time, they are but the blink of an eye when compared to the history of the human quest for knowledge. Moreover, it is important to note that it was scientists who uncovered the hoax, not creationists, which is both an immense credit to the self-correcting nature of science and yet another indication that creationism is only a religious doctrine with no power of discovery.

This is, then, why Piltdown-far from being an embarrassment - should be prominently featured in biology textbooks: it is an example of how the nature of science is not that of a steady, linear march toward the Truth but rather of a tortuous road, often characterized by dead ends and U-turns, yet ultimately progressing toward a better, if tentative, understanding of the natural world.

Massimo Pigliucci is a professor of evolutionary biology at SUNY- Stony Brook, and the author of Denying Evolution: Creationism, Scientism and the Nature of Science. His essays can be found at www.rationallyspeaking.org.

The marsupial wolf and grey wolf might look similar, but from what I understand they are same design reached in different ways.

They are both medium-sized four-legged mammalian carnivores, but one is fashioned from placental mammal and one is fashioned from marcupial mammal. From an Intelligent Design perspective it is as if two seperate designers tried their hand at a dog-like creature.

From a scientific point of view, it is no mystery that in two seperated regions, beasts available would evolve to fill the sucessful niche for medium-sized four-legged carnivore. Obviously there are optimum feature-designs to take advantage of this niche, such as jaw shape, skull shape and tooth shape. So it makes sense that both seperated populations would converge on this optimum design, but from different starting points.

"Why is this not science?"

I didn't claim it was. You seem to be under the impression that science is the only method of obtaining truth. This is incorrect. Science is very good at what it does. However, it is limitted. As you say, no matter what, if a designer whose purposes are unknown designed the universe, science would not be able to say so. That does not mean that those who say creation didn't happen are correct, or even say that creationism doesn't have evidence. It simply says that science cannot make such a hypothesis. If science makes a hypothesis based on the fact that it has excluded the other possibilities a priori, forgive me if I hold their interpretations a little in suspect.

"From an Intelligent Design perspective it is as if two seperate designers tried their hand at a dog-like creature"

Or one designer thought "I wonder what this would look like as a marsupial".

Have you ever ported a program just to see what design changes you would need to accomodate a different toolkit? Or rewrote a program you wrote earlier in a new language to see how the language would affect the program design?

"Obviously there are optimum feature-designs to take advantage of this niche, such as jaw shape, skull shape and tooth shape."

It is not obvious that there are so few. It is also not obvious why different continents/climates would produce such similar creatures. It is also not obvious that the same design can have a continual stream of stable intermediates from such diverse starting points.

Natural selection.

Hooray! Not many of you could have done even that much, religious horror and all that. Now, for the peanut gallery, all the forbidden and unknowable words together:

The theory of evolution says that the diversity of life on Earth is the result of common descent, diversifying through variation and natural selection.

However, that is unimportant to my point...

Wrong! You "forgot" it because random variation *acting alone* would not likely produce a change in any consistent direction over time. (Actually, it still would but the direction would be random and the progress would be achingly slow.) By comparision, high selection pressures are conceded to work, sometimes rapidly. ("But it's only microevolution and nobody disputes that! Blah! Blah!") Your point was an argument from incredulity against randomness moving things in a clear direction so you "forgot" the non-random part. Cheap, dirty, and dishonest, but par for the creation science course.

... because the only things available to be selected are those produced by random copying errors, and, in some rare cases, horizontal gene transfers.

It doesn't matter if the "only" source of variation is random copying errors. (But it isn't. There are non-copy-error mutations and you forgot sexual recombination.)

It matters that evolution is the joint action of two things and for strawman purposes you left one off.

"Or one designer thought "I wonder what this would look like as a marsupial"."

Good you've made a hypothesis. It is a shame that Intelligent Design Theory does not allow such hypothesising about the designer. It is a lie that if life is intelligently designed, nothing can be infered about the designer. We have so many facts about past life, present life and it's distribution that lots of properties of the intelligent designer(s) can be deduced.

Here are some facts:
-Australia has marsupial mammals, while mammals in the rest of the world are placental.
-The fossil record shows that both marsupial and placental mammals have changed over time. So this is not an instant design, rather it was cumulative stepped design much like Windows 98 was a design based upon Windows 95. The marcupial wolf was based on previous marcupial designs. In fact all of the marcupials of australia were designed in many versions over many millions of years.

So given these facts does it look like motive of creating the marsupial wolf was due to curiosity based on the grey wolf?
Well no. The facts show that the steps to reaching both grey wolf and marsupial wolf were established millions of years before any dog-like designs were even in place. So either the designer(s) started out with the intention of reaching two types of dog-like mammals, or that both are dog-like is just a coincidence given the similar niche that exists in both areas (this is more like the evolutionary explaination).

That said you really have to question that marsupials and placentals are the result of the same designer. All intelligent designers have a motive for designing. Yet if no motive can be produced for a single designer to create two similar beasts using different methods then multiple designers is a far better theory.

For example two seperate designers, Microsoft and Macintosh have produced two seperate lineages of similar looking operating systems. This appears very much like how two different lineages of mammal exist. So from our experience of Intelligent Design it seems likely that multiple designers were at work in creating life.

Actually if we persue the logic of the Intelligent Designer(s) further we would inevitably run into contradictions and real stupidity. Some of the greatest problems have to be as to why island life is so often similar to nearby mainland life. This is easily explained via evolution, but what possible motive is there for intelligent designer(s) to spread out their designs like this? We seriously end up with the ridiculous notion that there are millions of intelligent designers all tinkering with different species throughout time (ooh looks like we've reached evolution, but with supernatural thrown in).

I think it would be hillarious to muddy the Intelligent Design waters by setting up an institute of Multiple Intelligent Design that argued that the evidence is clearly on the side of multiple designers, not a single designer. Furthermore if regular Intelligent Design really does make headway into schools as the theory that explains life is designed, then Multiple Intelligent Design would follow as the theory that explains the designers.

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