Posted on 03/31/2007 1:09:59 AM PDT by Ethan Clive Osgoode
DARWIN THEORY IS PROVED TRUE!
That headline is from the New York Times. Have you seen similar headlines? I have. Many. "New Fossil Find Bolsters Evolution"... "DNA Proves Camels took to the Seas"... "Darwin Vindicated: Top Scientist evolves Yeast into Yeast", and so on.
I have seen many such headlines in the media, in the last few years alone. But this is, to the best of my knowledge, the original "Darwin Proved True" headline. One can say, in a sense, that all subsequent "Darwin Proved True" articles evolved from this one, the common ancestor of them all, dated (by carbon dating) to Sept 22, 1912.
This is an important fossil find. You will note the similarities to modern-day "Darwin Proved True!" reports, clearly indicating common descent with little modification. The ingredients of a fine modern "Darwin Proved True" tale are all here, of course - the waffling, the exaggeration, the impressive buzz-words, the fantastical embellishments, the self-contradictions, the fairytales. Such as...
A race of ape-like and speechless man, inhabiting England hundreds of thousands of years ago, when they had for their neighbors the mastodon and other animals now extinct is the missing link in the chain in man's evolution, which leading scientists say they have discovered in what is generally described as "the Sussex skull." To this Dr. Woodward proposes to give the name of "eoanthropus," or "man of dawn."
Yes sir, upon this fairytale, the New York Times put the headline "DARWIN THEORY PROVED TRUE", even though the article ends with the lines
There is, he thinks, a point of doubt as to the jawbone. It was not found in the same place as the skull, and he holds it possible that it does not belong to the skull. It is unquestionable apelike and it is not impossible that further examination may show that it does not fit the skull at all.
In other words, it is all nonsense, but nevertheless, DARWIN PROVED TRUE!! And thus began the classic genre of reporting on evolutionary matters, a trend which continues to this day.
This is an important archeological find, of special interest to participants and spectators of the ever-entertaining Darwin wars. But in case you are not familiar with this news article (you should be), I'll tell you what the punchline is. Scroll down to the end of the article...
And this great discovery, upon which it was announced that "DARWIN THEORY PROVED TRUE"! is also affectionally known as...
PILTDOWN MAN !
Before you reply to this, ponder carefully this quote from Scott "Dilbert" Adams:
I should add that the first person to explain that science continuously revises itself -- and that’s what makes it so great! -- has no free will.
As much as I hate to recommend something from PBS, their "Nova"
series had a good episode on the Piltdown phenonmenon.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/hoax/
Well, if ANYTHING shows that it's wrong; THESE two statements in the same article PROVE it!!
I'm not sure I'm understanding what you're getting at. I believe it's a hoax because all of the evidence says it was a hoax.
You know its a hoax only because scientists documented that it is a hoax.
See Coyote thats where you reveal how just the tiniest bit of PHD power can swell the smallest head to explosion. There was back then and always will be, plenty of doubters outside of 'peer review' halls.
And so if scientists had documented that Piltdown and many other debacles were not a hoax, what then?
Science is good when practiced by good men, and many advances can be made on science that is later proved wrong.
But fortunately, how the world turns and much greater questions, are not dependent on the latest greatest scientific answer for them, capiche?
In other words, an accurate fake. I can buy that.
I'm not sure I'm understanding what you're getting at.
He (and others) probably want you to say something like "science proved it was a hoax", to which he will presumably reply with powerfully banal retorts such as "see... science continuously revises itself -- and that’s what makes it so great!" And so on, as if you thought otherwise.
LOL! One can always count on an Aussie friend to add humor to the mix. Don't let a day go by without it. Thanks :)
I touched upon something else, which I would like to stress again here. That is, the powerful myth-making capacity of darwinians. This too, is nothing new. Darwin exhibited his powers of imagination when he wrote about wingless beetles and the transformation of bears into whales. The literature of darwinism, past and present, contains innumerable fairy-stories of the same nature, stemming from this creative capacity. Tales about giraffes and their necks, about leisure persuits of knuckle-dragging ape-men, about the evolution of flight in squirrels, why men prefer blondes, the evolution of alcoholism, intelligence, mathematical ability, etc., etc. Many of these yarns are prima facie absurd, but if you challenge them, you will be asked to prove that they could not have happened.
Piltdown man provides us with a ripping darwinian yarn based on a couple of bones, as you will see. But this yarn is demonstrably a vivid day-dream, because there is, after all, no Piltdown man. These are few exerpts from The Earliest Englishman by Sir Arthur Woodward, 1948. Here, the darwininian mental engine of myth-making, confabulation, and yarn-spinning is in full flaming capacity:
Piltdown Man would probably make a fire-place in the same way as do many existing savages, by lining a hollow in the ground with pieces of stone. The larger pieces of burnt flint which we find in the gravel may have been used for such a lining. Some of the existing natives in certain Pacific islands use such a hollow, not only for an ordinary fire, but also for cooking. When the stones have been thoroughly heated, the burning sticks are removed and replaced by little pieces of meat wrapped in leaves, which are covered by earth and left until the heated stones have cooked them. This is almost haybox cookery. Piltdown Man would also make another hollow for the heating, perhaps boiling, of water, and, as pottery was unknown, this would be lined with a piece of skin. A piece of skin, or perhaps a bladder, would have to be used for carrying the water.Piltdown Man, however, was evidently a mixed feeder: he ate roots, nuts, and seeds, as shown by the hammer-stone (Fig. 13), about 12 cm. (5 inches) in length, which must have been used for pounding them. He seems only to have broken them up, or to have pulped them, without any grinding to make flour or meal, for we have never found any trace of grinding on the tools or other stones.
For dress, Piltdown Man would have to depend on skins, which he would wear with the fur turned inside; he would be able to cut them easily with some of [53]the tools we have found, and he appears sometimes to have cut them into narrow strips to be used as thongs. We have already seen that a thong of this kind might be needed to thread through the hole of the large bone tool shown in Fig. 11. He could tie together the smaller skins by means of thongs or pieces of sinew threaded through bored holes, as the natives of Tierra del Fuego did quite recently, and he could also make skin vessels for carrying water. Like the former black natives of Tasmania, who were described by Captain Cook, he may have used dried grass to make bags and nets for carrying his few personal belongings. His various tools and fire-making materials were too precious to be lost or left behind. His drinking-cups were probably bits of skulls or the broken ends of marrow bones.
Fossils leave no doubt, indeed, that man is descended from ape-like ancestors to whom he owes most of his bodily shape. He is particularly distinguished from all the [57] apes, not only by the large size of his brain, but also by the relatively small size of his face and teeth, which are no longer of much use for fighting.
Finally, it would be interesting to know whether Piltdown Man was accustomed to think about anything beyond his immediate creature comforts– whether, for instance, he felt any curiosity about the world and sky around him, or whether he had any idea of entering on another life after death. We shall see later that his brain, in shape and size, was scarcely inferior to that of modern man, and he could probably speak and express himself at least as well as any of the existing savages. The beautifully regular curve and the symmetry of the broader end of the bone tool already described seem to show that he had some kind of artistic sense.
Someone wanted to prove evolution so bad that they were willing to create a fraud to do it.
No, it is more likely that Woodward wanted to advance his career.
So here we have a scientist creating a fraud that it took 40 years for *science* to disprove. The only reasonable conclusion is that scientists wanted it to be true so badly that they were not willing to examine it more closely before.
“Science” in the first half of the 20th Century was still in its infancy. Your “reasonable conclusion” is based more on prejudice than on fact.
Once again, When was the last time a religionist was encouraged or even allowed to question the Biblical account of creation?
Excuse me..but aren't we doing that right now, this very second, without consequence? I am afraid that I might get a finger cramp but that pretty much sums up my fears.
One way to neutralize a success-word is to put it in quotation-marks. Thus, in certain circumstances a journalist might write "The Minister `refuted' the allegations", meaning, and being understood to mean, that the Minister did not refute but only denied them. This might be thought a device too unsubtle for authors such as ours to have made use of. It is not so, however. In any case some variations on the device are not altogether without subtlety. One such variation is what I call "suspending" success-grammar: putting a success-word in quotation-marks, not necessarily in order to neutralize it, but just with the intention, or at least the effect, of leaving the reader uncertain whether you have neutralized it or not. (This is the effect momentarily produced by signs advertising `fresh' fish). Another variation is, using the same success-word several times in close succession, and sometimes putting it in quotation-marks and sometimes not, but with no reason that the reader can discover for so doing. Such variations as these can achieve, partially or gradually, that separation of a success-word from its success-meaning, which quotation-marks sometimes achieve completely and abruptly. They are devices, therefore, which are not at all too unsubtle, nor yet too subtle, to be of some use to a philosopher interested in making irrationalism about science plausible. It would be no use for such a philosopher, and everyone now knows it would be no use, to cry "stinking fish" about science. But it may well be some use for him to praise science as "`fresh' fish"; especially if he does it often enough.
Lakatos has certainly done it often enough. Enclosing success-words in quotation-marks was in fact a kind of literary tic with him. He could scarcely have gone to more extravagant lengths in the use of this device, if he had been trying to bring it into disrepute; which, however, he certainly was not.
Take his Proofs and Refutations. The first word in this title is of course a success-word. In the book it is subjected countless times to neutralization or suspension of its success-grammar by quotation-marks. Often, of course, perhaps equally often, Lakatos uses the word without quotation-marks. But what rule he goes by, if he goes by any rule, in deciding when to put quotation-marks around "proof" and when to leave them off, it is quite impossible for a reader of that book to discover. Nor does the reader know what meaning the writer intends to leave in this success-word. He knows that the implication of success is often taken out of it; or rather, he knows that on any given occurrence of the word in quotation-marks, this implication may have been taken out of it. But what meaning has on those occasions been left in it, he is entirely in the dark. Indeed, by the end of the book, or even half-way through it, the reader no longer dares attach success-grammar to "proof" or "proved", even when they occur without quotation-marks. Will any reader of Proofs and Refutations undertake to say what the first word of the title means in the book?
By the time Lakatos came to write about empirical science, his tic had got worse. I draw an example from `Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes'. One short example will suffice, because Lakatos's English is everywhere much the same, and anyone familiar with it will recognize in the following a representative specimen of it.
"One typical sign of the degeneration of a programme which is not discussed in this paper is the proliferation of contradictory `facts'. Using a false theory as an interpretative theory, one may get---without committing any `experimental mistake'---contradictory factual propositions, inconsistent experimental results. Michelson, who stuck to the ether to the bitter end, was primarily frustrated by the inconsistency of the `facts' he arrived at by his ultra-precise measurements. His 1887 experiment `showed' that there was no ether wind on the earth's surface. But aberration `showed' that there was. Moreover, his own 1925 experiment (either never mentioned or, as in Jaffe's [1960] misrepresented) also `proved' that there was one (cf. Michelson and Gale [1925] and, for a sharp criticism, Runge [1925])" [17].
Here, in the space of seven lines of print, Lakatos manages to neutralize by quotation-marks three success-words, two of them twice each: "facts", "showed", and "proved".
The effect on the reader is characteristic. An episode in the history of science has been described to him, and it is described, as we see, entirely in words importing cognitive achievement. Yet by mere dint of quotation-marks, every single implication of cognitive achievement has at the same time been neutralized or suspended. The reader, remember, almost certainly has no knowledge of his own of the episode as would enable him to object, for example, that Michelson really did show one of the things that Lakatos says he "showed". Nor has the reader any idea, as I said before, how much if anything of the ordinary meaning of the various success-words the writer is leaving in them: he only knows that their success-implication has been, or may have been, taken out. What, then, will the reader be able to carry away from this passage? Nothing at all; except a strong impression that despite all the success-words used in describing it, there was, in this presumably representative episode from the history of science, no cognitive achievement whatsoever.
This passage is a very model of irrationalist philosophy of science teaching by example, and being made plausible by example. Yet it depends entirely for its effectiveness on a device at first sight so trivial as the use of quotation-marks to neutralize success-words.
Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists, D. C. Stove, 1982
Unfalsifiable theories are like the computer programs with no uninstall option that just clog up the computer's precious storage space.
That Piltdown was proven fake by the same discipline as those who held it up as true does not exactly increase one's confidence in the notion that man is a result of evolutionary processes beginning with altogether different life forms.
It's fine with me if you want to take up such a philosophy, and the philosophy of history that results. But you're kidding yourself if you think the rest of the world is bound to accept these as purely objective, i.e. science in the strict sense, much less if you expect them to enjoy exclusive benefits in public schools and universities.
And you can neither prove nor disprove a belief.
BUMP
The problem with our education system lies with those of faith that have found comfort in the Omnipotent intelligence and regulated higher education for the faithful to religious Universities only. We are to be the salt and work in the fields not withdrawal ourselves from it.
We must insist that our students reenter the elite secular colleges and Universities. They are still birthing the movers and shakers in our civilization....and so reflects the laws of the land. Otherwise we have to restructure our society which would be a much more difficult task.
When in Rome...
Add.....emphasis on Schools of Journalism!
The interpretation of that record is subjective, depending on what conclusions one draws after examining it. That puts it in the category of *belief*.
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