There was a skit on the Monty Python comedy show back in the 1980’s. It began with a huge Greek statue of a man. It was fragmented and buried by an earthquake. After millennia, scientists dug up some of this statue, an isolated piece of the great toe. This was studied at the British Museum, where scientists labeled it a great discovery, the missing piece of a previously uncovered relic. A curtain rises and we see a wooly mammoth with the toe stuck where the elephant’s trunk should be.
Good for a laugh, but hardly reflective of retrospective science, right? Wrong. There have been goofs nearly as bad. Upon uncovering the first elasmosaurus dinosaur, the discoverer scientist put the head at the end of the tail, instead of the neck.
‘Nebraska man’ was speculated upon as the first primate found in the Western Hemisphere. This entire being, considered by some to possibly be an ape-man, was speculated upon from a single tooth. Upon further investigation, the tooth was found to belong to a prehistoric species of pig.
Most folks above the age of forty will recall the Brontosaurus, the prototypical huge dinosaur with the long tail and the long neck. The assumption that this was a separate species of dinosaur persisted for decades, until someone found that it had the wrong head. Whoops! When they located a proper head, it was discovered that Brontosaurus was merely an Apatosaurus, a previously identified dinosaur.
Brontosaurus quietly ceased to exist.
These are honest mistakes and I don’t record them to indict all paleontology. I believe, however, that these goofs send a message: if scientists (who after all are human) can be wrong in what they declare is true, they should be considered equally fallible when they declare that which they believe cannot be true, i.e., creationism.
Deliberate hoaxes can be seen in either a desire for fame or a manipulation of data to confirm a desired result. In the case of the former, we have Piltdown Man, a deliberate hoax: Eoanthropus dawsoni was ‘discovered’ in 1912. It wasn’t until 1953 that this ‘ape-man’ was found to have come from the combination of a human skull and the jawbone of an orangutan.
A more sinister, or at least tragically misguided, hoax occurred in the emotionally charged world of global warming, where emails between scientists at University of East Anglia (England) suggested doubt regarding the data showing a warming trend, possible misrepresentation of the data. Predictably, the screamers on both sides of the issue weighed in, but the inescapable observation is that these scientists let their objectivity be influenced by the desire for a particular conclusion.
To the nonscientist, this seems like no big deal. It is, however, scientific heresy. How would we treat a drug company that falsified data to cover up the dangers of a drug they were selling?
Another tragedy occurs when ideologies intrude. Much ‘effort’ was given to finding data that confirmed that the Negro race was inferior to the Caucasian race.
One finding was that the thickness of the skull was greater in the Negro skull versus the Caucasian. How this could have been construed to reflect a lesser degree of evolution is mystifying; if anything, given the evolutionary axiom that the importance of a body part is reflected in its degree of protection, we should conclude that the Negro brain, being protected by a greater skull thickness, is more important to the human species than a Caucasian brain (that certainly applies in the brain of a white supremacist).
Witness the modern trend, in the Middle East, to move away from ‘Archeology of the Bible,’ the argument being that the history reflected in scripture is either flawed or outright false.
Look at the archeology in, say, the city of Jericho (site of the first battle won by the Israelites upon entering the Promised Land). Being part of the West Bank, it was returned to Palestinian control. Since the return to Palestinian control, there have been no reported findings that reflect that Jewish Israelites ever lived there. It seems a tacit understanding that an archeologist is welcome to dig in Jericho, as long as there is one conclusion that must not be confirmed: the conclusion that Jews lived in Jericho before the birth of Islam.
An ethical modern scientist would rightly rebel at any such restriction on scientific inquiry, that they should be denied the right to any proper interpretation of discovered data. Yet that is exactly what American scientists both permit and embrace when they knuckle under to ‘separation of Church and State.’
In any educational center dependent on the federal dollar, scientific inquiry is free to pursue any conclusion, so long as it doesn’t support the concept of ‘Intelligent Design.’ I fear that there is a conspiracy of silence among American academic scientists: some may actually believe that the universe reflects the intent and genius of an Intelligent Designer; yet, articulation of that viewpoint invites being savaged by the atheist nonscientists on their campus.
I perceive the different scientific disciplines that are attempting to explain our universe as being much like all the blind men working together to describe an elephant. Which of the blind men is the atheist scientist?
He is the one who is telling everyone else they are wrong as he is busily feeling a nearby fireplug.
– Dennis Garvin
