Forma Debate - Piltdown Man Should Not Be Cited By Creationists

[USincognito]

(I’m writing this introduction after I’ve completed my OP, and at 4:50am I might add, so I’m going to keep it short and simple. My overall theme is that Creationists seem to want to bifurcate the Hominid fossil record into Piltdown and “everything else” then either ignore all the other evidence or myopically focus on the fake then try tainting all the other fossils because of it. I’ve laid out my OP under headings that generally follow this theme to my resolution that Creationists should not use Piltdown in the Creation and Evolution debate.)

Logical fallacies

There are a number of logical fallacies injecting Piltdown into the Creation/Evolution debate suffer from, but the two I’ll touch on are Poisoning the Well and Red Herring. The two actually tie closely together because the reason for the logical fallacy is it ignores the importance of “Piltdown” vs. “The rest of the Hominid fossil record” which is the gist of my argument.

Since most Creationists who cite Piltdown do so referencing some Chick Tract or schoolyard tale they’d heard about it, they really don’t care about the details except one – Fraud. By referencing Piltdown, they are trying to poison the well of the rest of the hominid fossils that have been discovered. This is illogical because it actually doesn’t provide any evidence that all the rest of the fossils are frauds and relies on what amounts to an argument from “pie in the sky.” Yes, all the rest of the fossils could be shown to be frauds in the future, and I could suddenly sprout wings and take and take flight. Neither of these scenarios is very likely.

A red herring is a distractive tangent from a topic and that’s what Piltdown winds up being when it’s used by Creationists in debate. It’s meant to cause the Evolution advocate to waste time explaining what actually occurred during the Piltdown controversy.* It’s meant to draw the focus of the reader/audience towards one word – Fraud, and away from the large number of legitimate hominid finds. And it’s meant to distract from the fact it was these legitimate finds that finally demonstrated Piltdown was a fake once and for all.

My main points

I’d like to structure my main argument around a response and correction to those distractions I mentioned in the red herring paragraph: Correcting misconceptions about the whole Piltdown affair. Discuss the legitimate finds, and present a few examples showing why it’s unlikely “all the rest of the hominid fossils are frauds.” And finally a historical overview exploring how the legitimate finds exposed Piltdown and how the scientific method ultimately worked and remains a warning to this day.**

The Rest of the Story

The typical Creationist M.O. is to offer a drive by about Piltdown being in textbooks until the 70s or a cut and paste from some website that says, “In 1912 Charles Dawson perpetrated a fraud on the whole of evolutionism that was accepted as THE missing link and wasn’t exposed until 1953.” The problem with using such material in debate is that it doesn’t really tell the whole story and relies on the ignorance of the reader/audience regarding the actual facts.

Most importantly we are not sure if it was meant as a fraud in the first place. It likely was, but it would have been a practical joke gone awry. It might also have been planted by someone angry at the scientific community like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. We can’t even really be sure if it was Dawson who perpetrated the hoax/practical joke or was its unwitting victim, since he died before the fakery was exposed. If one really wants to sincerely introduce Piltdown into an intellectually honest Creation/Evolution discussion then the focus should be on the scientific method, not the fraud.

Apart from not really knowing if it was a deliberate hoax or not the Creationist Piltdown myth claims is that it was universally accepted from discovery until 1953. That simply isn’t true. While the paucity of Hominid fossils in 1912 certainly facilitated acceptance of the find, there were more important social and theoretical factors for why it was so readily accepted in Britain, and why others remained skeptical of it from the beginning.

The social factor was residual Victorian Racism/Chauvinism. To British paleontologists it was a given that the “most advance primitive man” would of course be a Briton (and better English!) and not an African or Asian. The theoretical factor, which I’ll detail in the next section, was the question of which came first – bipedalism or a big brain. To British paleontologists, wedded to the later hypothesis, Piltdown was a Godsend.

Legitimate Fossils Finds

It’s important to keep “red herrings” in mind as we discuss the legitimate fossils to keep conversation to within the context of using Piltdown in debate. It doesn’t matter if you think they were separate special creations or not our ancestors because they we’re what finally made them reexamine Dawson’s find and uncover the fakery. As I said above, discussions of Piltdown should focus on the scientific method, not the fraud. Keeping that focus in mind, here are three legitimate fossils answered the bipedalism/big brain debate.

Taung Child

One thing I’ve noticed about Creationists who get their information from Chick Tracts is that they mention Piltdown and Lucy (below) almost like a mantra, but never seem to Turkana Boy (also below) or the Taung Child. If they really had any knowledge on the subject they could address all of the Hominid fossils, not just try poisoning the well with Dawson’s discovery or offering misinformation with Johansen’s.

Taung Child is perhaps the most relevant of the three I’ll discuss because it was discovered in 1924, right in the midst of Piltdown’s salad days and was one of the first finds to directly undermine the “big brain” first crowd. The fossil possesses the ape like features both sides expected in the face, but more importantly it had not one, but two trump cards for critics who tried to dismiss it as an immature ape. The first was an endocast of the brain’s outer surface conclusively showing it had a brain hardly larger than modern apes.

The second was its preserved foramen magnum undeniably demonstrating that this small brained, ape faced human walked upright.

With hindsight and additional legitimate fossil finds, we now know the case was closed on Piltdown in 1924, but as history and literature show people hate to be wrong. When people wed themselves to an idea, like big brain first, or Creationism it’s literally injurious to their sense of self to be confronted by evidence as devastating to their position as the Taung Child. It wouldn’t be until 1954 though when a reexamination exposed the obvious shenanigans that had perpetrated on the skull and jaw Dawson found that the lid was closed on Piltdown’s coffin.

Lucy and Turkana Boy

Two of the more recent nails into that lid were Lucy, unearthed in 1974, and Turkana Boy, discovered in 1984. Again, since we’re discussing Piltdown within the context of debate and the scientific method, it’s important to note that they matched the predictions of the theory as well as previous confirmations of the theory. In the bipedalism/big brain debate, they both exhibit evidence that bipedalism developed before a large brain: unlike Piltdown, but like the Taung Child. In terms of biogeography, they both were found in Africa, where Darwin predicted, not in England like the Victorian chauvinists wanted.

While we only have 40% of Lucy’s skeleton, we have the important parts – her legs that show she walked upright, while we know her cranial capacity was barely that above a chimp. On the other hand Turkana Boy is amazingly complete and while his body is fully upright and human like, his skull is ape like with an estimated cranial capacity in adulthood of 909cc. Turkana Boy is the only Homo specimen of the three, the most fully human like from the foramen magnum down, but he still hasn’t developed a large brain yet: just as the bipedal crowd predicted 100 years earlier.

In 1924, when Taung was discovered, some might try and make the case that the brain/bipedalism was still open in light of supposed discoveries like Piltdown, but the intervening 80 years and the unearthing of Lucy and Turkana render Dawson’s fossil not just an aberrant fake, but an irrelevancy in the debate today.

Conclusions

It’s clear to anyone who actually looks at what happened during the first decades after Piltdown was discovered, at how paleoanthropologists finally got to the facts, and at how nearly a Century later, those discoveries which demonstrated Piltdown to be based on shoddy application of the scientific method continue to hold up under the scrutiny of paleontologists and evolutionary theory that the chances of a Hominid hoax being perpetrated today and lasting for any amount of time is about as likely as a transitional dino/bird fossil hoax being perpetrated successfully toady.

Nebraska Man was invented not by scientists, but by the London Illustrated Mail. Archaeoraptor duped the journalists and editors of National Geographic. Neither survived actual scientific scrutiny long enough to be considered genuine fossils. The chance of a Piltdown occurring these days is virtually nil.

I therefore resolve that since:

- Effective debate avoids argumentative fallacies like Poisoning the Well or Red Herrings, so Creationists should not raise Piltdown for either purpose.
- Honest debate requires that all assertions be factual and inclusive, so Creationists should not raise Piltdown unless they will admit we don’t knew who was responsible for the fake or why and discuss those things mentioned in the “Rest of the Story above.
- Creation/Evolution requires both sides to examine all the evidence, so Creationists should not raise Piltdown unless they are willing to sincerely examine legitimate fossil finds like Taung, Lucy and Turkana.
- The Scientific Method works when applied properly and not when tainted by emotionalism, so Creationists should not raise Piltdown unless the take time to understand the entirety of the affair and how the Scientific Method ultimately worked and continues to work in terms of Hominid fossils.
- There have been no evidence of fraud or hoaxes in the hundreds of Hominid fossils found since 1912 and frauds like Archaeoraptor have been quickly exposed when studied by paleontologists, so Creationists should not raise Piltdown unless they understand this fact and can admit the likeliness of contemporary fossils being frauds or hoaxes to be almost nothing.

Unless Creationists are willing to debate effectively and honesty and look at all of the information on the issue, they should not raise Piltdown while debating Creationism and Evolution.

 

[mark kennedy]

First of all I would like to thank USincognito for the chance to debate this issue formally. I would hope that we are both interested in getting at the truth and having an exchange that is both substantive and pointed. In the spirit of open exchange and the expressed purpose of the Creation/evolution forums, may the truth prevail.

Piltdown England was the site of a mass grave duing the during the great plague of AD 1348-49. Among the finds at the site were fossil bones of elephant, mastodon, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, beaver, and deer. Piltdown is 20 miles west of Hastings in a tiny hamlet in east Sussex. In a gravel pit used for the repair of roads, Charles Dawson 'discovered' Piltdown Man. It was a fully human cranium with the jaw of an orangatan that convinced mainstream science that Piltdown was a transitional from ape to man. The fossils were discovered between 1908 and 1915 and it was not until 1953, 38-45 years later that Piltdown Man was discovered to be a fraud. (paraphrased from, Bones of Contention, Lebenow, 2004).

It is the postition of my opponent that Creationists should not cite this deliberate deception as an argument against evolution. While I don't approve of Chick publications as a reliable source for scientific reading, this scandel has cast a long shadow on the handling of fossil evidence. The painstaking process of critical peer review and the demand for direct observation and demonstrative proof are supposed to avoid discrepancies in scientific reporting. In the case of Piltdown Man we are looking at a fraud that perpetuated itself in the corridors of academia for nearly half a century. Neither our political systems, sacred theologies, meticulas histories or critical inquirys into natural history are immune to our own willfull self deception. The Piltdown scandel is a warning to all who would know our history, you are more easily mislead then you would like to believe.

With that in mind lets explore some of the many offerings laid on the altar of natural history today. Evolution as it applies to natural history is a twisting turning road that is not easily navigated. The discerning traveler will have to keep both an open mind and critically examine the evidence modern science has put before us. The first order of buisness is to see how this fraudulant fossil evidence was recieved at the Smithsonian Institute.

"The evidence was there the entire time. Any researcher could have looked at the teeth with a microscope and noticed an artificial wear pattern, or the fact that one tooth had a coat of paint on it. But why didn't anyone recognize this forgery? One reason is that beacause Piltdown affirmed many scientists' hypotheses, they were reluctant to put it under scientific scrutiny that might have proved it wrong. Museums prominently displayed casts of Piltdown as scientific fact. Ales Hrdlicka, a leading anthropologist here at the Smithsonian, was one of the few scientists to question whether the jaw and cranium went together. But even here in our museum there was an exhibit on display: "Evolution of the Bony Chin" -- from chimpanzee through Piltdown Man to modern humans! "​

It fit the hypothesis of many scientists so no one really looked that critically at it, with an occasional exception. The attitude of many evolutionists I encounter is that all of the evidence is pointing toward common ancestory of man and chimpanzee. As an amature science buff (some would say rank amature) I am curious how the evidence is put together to confirm or falsify the various aspects of evolutionary theory. On the other hand as a Creationist the Scriptures are sacred history so I ask you to take a little journey with me. Human evolution as it relates to the transition from apes to human beings cover some 5 to 7 million years. For my opening argument I ask only that you take a look at the major landmarks indicated by modern paleontology.

This skull fragment was used along with several other framents to create a composite cranium for Australopithecus afarensis. It had a cranium not much bigger then that of a chimpanzee but is thought to have been bipedal and walked around like humans.

How did they get all of that from skull fragements, well, they peice this all together with a strange mosaic of finds. There was a knee joint (AL 129-1), a u-shaped pallet AL 200-1 and the famous Laetoli Footprint. Don't let anyone fool you on this, the evidence used is piecemeal and fragmentary. I don't see any reason to elaborate on the mosaic of evidence used at this stage. Some look at this evidence and see a transitional, I look at it and see a desperate attempt to produce a transitional. Take a look for yourself, I don't ask you to take my word for anything, just consider the evidence presented and lets move on.

http://www.mnh.si.edu/anthro/humanorigins/ha/afar.html

Our supposed ancestors had achieved some level of bipedal locomotion at this point. Pygmy chimps are somewhat bipedal so that is not such a stretch for the Creationist to consider. But what about the expansion of the human brain? The fossils don't have a lot of answers for us here, in fact there are more questions raised at this stage of the game then anywhere else.

"Homo habilis has been considered ancestral to modern humans through Homo erectus. And so its limb proportions were thought to be similar to modern humans. The KNM WT 15000 skeleton (a nearly complete juvenile), which was found in 1984, showed that African populations of Homo erectus (Homo ergaster), only 200,000 years after H. habilis had modern limb proportions. Yet, the OH 62 skeleton has thrown researchers a curveball because of its sruprisingly ape-like limb proportions."​

http://www.mnh.si.edu/anthro/humanorigins/ha/oh62.html

So what's the problem here? The skeleton at a crucial period of transition has all the propotions of an ape. The cranial capacity is just under 600cc which makes it for all intents and purposes an ape. This is the pile of 302 bones that are peiced together to make a comprehensive proof of human ancestory.

The problem here is that the previous ancestors were fully bipedal, but this little guy (only about 3 foot tall) was making tools. His body proportions are not very different from African apes, which is exactly what this pile of bones came from. Bear in mind the cranial capacity has not grown much and we are only about 1.7 million years out. Just like with the Piltdown Man debacle the desire to find supporting evidence for a transitional is overwelming. The problem is that Homo habilis was not bipedal Whoever left the footprints in Laetoli was and they are dated 3.75 million years ago. See:

http://www.darwinismrefuted.com/origin_of_man_03.html ).

Then there is little Lucy, she stood just over 3 foot tall with a skull that is comparable to modern chimpanzees. Supposedly she had a human body, lets take a closer look.

"If body height in the human line did indeed increase gradually from afarensis to erectus, then by heights Homo habilis should have averaged somewhere between four and a half and five feet tall. Instead, we had found a habilis skeleton that appeared to have stood no taller in life than Lucy herself. Judging from the fragments we had of the Dik-dik Hill hominid, from the neck down she was practically Lucy's twin.".

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?rid=eurekah.chapter.4504

These fossils cause a lot of problems, not the least of which is that they are apes and should be classified as such. We are also at the crest the expansion of the cranial capacity from 500-700 cc to well over 1000cc with the emergance of Homo erectus. My opponent would have you believe that Turkana boy is a human body with an apelike skull, when looking at the actual evidence its not that cut and dried.

"One would also see differences: in the shape of the skull, in the degree of protrusion of the face, the robustness of the brows and so on. These differences are probably no more pronounced than we see today between the separate geographical races of modern humans. Such biological variation arises when populations are geographically separated from each other for significant lengths of time."​

(Richard Leakey, The Making of Mankind)

Nature does not make leaps but in our theoretical linage from African apes it would have had to do exactly that. The Piltdown Man debacle is a warning, we are more easily decieved then we would like to believe. Creationists do well to consider the Piltdown fraud in the larger context of other fossils handled with the same desire for a transtitional. Piltdown Man was not an isolated incident that was quickly dispatched by scientific methodologies. The forgery was there for anyone to see with a good microscope and average competance. It took close to half a century for it to be discovered and openly admitted. Creationists do well to remind evolutionary apologists that the Piltdown Man scandel calls into question the motives of those who seek the elusive transitional from apes to human beings.

As an aside to Creationists.

Our opening remarks are now on the table. My opponent will respond to the OP I just offered as he sees fit. As a Creationist I think it's important to inform the casual reader that in debates like this it often get heated. Tempers can flare and often highly critical remarks will be made. Yet it is exactly here that Creationists need to be better informed and dispite the difficulties, this is an important area of Christian apologetics with vast ministry potential. I am a casual debater with no real motive other then learning more about the issues. Others have found tremendous ministry potential in challenging evolution as a presumed fact.

For Creationists simply looking for resources I would suggest checking out these links.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/cec/online_resources.asp

http://www.answersingenesis.org/video/ondemand/

 

[USincognito]

That was a very well written and thought out OP. For any readers out there, when I’m referring to Mark directly or something he wrote, I’ll do so by his name. References to Creationists or “the other side” are to Creationists as a whole, though not necessarily Mark in particular. I hope who I’m discussion will be clear from the context of the comment.

I’ll be dividing my response into two general sections: rhetoric and skepticism within the Creation/Evolution debate, and a further discussion of the fossil and other evidence for Hominid common ancestry. Before I get into the guts of this post, I’d like to point out something related to my “The Rest of the Story” section above.

When presenting a brief history of Piltdown, I noticed that Mark chose to paraphrase Creationist apologist Marvin Lubenow. That’s unfortunate because there was a perfectly good overview on the Smithsonian page we’ve both been referencing.

My biggest problem is with this section, “It was a fully human cranium with the jaw of an orangutan that convinced mainstream science that Piltdown was a transitional from ape to man. The fossils were discovered between 1908 and 1915 and it was not until 1953, 38-45 years later that Piltdown Man was discovered to be a fraud.” More specifically that Piltdown “convinced mainstream science..” Quoting from the Smithsonian page:

British paleontologists championed the find (that Britain was the cradle of humankind was almost too good to be true), while the French and American scientific communities remained skeptical.

This similar quote comes from Talk Origins page that goes into great detail about “The Rest of the Story” of Piltdown.

The reaction to the finds was mixed. On the whole the British paleontologists were enthusiastic; the French and American paleontologists tended to be skeptical, some objected quite vociferously. The objectors held that the jawbone and the skull were obviously from two different animals and that their discovery together was simply an accident of placement. In the period 1912-1917 there was a great deal of skepticism. The report in 1917 of the discovery of Piltdown II converted many of the skeptics; one accident of placement was plausible -- two were not.

Emphasis Mine.

The brief reduction in skepticism after the revelation of Piltdown II only lasted a few years as additional erectus fossils (Chinese and more Indonesian) and Taung were unearthed in the 20s. Further finds in Africa made Dawson’s fossils all that much more irrelevant. One should be skeptical of the claim that Piltdown “convinced mainstream science” of anything.

It should also be noted that Piltdown’s staying power wasn’t that it was so convincing of human evolution. Paleontologists already understood that humans shared a common ancestry with our fellow apes. The question in 1912 was not if humans had evolved, but how they had evolved and Piltdown fit the notions of the big brain first advocates. I’ve already detailed why this is important in “The Rest of the Story” above.

Be Alert. The world needs more lerts.

Mark and I both agree on the need for critical thinking and skepticism. We apply our skepticism in different areas and ways, and have come to different conclusions, but at least we apply it. Unfortunately that isn’t the case with everyone and I aver that Creationists are less likely to be skeptical of things they read or hear about the Creation/Evolution debate than the evolution side is. I would go so far as to state that many of them use cynicism when evaluating things that disagree with their viewpoint and blind credulity for those they do.

Forgeries, Frauds and Hoaxes, Oh My!

Creationists would have us believe that because a fraudulent fossil, subject to immediate skepticism, was marginally considered genuine for the early part of the 20th Century that all subsequent fossil finds are hoaxes or frauds. At least Mark has the integrity to question the classification of the fossils, not their legitimacy. Such integrity is sorely missing in many mainstream Creationist organizations today. One example is the embracing of an urban legend about Lucy’s knee joint.

This is important because while Piltdown occurred in a time before the Internet where information could be checked more readily, even by laymen, the dishonesty about Lucy’s knee joint has been circulating for nearly 20 years in this day of instant communication. It shows up quite frequently in Internet chat rooms and debate forums, confidently posted by Creationists who know it must be true.

Worse yet, Creationists tend to fall for April Fools jokes, again, in the 21st Century, as opposed to the early 20th Century over and over. Two infamous examples are The ICRs claim that Neanderthal bands used to jam, and Kent Hovind directing people to the ”Darwindisproved” website so they could see Onyate man being eaten by an allosaurus.

There’s also the Ica Stones, Paluxy (more urban legend than fraud), but I’m starting to get away from my main point, so let me just mention one more example of a hoax germane to the Creation/Evolution debate to bring this section full circle.

Plesiosaurs in the Mist

This is one of the most famous photos in Cryptozoology known to the general public. The so called “Surgeons Photo” was uncovered to (most likely) be a hoax in 1994. While Nessie is more famous in Cryptozoologist circles, she is referenced by Creationists as evidence for dinosaurs (actually Plesiosaurs are marine reptiles, but the readers know what I mean) living today. This is important for two reasons.

First, a living dinosaur today, while it certainly would require the need for major revisions in biology and geology, it wouldn’t destroy evolutionary theory. As Christian Forums member shenren points out in this thread a living dinosaur today is less damaging to current evolutionary theory than a fossil Devonian chicken would be.

Second, and more importantly to our Piltdown discussion, just because the Surgeons Photo is a fake, that doesn’t mean Nessie doesn’t exist, that there are no strange lake monsters or that Cryptozoology is nothing but fantasy and hallucination. From this page for a Nova episode on Loch Ness, Alistair Boyd, who helped uncover the hoax says it doesn’t change anything.

Does that finally disprove the monster's existence? Not at all, says Boyd. One of the great ironies of the Loch Ness story is that the man who brought down the most famous piece of evidence remains a firm believer in Nessie. "I am so convinced of the reality of these creatures that I would actually stake my life on their existence," he told NOVA.

I maintain that this attitude should be applied to the Piltdown hoax as well. Just because a (or two) fossil specimen turns out to be a fraud, that doesn’t mean all the others are as well, nor that the theory associated with those specimens (or Nessie sightings) needs to be tossed out just because of “evidence” that merely turned out not to be so.

Conclusion

Mark and I agree that there needs to be more skepticism by people involved in the Creation and Evolution debate. I maintain that the Creationist side needs larger dose of it than the Evolution side however. And while I think Mark excuses what I will hence forth call the “Piltdown Gambit” (either trying to poison the well or overtly averring that since Piltdown was a fraud, all Hominid fossils are frauds), he at least uses the more intellectually honest tactic of trying to say instead of being transitionals, the fossils are either fully “ape” or fully “human.” Finally I’d note the lessons to be learned from the Surgeons Photo of Nessie – just because one example of evidence is found to be a fraud, doesn’t mean all or even any of the other examples are as well, nor does it mean the entire theory surrounding the issue is faulty or worthless.

To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a fossil is just a hoax.

(This was running way longer than I planned so I'm going to discuss the fossils in a Part II that I'll get to later and both posts will count towards my total, 3 so far)

 

[USincognito]

Part II will mainly be a further discussion of the fossils, with part covering why I think a Piltdown like fraud will occur now or in the future and the rest discussing some of the objections Mark raised on the three legitimate examples I cited above. Before getting started, I’d like to reiterate to readers that he’s not taking the usual position that I’m decrying as my overall theme in this discussion – that being Piltdown was a fraud so all others are frauds. Instead he objects to them being classified as transitionals and instead assigns them to either the fully ape or fully human category. If Creationists wish to raise Piltdown and engage in intellectually honest debate over how skeptical we should be about the legitimacy of fossils or their classification, I have no problem with that. It’s the logically fallacious attempt to poison the well that I object to.

Why Piltdown Won’t Happen Again.

To put it simply, it’s 2006 not 1912. A lot has changed in the last 94 years. For starters we have considerably more fossils than we did back then. At the time Piltdown was revealed, the Hominid fossil record consisted of some Neanderthal and the Homo erectus fossils called Java Man. There really wasn’t enough data to make comparisons with and determine if a find could be dismissed out of hand or warranted further study. As I pointed out previously, there were skeptics from the very beginning, and as hominid fossils went from filling a breadbox to filling several caskets it became more and more clear that Piltdown just didn’t fit.

The competition between developmental theories that I mentioned above is another reason why a Piltdown type hoax won’t happen. The question of which came first, bipedalism or big brains was settled as the numbers of legitimate finds: Taung in the 20s, the Peking Man erectus samples in the 30s, the discoveries in Africa in the 40s and 50s, Lucy in the 70s, and Turkana in the 80s. Bipedalism developed first, then “modern” body size and proportions, and finally a big brain. If any fossil shows up in an auction house that doesn’t fit this well established pattern, it’s immediately suspect.

Another reason why there won’t be another Piltdown is ironically due to the method by which this debate is being carried out. In 1912, there were no commercial radio stations in the United States, obviously no television or Internet and this was the state of the art in communication, a Western Electric model 10.

followed by the telegraph, and mail and newspapers.

These days a paleontologist can have live streaming video over the Web while the dig is occurring. Field drawings can be scanned and posted or faxed anywhere virtually instantaneously. Digital photos of finds can be posted in minutes. Once the fossil is made public, millions of people will have access to any journal articles written about it today, as opposed to only those who subscribed to them in the early part of the 20th Century. Finally the news media will bring the story via newspapers, television, popular magazines and the Internet to laymen. If there are questions about the validity of the fossil they will be raised immediately and those questions broadcast far and wide instead of remaining ensconced in the Ivory Towers of academia.

Communications technology isn’t the only thing that’s improved since 1912. Today we have isochron dating techniques that can show the actual age of the strata the fossil is removed from. We have CAT scans, MRI and electron microscopes than can show us the actual shape and content of a find in minutes compared with months or years for an analysis using pencil, paper and a magnifying glass. Anomalous finds will stand out and fraudulent ones will be immediately exposed thanks to these new tools.

All this brings me to a final point for those who would play the Piltdown Gambit – How long are we supposed to wait until one accepts the fossil as legitimate? It’s been 113 years for Java, 82 years for Taung, 32 years for Lucy, and 22 years for Turkana. How long do Creationists want us to wait for these to be demonstrated to be frauds? Are we to wait until the personal incredulity of every evolution doubter wanes? Shouldn’t, if all of these as frauds, someone at some point have been able to show them to be?

As I stated at the start of this section, it’s 2006, not 1912 – another Piltdown isn’t going to happen.

To Grunt Is Ape, To Be Human Devine

While Mark makes a valid correlation between skepticism and his analysis of the three legitimate fossils in question as either ape or human, I think making too much of his critique would be a tangent. I will, however, reply to a few of the comments he made.

We Three Fossils Of Africa Are

Lucy – A large portion of Mark’s criticism of the fossils in general stems from this composite reconstruction (which includes the skullcap AL 333-45 shown above) and the matrix of bones plus the Laetoli footprints used to represent Australopithecus afarensis for the Smithsonian Institution’s exhibit on human evolution as if that’s all there was. The problem is he’s ignoring one specimen not included – Lucy.

I’d note that his quote regarding the Dik-dik Hill fossil is not discussing Lucy, but is instead referring to a possible Homo habilis and further point out that his objection that Lucy’s proportions were Chimp like are incorrect. (from the link above)

The humerofemoral ratio, or length of humerus divided by length of femur, is 84.6 for Lucy, compared to 71.8 for humans, and 97.8 and 101.6 for the two species of chimpanzee (all these figures have a standard deviation of between 2.0 and 3.0). In other words, humans have much shorter arms compared to their legs than chimpanzees do, and Lucy falls roughly in the middle. (Korey 1990)

I’d also point out this quote from the page Mark linked to above which might sound familiar to those reading my posts in this debate.

The evidence that has accumulated until now suggests that the biped physique appeared abruptly about 5 million years ago in Africa and that upright walkers that came later also came with the potential for larger skulls.

Taung – In two distinct comments above Mark states that Taung’s cranium falls within ape proportions and while critiquing A. afarensis states that Bonobos sometime walk only on their legs. In response to the latter, a lot of animals can move on their hind legs like Kangaroos (which are bipedal) or the Lipizzaner stallions (which are trained to do so). Plus it fits the common ancestry model that a species descended from the same ancestor species we are would be able to amble around bipedally. The difference, and as I pointed out in my OP is that neither Bonobos nor horses have the placement of the foramen magnum of a fully bipedal species like A. africanus or H. sapiens. I can understand how one might quibble with hips and femur lengths, but the placement of the hole in the skull where the spinal cord enters the brain is problematic if one tries to suggest Taung wasn’t a fully bipedal.

Turkana – I’m always suspicious of quotes that don’t note a page number in the citation and I’m even more suspicious when a Google only brings up Creationist websites, but since I don’t have a copy of “The Making of Mankind” myself, all I can do is get another quote from Richard Leakey. (cite in link)

"I think [the Turkana Boy] is remarkable because it's so complete, but perhaps another aspect that is often overlooked is that many people who don't like the idea of human evolution have been able to discount much of the work that we've done on the basis that it's built on fragmentary evidence. There have just been bits and pieces, and who knows, those little bits of bone could belong to anything. To confront some of these people with a complete skeleton that is human and is so obviously related to us in a context where it's definitely one and a half million years or even more is fairly convincing evidence, and I think many of the people who are fence-sitters on this discussion about creationism vs. evolution are going to have to get off the fence in the light of this discovery."

I’d also point out that when Mark suggests the reader look at the actual evidence, suggesting that it would murk the waters of my assertion that Turkana’s fossil is an ape-like head on a human body, he provides a quote. I’ll go one better and give you the actual fossil. The entire specimen is shown in the OP. Here’s a close up of the skull from the Smithsonian pages:

And a comparison of a profile of the skull and a modern human:

I can’t see how anyone would suggest the evidence of Turkana’s skull being ape-like is anything less than cut and dried. And things are only going to get more uncomfortable for Creationists once Little Foot is fully excavated.

Since Mark’s objections we’re about common ancestry and not accusations of fraud, I’ll leave my responses said without a closing comment.

A Leap Of Faith?

Nature does not make leaps but in our theoretical lineage from African apes it would have had to do exactly that.

Actually it neither would have to, nor did it. Instead of gold medal winning broad jumps we find exactly what evolutionary theory predicts and what the bipedalism first side asserted so long ago. If we look at this series of skulls (A being a chimpanzee though Astrals and Homos to N being a modern human),

what we find a smooth transition of general morphology while the changes gradually occur in the details. It takes a lot more mutations to get from scampering legs to walking legs and from a dorsal foramen magnum to a posterior one than it does to merely increase to area of size of an in place skull and brain.

And this is exactly what we find in the Hominid fossils. A slow and gradual change from a quadrapedal small-brained chimp-like ape to a fully bipedal, but still small brained ape-faced human followed by a relatively rapid expansion of the brain and cranium. No leaps, no bounds. The hard stuff just took longer than the easy stuff. In fact, while we’ve been pretty much in a bipedal niche for 2,000,000 years, our brains evolved very recently and and continue to do so. (registration required)

The human brain may still be evolving. So suggests new research that tracked changes in two genes thought to help regulate brain growth, changes that appeared well after the rise of modern humans 200,000 years ago.

That the defining feature of humans - our large brains - continued to evolve as recently as 5,800 years ago, and may be doing so today, promises to surprise the average person, if not biologists.
>>>>>>>>>>
Lahn and colleagues examined two genes, named microcephalin and ASPM, that are connected to brain size. If those genes don't work, babies are born with severely small brains, called microcephaly.
>>>>>>>>>>
For the microcephalin gene, the variation arose about 37,000 years ago, about the time period when art, music and tool-making were emerging, Lahn said. For ASPM, the variation arose about 5,800 years ago, roughly correlating with the development of written language, spread of agriculture and development of cities, he said.

"The genetic evolution of humans in the very recent past might in some ways be linked to the cultural evolution," he said.
>>>>>>>>>>
(And as always the caveat – US)
Other scientists urge great caution in interpreting the research.

Again, exactly the opposite of the big brain first folks were suggesting and what Piltdown was supposed to represent and exactly what the bipedalism first folks were saying all along. I ask the readers, are you seeing a pattern here?

But Wait There’s More!

This last bit is mainly for the readers since Mark’s familiar with them, but the bones aren’t the entirety of the evidence of primate common ancestry. There’s the evidence from our cytochrome C, where a protein found in all life has only one reason it would be identical in humans and chimpanzees – common ancestry. We find the same broken gene in our fellow primates (and interestingly guinea pigs), and when sequenced there are more mutations between humans and orangutans than between humans and chimps. Plus there’s a Nobel Prize waiting for the first Creationist who unearths a hominid fossil in Australia or North America.

Conclusions

In 1912, when Piltdown was made public, there weren’t nearly as many hominid fossils available for comparison, communication was much slower and there wasn’t nearly was wide an audience to see a new fossil and have questions about it as in 2006. Also in 1912, the bipedalism first or big brain first debate was still extant. It’s since been definitively answered. Most importantly, a lot of years have passed since Piltdown’s heyday, as they have since the discovery of the other fossils I’ve mentioned – why haven’t they been shown to be hoaxes as well? How many more years do Creationists need?

To sum up Part II, I have no problem with Creationists like Mark who want to raise and discuss Piltdown within the context hominid fossils. He only disagrees with their classification as transitionals and would either call them ape or humans. I disagree with his conclusions (see above), but at least he’s engaging in honest debate. I therefore still maintain that Creationists would cite Piltdown only to Poison the Well and not discuss the merits of legitimate hominids by either declaring them frauds a priori or disappearing from the thread as soon as Taung, Lucy or Turkana are mentioned should not even mention Mr. Dawson’s find in the first place.

 

[mark kennedy]

It would be awkward to address every point my opponent raised in the two part response to my OP. I will offer him the opportunity to again raise any issues not addressed via PM or in the common forum. That said, I am going to address this statement and cover as much of the proported evidence as I am able:

"I think [the Turkana Boy] is remarkable because it's so complete, but perhaps another aspect that is often overlooked is that many people who don't like the idea of human evolution have been able to discount much of the work that we've done on the basis that it's built on fragmentary evidence. There have just been bits and pieces, and who knows, those little bits of bone could belong to anything. To confront some of these people with a complete skeleton that is human and is so obviously related to us in a context where it's definitely one and a half million years or even more is fairly convincing evidence, and I think many of the people who are fence-sitters on this discussion about creationism vs. evolution are going to have to get off the fence in the light of this discovery."

The first thing that jumps out at you in this statement is that the dating is wrong. T.C. Partridge determined using thermoluminescence analysis of calcite and uranium-series dates. What he concluded was that the Taung skull had could not have formed prior to 870,000 years ago (Nature, Geomorphological Dating of Cave Openings at Makapansgat, Sterkfontein Swarthrans, and Taung. Nautre 1973). What is even more important is the dimorphism of the Taung skull is comparable to the simularities between juvenile human children (5-6 years old) and chimpanzee juvenile (3-4 years old).

Let's look at Homo habilis and Homo rudolensis, there is good reason to conclude that they don't even belong in the genus Homo:

A general problem in biology is how to incorporate information about evolutionary history and adaptation into taxonomy. The problem is exemplified in attempts to define our own genus, Homo. Here conventional criteria for allocating fossil species to Homo are reviewed and are found to be either inappropriate or inoperable. We present a revised definition, based on verifiable criteria, for Homo and conclude that two species, Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis, do not belong in the genus. The earliest taxon to satisfy the criteria is Homo ergaster, or early African Homo erectus, which currently appears in the fossil record at about 1.9 million years ago.​

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/...uids=10102822&query_hl=35&itool=pubmed_docsum

The same problem exists with Lucy, she is supposed to be a bipedal ape but she is more like Pygmy chimps then humans:

Zihlman has doubts about these assertions, based on her research on gorillas and chimps. First, she says, it is impossible to determine sex without other pelvises to compare to Lucy's, and she believes Johanson and White have erred by using the modern human pelvis as the basis for their work on Lucy's pelvis. On the evolutionary time line, Lucy's 3-million-year-old remains are closer to apes than modern humans; as such, apes would be a better yardstick for comparison, contends Zihlman.

http://www.ucsc.edu/news_events/review/text_only/Winter-96/Anatomy.html

Now about Turkana Boy, there is no doubt in my mind that he is completly human.

"The skeleton was about 1.60m (5 ft 3 in.) tall; though he might have been 68 kg (150 pounds) and 1.85m (6 ft 1 in) tall had he lived to adulthood. The total skeleton is made up of 108 bones accounted for. The cranial capacity of Turkana Boy was about 880cc, although if he had lived to adulthood it would have been about 910cc, which is considerably smaller than the 1350cc cranial capacity of modern humans."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkana_Boy

This creates a real problem for the evolution of human beings from apes. The cranial capacity for Homo Habilis is under 600cc with Homo rudolfensis being over 700cc. That means the the overall size doubled while the cranial capacity was increased by at least 25%. Bear in mind that they are dated about 2 mya and the sudden emergance of Homo erectus has no viable precursors. You also have to take into consideration that Turkana Boy is still not fully grown so the adult cranial capacity is largely speculative.

Homo habilis and his contemporaries are indistiquishable from apes, both size and stature are comparable as seen in the anatomical comparisons of Lucy and modern apes. Still, we have the evidence that a considerably hominid has limb proportions 1.5 times bigger and display bipedal characteristics:

"The humerus and femur of Orrorin are 1.5 times larger than those of A. afarensis AL 288-1 (Lucy), which confirms that early human ancestors were larger than previously believed (20). Orrorin's femora indicate that it was a biped when on the ground, while its humerus and manual phalanx show that it retained some arboreal adaptations:

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=164648

Orrorin is dated over 6 million years old and yet 3 million years later it's ancestors are still knuckle dragging apes. The fossils 2 million years out are those of apes, perhaps bipedal but the cranial capacity is comparable. Evolutionists want us to accept a gradual divergance but they don't understand, it would have had to be a giant leap. What is even more frustrating is that internal mechanisms would have had to be used to create the changes in the first place. Does it ever occur to evolutionists that there might not be a genetic basis for this even being possible?

"Similarly old molecular clock dates (13.5 Ma, based on mitochondrial DNA and using nonprimate calibration points) for the human–chimpanzee divergence present the same problem. By enabling tests such as these, new fossil discoveries and better radiometric dating of existing fossils provide the best prospects for improved understanding of the timing of events in hominid evolution. "

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/102/52/18842

Radiometric dating and fossil evidence is telling us that 2 million years ago our ancestors were apes. What the molecular data is telling us is that based on MtDNA the human-chimpanzee divergence happened 13.5 Mya. One is left to wonder, why on earth would it be important to evolutionists to find this elusive transition from apes to humans. I have no problem with the idea that apes were at one time bipedal, the evidence would seem to indicate that they were. The key to this whole scenerio is the emergance of the brain to the proportions of modern humans. Evolutionists have known this for over a hundred years and that is why the Piltdown fraud had such a strong appeal. When it became obvious that the Piltdown hoax was a superficial slight of hand it became necassary to find another one. Let's hear Richard Leaky out one more time and consider his challenge:

I think [the Turkana Boy] is remarkable because it's so complete, but perhaps another aspect that is often overlooked is that many people who don't like the idea of human evolution have been able to discount much of the work that we've done on the basis that it's built on fragmentary evidence.

Turkana Boy was built from a box of bones that were fragementary at best. Dart recieves two boxes of fossils in 1924 as he is getting ready for a wedding. Unable to contain himself he opens the boxes and examines the contents. He was expecting to find an ape skull but instead found one that was too big to even be that of a chimpanzee. He also made the conclusion that is was too small to be a primative human but that is largely speculative in my view:

"But was there anywhere among this pile of rocks, a face to fit the brain? I ransacked feverishly through the boxes. My search was rewarded, for I found a large stone with a depression into which the cast fitted perfectly.

I stood in the shade holding the brain as greedily as any miser hugs his gold, my mind racing ahead. Here I was certain was one of the most significant finds ever made in the history of anthropology."

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/284158_brain.html

He has a cast of a brain, rummages through the box and finds a large stone that fits it, in his words, perfectly. That sounds like vintage fragmentary peicemeal evidence to me.

I am going to hold off on the conclusion of this response and give my opponent a chance to raise any concerns about details that have not been addressed. Since he responded in two parts I think it is only fair to him to give him a chance to bring any issues I have neglected to my attention. I reserve the right to revise and extend this post and cover any issues not addressed in a subsequent post to this one. However, nothing previous to this paragraph will be altered so that he has the opportunity to address the points raised.

I will say this, in looking at the evidence for a common ancestor I am not impressed with the veracity of the evidence offered. The Piltdown Man hoax is still a warning that the desire to find a transitional distorts the actual evidence. Creationists do well to remind evolutionists that the Piltdown fraud casts a shadow on the whole process of examining the fossil evidence.

 

[mark kennedy]

The desire to find the apeman transitional greatly distorts our understanding of natural history. Piltdown Man is recognized by scientists and scholars as the greatest scandel in the history of science. The desire for proof of an apeman transitional is the obvious motive and frankly, I could care less who perpetrated the hoax in the first place. What concerns me the most is the way that the evidence is presented by modern evolutionists. This is a prime example of how important differences between human beings and apes are ignored.

Skull A is a modern chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) and skull N is a modern human (Homo sapiens sapiens). Just looking at this picture gives the illusion that there is a smooth gradual transformation. The fact of the matter is that the human brain is two and a half times heavier then our supposed chimanzee cousins. This is not a minor change, this is the greatest giant leap in nature. This is a better comparison of the brian size differences:

And the skull size differences:

Just look that the Smithsonian Human Family Tree, I mean really look at the timeline and consider the implications.

ER 1813 had a cranial capacity of only 510cc . KNM-WT 15000 ("Turkana Boy") is 700 and 850cc and 1.6 million year old . Turkana boy stood 6 foot tall and his brain was not fully developed. Homo habilis was 3 foot tall and had a skull is well below the cutoff of Homo classification.The species Homo erectus is thought to have diverged from Homo ergaster populations roughly 1.6 million years ago, and then spread into Asia. It was believed that Homo erectus disappeared as other populations of archaic Homo evolved roughly 400,000 years ago.

http://www.mnh.si.edu/anthro/humanorigins/ha/erec.html

"Analysis of the sediments, calibrated with the world’s geomagnetic pole reversal time scale (Day, 1986), along with Potassium-Argon dates put the fossil at about 1.8 mya. "

http://www.planetspatula.com/archaeological/Human-Origins/KNM-ER-1813.html

That does not give the ape brain of early Hominids 2 1/2 million years to gradually develop a bigger brain. When you actually look at what is being passed off as viable proof the whole scenerio becomes increasingly problematic. Confused yet? You should be, the Austrophithicenes are static for millions of years and then suddenly just under 2 million years ago the size of the cranial capacity jumps to modern proportions. There is another period of stasis of well over a million years and modern Homo Sapiens (that includes Neanderthals and Crommagnum) appear on the scene.

"AMONG mammals, humans have an exceptionally big brain relative to their body size. For example, in comparison with chimpanzees, the brain weight of humans is 250% greater while the body is only 20% heavier (MCHENRY 1994 ). The dramatic evolutionary expansion of the human brain started from an average brain weight of 400–450 g 2–2.5 million years (MY) ago and ended with a weight of 1350–1450 g 0.2–0.4 MY ago (MCHENRY 1994 ; WOOD and COLLARD 1999 ). This process represents one of the most rapid morphological changes in evolution. It is generally believed that the brain expansion set the stage for the emergence of human language and other high-order cognitive functions and that it was caused by adaptive selection (DECAN 1992 ), yet the genetic basis of the expansion remains elusive."​

http://www.genetics.org/cgi/content/full/165/4/2063

The emergance of the human brain is one of the greatest mysteries in evolutionary biology. That is why the Piltdown Man hoax had such a narcotic affect on so many scientists for so long. Of course the brain first scenerio was appealing, any comparison of human and ape brains will reveal the shear size difference and even the most superficial glance. What is even more telling is that it wasn't even a good forgery, all that had to happen was for someone to look critically at the actual evidence.

What should the creationist postition be with regard to Piltdown man? I think that is a much fairer question then if we should ever cite it at all. It was the desire to produce treasured theoritical apeman fossils that led to the frauds acceptance in the first place. Everytime they find an ape skull in Africa we are told that this is one of our ancestors. With all these homind fossils being produced from paleontology digs, where are the chimpanzee ancestors? The answer is simple enough, they are getting mixed up with hominid fossils.

Does that mean that all the fossil evidence is tainted? Of course not, it is this kind of superficial skepticism that makes this whole issue of human origins so hard to navigate. Science is about tools, both physical and mental. With the tools of science you can build a comprehensive understanding of the world around you. It is frustrating that my creationist brethren want to focus on frauds of science more then the tools and well established laws of inheritance. Christians like myself don't like to get lumped in with the Witch Hunts of Salem Villiage in 1692 or the Spanish Inquistion. Yet there is a tendancy to characterize the theory of evolution by Piltdown Man hoax and I don't think that is fair either.

Creationists do have good reason to remind evolutionary apologists that Piltdown Man was the greatest scientific fraud in the history of science. However, I don't want to be judged for what Cotton Mathers did in 1692 and I don't judge evoltutionists by what happened at Piltdown. The Creation/Evolution fourms have a simply motto that I think applies here, 'the truth will prevail'. Scientific method prevailed in the Piltdown hoax and will continue to expose the unfounded claims of Darwinism at large. Instead of putting a blanket curse on the whole theory of evolution we as creationists should become better aquainted with the actual evidence.

That concludes my first response which means we both have three posts up apeice. For my part I feel I have offered all the source material, links and referances I need to. From this point forward I think I will focus more on expostive responses to USIncognito's posts and the arguments he offers.

 

[USincognito]

I'd like to apologize to interested readers and Mark for taking so long to post a response but I have both been distracted during the time that I normally post my more elaborate messages and been trying to decide precisely what content I wanted to focus on. To be honest, I'm still conflicted on what to address, but Mark will be unavailible soon so I owe him the courtesy of a reply even if it's a bit disjointed.

Working In A Quote Mine

I've noted above that Mark seems to like to argue via quote. I'm not sure if it's an appeal to authority or something Creationists engage in naturally since they're used to "proof texting" when they argue theological issues and thus words have the same or more validity than actual evidence like fossils or genetic evidence.

I'll address below why I find Mark's desire to shift the debate to the classification of the fossils a red herring below, but there are a few things about his choices of quotes that I must point out.

In post #5 I was flabbergasted to read Mark quoting Richard Leakey's comments about KNM-WT 15000 a.k.a. Turkana Boy and then go on to post comments - and more quotes regarding Taung Child. Since this whole thread should be focused on the (possible) deception of Piltdown, how can an unbiased reader see that and not think he's trying some sort of shenannigans himself? Especially when he does it twice.

Worse, in his quoting of an quoting of Raymond Dart regarding Taung, while ostensibly discussing Turkana, he engages in exactly what was the first thing I mentioned in this thread as to why Creationists shouldn't raise Piltdown - Poisoning the Well.

Don't Drink the Water

He has a cast of a brain, rummages through the box and finds a large stone that fits it, in his words, perfectly. That sounds like vintage fragmentary peicemeal evidence to me.

If the readers will forgive me, but suggesting that Taung was a confabulated matrix of mixed parts sounds awfully similar to what happened with Piltdown and is a subtle suggestion that Taung too is a hoax. I realize I'm reading a lot into what Mark wrote, but isn't he engaging in even more wild speculation than I am?

For one thing, I've already mentioned above it's been 82 years since Taung was discovered. Isn't that more than enough time for someone to have uncovered Dart's duplicity? Also, Mark wasn't there when the Taung fossils were recovered, nor was he in the room when Dart matched the endocast to the hole in the rock that held the skull - yet he just knows something fishy was up all these eight decades later. Finally, Dart was in the backwaters of South Africa, not the ivory towers of Oxford. If he really wanted to make a name for himself, why would he fabricate a fossil that was so in opposition to the ideas of say, the formidable Arthur Keith, and not "find" an endocast more in line with Piltdown and the big brain first side?

It just doesn't add up and I'd further point out that Chimpanzees, nor no known great ape lives or lived in Southern Africa. The endocast, while too small to be H. sapiens, is too large to have come from an astoundingly migratory chimp.

Talking Points

Two other quotes Mark cites are problematic since he's engaging in the logical fallacy of Equivocation. That is he's trying to suggest that because a single paleontologist has an opinion outside the mainstream that human evolution did not occur. But that simply isn't the case.

The quote regarding whether H. habils and H. rudolfensis should be in genus Homo comes from a paper by Bernard Wood, which, if you actually read, he isn't suggesting that either is "fully ape" but either should be classified as Astralipiticene hominids or given their own unique hominid genus. I can't think a man who has this graphic on his university home page would suggest early Homos were "just apes."

Note that it says "hominid paleobiology" not "ape and/or human paleobiology."

The second quote regarding Lucy is just as problematic. Lets look at some other comments by Adrianne Zihlman bolding mine for emphasis.

"We know humans evolved from apes, but the question is how that transition occurred," says Zihlman."

"Bipedalism and the structures that go with it are the defining features of early humans***," says Zihlman. "It's what separated us from the apes. If you really understand functional anatomy and living apes, you can make some pretty good guesses about the early hominids."
*** Does this sound familiar to what I said in my OP?

And finally this coup de grace where Zihlman explains why she thinks Lucy's remains are so similar to Bonobos...

"What intrigues Zihlman about Lucy is that the remains are strikingly similar to the pygmy chimpanzee. In 1982, Zihlman published an illustration of Lucy's left side juxtaposed with the right side of a pygmy chimp. That image clearly showed the parallels between the early human fossil remains and pygmy chimps. "It was so dramatic, you couldn't deny that our early ancestors were chimplike," says Zihlman."

Now opinions are like foramen magnums - we all have one, but if Mark is going to cite quotes by paleontogists to support his assertion that all hominid fossils are "fully ape" or "fully human" he should really try and find some that actually think that and not those who merely question the prevailing thoughts regarding classification of hominid ancestors.

The Greatest Hyperbole Ever Posted

I have to give Mark credit for having a great flair for the dramatic. Those of us who have read his posts since joining CF appreciate, even if we disagree with his mantra like repititions of certain emotionally laden phrases and buzz words. I'm going to disagree with him that Piltdown was the "Greatest Scientific Fraud Ever" though because of two more recent events deniers claim are fraudulent - The Holocaust and the Apollo 11 mission.

It would be cheap and easy to juxtapose Holocaust denial with Creationisms claims about the hominid fossil record, but I won't do that and will instead make that comparison with the Moon landing hoax, but I do want to bring the Holocaust in the back door to make a point about which scientific fraud was the greatest (or worst in this case). So-called "Nazi Science," a toxic melange of racism, nationalism, myth and corrupted Anthropology that resulted in the direct death of at least 6,000,000 people and indirectly in the deaths of tens of millions of others was far worse a scientific fraud perpetrated on humanity that Piltdown could ever have been - period.

Buzz Aldren's Mean Right Hook*

It's not without a load of irony that I note how Creationists have a lot in common with people they themselves would think crazy - Moon Landing Deniers (that I'll refer to as "Moon Hoaxers"). The Moon Hoaxers claim we're all being duped by a great and widespread scientific/governmental/media conspiracy to promulgate the fraud that man ever went to the moon. Just like Creationists they cite "evidences" that purportedly demonstrate that Apollo missions 8-17 could never have happened and that 11-17 in particular were faked.

Hey, they made the movie Capricorn 1 right? That means Piltdown is applicable to the hominid fossil record. Yes, I realize that's a bit of a stretch, but the connections between Creationist denials of the same sort of incredulity and data mining that Moon Hoaxers engage in. If any of you readers are interested, keep in mind the usual littany of Creationist anti-evolution claims and check out this page debunking the Hoaxer objections raised in a 2001 Fox show called "Conspiracy Theory: Did we land on the Moon?"

To Reply or Not To Reply

Finally I'm back to the cunondrum that inhibited me replying earlier - whether to Mark's travels down the rabbit hole regarding the classification of hominid fossils. I concluded tonight that to address the issue more than I did above would be a tangent from my main issue and the one that prompted my offer of this debate: should Piltdown being fraudulent taint the entire hominid fossil record?

There's a certain amount of irony in that while Mark and I agree that Piltdown can be raised contextually by Creationists regarding the issue of whether the fossils are "fully ape" or "fully human" and if evolution advocates are Desperately Seeking Susan's common ancestor that Creationists themselves cannot decide which finds are "fully ape" or "fully human".

I would suggest that until there is more consensus amongst well known Creationists, and until you average Creationist, instead of using Piltdown as a poison pill, uses it as stepping stone to more productive debate regarding interpretation and classification that they avoid using it in debates lest they be overwhelmed by hominid fossil evidence they likely don't even know existed.

Mark would turn the Piltdown issue into one that discerns where the line between specially created extinct apes and specially created extince humans exists - but that is not what we're debating here. We're debating whether Dawson's find should serve, nearly 100 years later, after countless legitimate finds as evidence that humans didn't evolve because one supposed example was a fraud. Unless he wants to address that issue, or some of the others I raised about frauds then this debate is over.


* I'll give 10,000 CF Blessings to the first person who PMs me and correctly guesses what I'm referring to here.

 

[mark kennedy]

I've noted above that Mark seems to like to argue via quote.

The rules of CF in general and Creation/evolution in particular emphasis the quotes must be cited and preferably linked. In evolution as natural history it supposedly covers millions of years, in human ancestory it is anywhere from 5-7 million years. Of course you are going to need good source material to make a solid arguement. It is the sources cited and linked that describe the actual evidence.

The question before us is should Creationists cite the Piltdown scandle at all. I paraphrase Lubenow and this is called unfortunate. I quote Leaky and this leaves my opponent flabbergasted. I compared the Talk Origins case of skulls to better representations of the enourmous differnces between humans and chimpanzees. What I am left to wonder is if Creationists are ever going to be allowed to cite anything.

I'll address below why I find Mark's desire to shift the debate to the classification of the fossils a red herring below, but there are a few things about his choices of quotes that I must point out.

A red herring is considered a logical fallacy that Ignoratio elenchi (also known as irrelevant conclusion) indicates that the evidence used is irrelevant.

In post #5 I was flabbergasted to read Mark quoting Richard Leakey's comments about KNM-WT 15000 a.k.a. Turkana Boy and then go on to post comments - and more quotes regarding Taung Child. Since this whole thread should be focused on the (possible) deception of Piltdown, how can an unbiased reader see that and not think he's trying some sort of shenannigans himself? Especially when he does it twice.

Richard Leaky said that a 40% complete skeleton for Turkana Boy dismisses the notion of transitionals being built on framentary evidence. I quoted it because he is absolutly right, but Turkana Boy is human as are many, if not most of the Homo Erectus fossils.

Worse, in his quoting of an quoting of Raymond Dart regarding Taung[/url], while ostensibly discussing Turkana, he engages in exactly what was the first thing I mentioned in this thread as to why Creationists shouldn't raise Piltdown - Poisoning the Well.

This was not a poison pill, it was a comment of what Nature considered one of the most important discoveries of the 21st century. The article describes the terrible criticism Dart faced, criticism that we now know was based on a fraud. Dart challenged the status quo and in science this creates a firestorm of controvesy. The larger point is that scientists have a tendancy to accept evidence that supports their hypothesis. I have also stated that not even our sacred theologies are immune to this kind of deception.

If the readers will forgive me, but suggesting that Taung was a confabulated matrix of mixed parts sounds awfully similar to what happened with Piltdown and is a subtle suggestion that Taung too is a hoax. I realize I'm reading a lot into what Mark wrote, but isn't he engaging in even more wild speculation than I am?

I see no reason that an honest examination of the evidence somehow poisons the well. The fact that Creationists who study the evidence are called ignorant, dishonest and worse. If you don't think this is poisoning the well for creationists then think again. Something more important is that I never said that Taung was a hoax.

For one thing, I've already mentioned above it's been 82 years since Taung was discovered. Isn't that more than enough time for someone to have uncovered Dart's duplicity?

There you go again, when did I ever accuse Dart of duplicity? I simply quoted the discription he used to describe what happened when he first examined the fossils. I thought it was a fascinating story and I was excited to find a direct quote from him. Lucy and Taung are remarkable finds and I certainly don't characterize them as the scientific equivalant of the Lock Ness monster.

Also, Mark wasn't there when the Taung fossils were recovered, nor was he in the room when Dart matched the endocast to the hole in the rock that held the skull - yet he just knows something fishy was up all these eight decades later.

Dart was in the room and gives an important description that is very important. This is getting lost in the mix and I don't know why anyone would not be interested in learning from it. I disagree with some of his conclusions but are creationists ever allowed to come to a conclusion based on the evidence? If we can learn anything from the Piltdown scandel its that the status quo can be wrong.

Finally, Dart was in the backwaters of South Africa, not the ivory towers of Oxford. If he really wanted to make a name for himself, why would he fabricate a fossil that was so in opposition to the ideas of say, the formidable Arthur Keith, and not "find" an endocast more in line with Piltdown and the big brain first side?

He was expecting to find a baboon, he instead found the remains of a human boy. The ridicule he suffered was both unfair and ill founded. It's tempting to side with the status quo but you have to examine the actual evidence.

It just doesn't add up and I'd further point out that Chimpanzees, nor no known great ape lives or lived in Southern Africa. The endocast, while too small to be H. sapiens, is too large to have come from an astoundingly migratory chimp.

It's not a chimpanzee, I think that has been definitivly settled.

Two other quotes Mark cites are problematic since he's engaging in the logical fallacy of Equivocation. That is he's trying to suggest that because a single paleontologist has an opinion outside the mainstream that human evolution did not occur. But that simply isn't the case.

What the paper said was:

"We present a revised definition, based on verifiable criteria, for Homo and conclude that two species, Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis, do not belong in the genus."

He says that these two do not belong in the Homo genus which makes a lot of sense. Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis are not Homo fossils in the strict sense anyway.

The second quote regarding Lucy is just as problematic. Lets look at some other comments by Adrianne Zihlman bolding mine for emphasis.

"We know humans evolved from apes, but the question is how that transition occurred," says Zihlman."

"Bipedalism and the structures that go with it are the defining features of early humans," says Zihlman. "It's what separated us from the apes. If you really understand functional anatomy and living apes, you can make some pretty good guesses about the early hominids."
*** Does this sound familiar to what I said in my OP?

Pretty good guesses are not the same thing as definitive conclusions. Zihlman herself says that certain hominid fossils are more comparable to apes. The assumption that we have a common ancestors with the apes should be called into question and rarely is.

And finally this coup de grace where Zihlman explains why she thinks Lucy's remains are so similar to Bonobos...

"What intrigues Zihlman about Lucy is that the remains are strikingly similar to the pygmy chimpanzee. In 1982, Zihlman published an illustration of Lucy's left side juxtaposed with the right side of a pygmy chimp. That image clearly showed the parallels between the early human fossil remains and pygmy chimps. "It was so dramatic, you couldn't deny that our early ancestors were chimplike," says Zihlman."

Concluding that Lucy was bipedal much like a pygmy chimpanzee speaks volumes for the problem of evolution as natural history. Lucy was an ape from about 850,000 years ago. We are being told that she actually lived millions of years ago and this is simply not supported by the actual dating of the bed she was found in.

Now opinions are like foramen magnums - we all have one, but if Mark is going to cite quotes by paleontogists to support his assertion that all hominid fossils are "fully ape" or "fully human" he should really try and find some that actually think that and not those who merely question the prevailing thoughts regarding classification of hominid ancestors.

Homo habilis did not cross the cerebral rubicon and should be not be classified in the Homo genus.

I have to give Mark credit for having a great flair for the dramatic. Those of us who have read his posts since joining CF appreciate, even if we disagree with his mantra like repititions of certain emotionally laden phrases and buzz words. I'm going to disagree with him that Piltdown was the "Greatest Scientific Fraud Ever" though because of two more recent events deniers claim are fraudulent - The Holocaust and the Apollo 11 mission.

Piltdown is commonly refered to as the most successfull fraud in the history of science. One is left to wonder what this has to do with revisionist history of the Holocoust or the widespread skepticism of Apollo 11. Piltdown Man actually was displayed in the Smithsonian Institute as a transitional fossil. If there was ever a more successfull scientific fraud I don't know what it would be. 40 years is a long time for no one actually looking at this evidence under a microscope.

It would be cheap and easy to juxtapose Holocaust denial with Creationisms claims about the hominid fossil record, but I won't do that and will instead make that comparison with the Moon landing hoax, but I do want to bring the Holocaust in the back door to make a point about which scientific fraud was the greatest (or worst in this case).

If this is not irrelevant evidence then I don't know what is. The Holocoust has nothing to do with this unless you want to point out that both the Piltdown Man hoax and the Holocaust were both motivated by racism.

It's not without a load of irony that I note how Creationists have a lot in common with people they themselves would think crazy - Moon Landing Deniers (that I'll refer to as "Moon Hoaxers").

You have to be crazy to be a creationist right, comparable to those who consider the Moon Landing a hoax. It might interest you to know that a moon landing was faked by the Russians and found to be a fraud. Of course people were skeptical a fraud creates a credibility gap. You accuse me of using a red herring argument and you make this one. Talk about irony, the Moon Landing hoax is a conspiracy theory, nothing more. No self respecting scientist would challenge the Apollo 11 landing. They did however accept the Piltdown Man evidence for over 40 years. This is not comparing apples to apples, it is in fact utterly irrelevant.

Hey, they made the movie Capricorn 1 right? That means Piltdown is applicable to the hominid fossil record. Yes, I realize that's a bit of a stretch, but the connections between Creationist denials of the same sort of incredulity and data mining that Moon Hoaxers engage in. If any of you readers are interested, keep in mind the usual littany of Creationist anti-evolution claims and check out this page debunking the Hoaxer objections raised in a 2001 Fox show called "Conspiracy Theory: Did we land on the Moon?"

Did we land on the Moon, sure we did? Did we evolve from apes? No we did not and the evidence is compelling in both cases.

Finally I'm back to the cunondrum that inhibited me replying earlier - whether to Mark's travels down the rabbit hole regarding the classification of hominid fossils. I concluded tonight that to address the issue more than I did above would be a tangent from my main issue and the one that prompted my offer of this debate: should Piltdown being fraudulent taint the entire hominid fossil record?

I never made the slightest suggestion that all the fossil evidence are an elaborate hoax. I never said anything of the sort and frankly this sounds like hyperbole. If you want to offer discussions of the actual evidence of fossils I'm perfectly willing to hear you out. I do not however consider Talk Origins to be an unbiased resource or even a reliable one. Posting a jpg of their case of skulls is misleading and there is better resources out there.

Creationists themselves cannot decide which finds are "fully ape" or "fully human"[/url].

The question is whether or not Creationists should cite Piltdown at all. If a creationist is basing their arguements on Chick publications then they don't have a basis for a real arguement. Piltdown can and should be cited but only as it underscores the tendancy to organize evidence around preconcieved notions.

I would suggest that until there is more consensus amongst well known Creationists, and until you average Creationist, instead of using Piltdown as a poison pill, uses it as stepping stone to more productive debate regarding interpretation and classification that they avoid using it in debates lest they be overwhelmed by hominid fossil evidence they likely don't even know existed.

Some, certainly not all, creationists do examine the evidence and conclude human ancestory does not include apes. This isn't a Moon Hoax conspircay theory, it's what someone can logically conclude in looking at the actual evidence.

Mark would turn the Piltdown issue into one that discerns where the line between specially created extinct apes and specially created extince humans exists - but that is not what we're debating here. We're debating whether Dawson's find should serve, nearly 100 years later, after countless legitimate finds as evidence that humans didn't evolve because one supposed example was a fraud. Unless he wants to address that issue, or some of the others I raised about frauds then this debate is over.

Two things have stood out in my mind in responding to this debate. I am accused of characterizing all the fossil evidence as fraudulant when I definitly never did anything of the sort. Secondly, I never called into question Darwon's honest examination of actual evidence. No one suggested that Darwson contrived the evidence. He was criticised for misintrepruting the remains found in South Africa not for fabricating them.

I have examined a good deal of evidence and the most important adaptation would have to be the human brain. That is what made the Piltdown fraud so appealing in the first place, it offered a solution to the biggest problem regarding human evolution. The emergance of the human brain at modern proportions remains unsolved and the evidence is telling us exactly that.

 

[USincognito]

Mark, thanks for the time you put into your response, and I realize that you have concerns of national proportion coming so I'm going to end my side of the debate at this point.

We agree that Piltdown can be raised by Creationists as you do to call into question the interpretation of hominid fossils. It seems we agree that Piltdown should not be raised by Creationists as a poison pill to suggest that all hominid fossils are fakes.

Thus the debate moves, as I pointed out above, from "whether" Creationists should mention Piltdown when debating Creationism/Evolution to in what context they should mention it and, as I said, that is an entirely different debate.

For now I succede the lecturn and will allow the readers to comment and make up their minds in the Commentary thread. I wish you safety and good will in your upcoming deployment and look forward to your contributions to the C/ID/E debate in the future.

 

[mark kennedy]

USincognito, I wanted to thank you openly for the chance to debate this formally. I'm not entirely sure we accomplished alot here but it was my hope that a formal debate forum would raise the level of discussion. If you would indulge me just one more quote before I request the moderators close the thread I wanted to clarify were I was trying to go with this:

"Man is a tool-using animal. Weak in himself and of small stature, he stands on a basis of some half square foot, has to straddle out his legs lest the very winds supplant him. Nevertheless, he can use tools, can devise tools; with these the granite mountain melts into light dust before him; seas are his smooth highway, winds and fire his unwearying steeds. Nowhere do you find him without tools. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all."​

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

Science is about tools, both physical and mental. Piltdown Man happened because a simple tool was not used that could have uncovered the whole thing. It is both the quality of the tool and the integrity of the scientist that builds the knowledge we owe so much innovation to. The life sciences have produced some profoundly important ones in the field of genetics, horticulture and biology at large. The tools of science could prevent another scandel like Piltdown Man but only if the scientists involved use them.

I had a more elaborate discussion in mind but the debate would seem to have run it's course. It's just as well, I have other things I need to be doing right now but I couldn't resist the debate invitation.

Thanks again USincognito and I'll see you on the boards.

Grace and peace,
Mark