The Piltdown Hoax
1. The Piltdown Hoax was a claim that had prominently denied the ideas of human evolution. The hoax itself is about the finding of fossil remains from a proposed extinct species that was part of the human lineage. Discovered around 1910 in early England, the Piltdown Man, otherwise known as the "Dawson's Dawn Man," was convincing enough to create one of the most successful controversies in the history of science. Charles Dawson, once an English lawyer and geologist, found fragments of a specimen's cranium, jawbone, as well as other specimens at Barkham Manor near Lewes in Sussex. The development and exposure of the Piltdown Hoax affected the scientific community with how it clarified the processes of human evolution. The fraud also brought recognition to the importance of hominin fossils. Many skeptics were claiming that a friend a of Dawson's named Samuel Woodhead, had access to bones and chemicals that he used to create the bone artifacts. Another person who was brought into the skeptic scene was a French priest and paleontologist named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Chardin joined Dawson in his first excavations at Piltdown and this made people believe that he could have possibly tampered with the artifacts to make them seem significant.
2. Some human faults that came into play during this scenario were that some of the scientists were believing that the artifacts they found were millions of years old. The perpetrator had placed the teeth, tools, and bone fragments in a specific manner to where it was very believable that they were ancient. The human error made here was that the scientists were believing in just what they were seeing. But upon closer examination, they were able to find out that the artifacts were manipulated.
3. The positive aspects that came from using scientific processing while examining the Piltdown skull were abundant. In order to examine the remains closely, scientists were using DNA analysis and spectroscopy, which is the study of the absorption and emission of light and other radiation by matter. These processes worked to find out how the fabricated remains from the skull were combined from the bones of an orangutan and not more than two human specimens.
4. I believe that it is not possible to completely remove the human factor from science because without making initial observations, it will be impossible to find out what is right and what is wrong. Trial and error has been a method used by the human species since the beginning. It is impossible to make a correct observation without realizing what information is wrong. By making errors, we learn from these and we know how to avoid the same mistake when we are faced with it. I would not want to remove the human factor from science as we are the only means of deciphering the correct and false.
5. As for taking information from unverified sources at face value, I believe that one should never believe in what they are shown. Illusion has been practiced for centuries and this hoax was just another example of it. Illusion and science are two things that do not go hand-in-hand so being able to verify something before believing in it is very important. As Phaedrus, a 1st-century Roman fabulist said on perception, "Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many; the intelligence of a few perceives what has been carefully hidden."
1. The Piltdown Hoax was a claim that had prominently denied the ideas of human evolution. The hoax itself is about the finding of fossil remains from a proposed extinct species that was part of the human lineage. Discovered around 1910 in early England, the Piltdown Man, otherwise known as the "Dawson's Dawn Man," was convincing enough to create one of the most successful controversies in the history of science. Charles Dawson, once an English lawyer and geologist, found fragments of a specimen's cranium, jawbone, as well as other specimens at Barkham Manor near Lewes in Sussex. The development and exposure of the Piltdown Hoax affected the scientific community with how it clarified the processes of human evolution. The fraud also brought recognition to the importance of hominin fossils. Many skeptics were claiming that a friend a of Dawson's named Samuel Woodhead, had access to bones and chemicals that he used to create the bone artifacts. Another person who was brought into the skeptic scene was a French priest and paleontologist named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Chardin joined Dawson in his first excavations at Piltdown and this made people believe that he could have possibly tampered with the artifacts to make them seem significant.
2. Some human faults that came into play during this scenario were that some of the scientists were believing that the artifacts they found were millions of years old. The perpetrator had placed the teeth, tools, and bone fragments in a specific manner to where it was very believable that they were ancient. The human error made here was that the scientists were believing in just what they were seeing. But upon closer examination, they were able to find out that the artifacts were manipulated.
3. The positive aspects that came from using scientific processing while examining the Piltdown skull were abundant. In order to examine the remains closely, scientists were using DNA analysis and spectroscopy, which is the study of the absorption and emission of light and other radiation by matter. These processes worked to find out how the fabricated remains from the skull were combined from the bones of an orangutan and not more than two human specimens.
4. I believe that it is not possible to completely remove the human factor from science because without making initial observations, it will be impossible to find out what is right and what is wrong. Trial and error has been a method used by the human species since the beginning. It is impossible to make a correct observation without realizing what information is wrong. By making errors, we learn from these and we know how to avoid the same mistake when we are faced with it. I would not want to remove the human factor from science as we are the only means of deciphering the correct and false.
5. As for taking information from unverified sources at face value, I believe that one should never believe in what they are shown. Illusion has been practiced for centuries and this hoax was just another example of it. Illusion and science are two things that do not go hand-in-hand so being able to verify something before believing in it is very important. As Phaedrus, a 1st-century Roman fabulist said on perception, "Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many; the intelligence of a few perceives what has been carefully hidden."
Hi Justin,
ReplyDeleteI thought your post was well-written and your breakdown of the questions was well done. I have to say, however, I slightly disagree with your first sentence as I feel the Piltdown Hoax didn't necessarily deny the ideas of human evolution, but rather led many people to be misled about the history of our evolution. It didn't convey the message that human evolution was nonexistent, just that it provided a false connection in lineage that wasn't actually there. I strongly agree with you though that you cannot remove the human factor out of science. Conscious and creative minds are needed for much of the scientific process. As long as we are diligent in checking our findings and being sure they are accurate, we can prevent major mistakes like the Piltdown Hoax from happening again.
"The Piltdown Hoax was a claim that had prominently denied the ideas of human evolution."
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I understand this statement. How did Piltdown "deny" human evolution? Wasn't it based upon the idea that humans evolved just like all other organisms?
Past that, you offer very good information on the hoax with regard to how it was found, and you offer possible explanations as to how the hoax was created, but some key issues are missing. For example, how did the scientific community react to this fossil when it was presented to them? How was the hoax discovered and when? Why did it take so long to uncover the hoax? Who made this discovery?
A question about this point:
"The development and exposure of the Piltdown Hoax affected the scientific community with how it clarified the processes of human evolution."
Okay... but this needed to be explained. It sounds like you are trying to describe the possible significance of this fossil discovery, but this is a little too general. It could describe any of the many valid fossil discoveries, not just the invalid Piltdown.
So what was the significance of Piltdown? Had Piltdown been valid, it would have helped us better see a tiny bit of *how* humans evolved from that common ancestor with non-human apes. Piltdown was characterized by large cranium combined with other more primitive, non-human traits, suggesting that the larger brains evolved relatively early in hominid evolutionary process. We now know this to be incorrect, that bipedalism evolved much earlier with larger brains evolving later, but Piltdown suggested that the "larger brains" theory, supported by Arthur Keith (one of the Piltdown scientists) was accurate.
For your "faults" section... I think what you are suggesting is that the scientists involved exhibited too little skepticism when studying Piltdown (and this would apply to the scientific community in general). But this doesn't really make sense. Scientists can gain prestige by shooting down the claims of another scientist, so there is no incentive to accept a conclusion without question... in fact, it is the JOB of a scientist to question, so beyond incentive, scientists actually failed to do their job properly when they accepted Piltdown with so little skepticism. This needs to be explored. So why did the scientists fail to do their jobs? Remember that Germany and France had already found their own hominid fossils. This would have been England's first. Would you like to be the British scientist that killed England's chance to be on the hominid map? Could national pride have played a role here?
Beyond that, what about the perpetrators? What faults drove them to create this hoax in the first place?
You offer a lot of information in the next section, but the key test that helped to uncover the hoax was the fluorine analysis conducted by Kenneth Oakley, which provided the definitive evidence that the cranium and the jaw were of different ages (and different species). There is another side to this as well: What made scientists come back and retest Piltdown? What was happening in paleoanthropology in those 40 years that pushed them to re-examine this find? What aspect of science does that represent?
"I would not want to remove the human factor from science as we are the only means of deciphering the correct and false."
Well, actually, computers can be programmed to distinguish the two, depending upon what you are actually measuring. Is this the only reason to keep humans around? Do humans bring nothing more positive to the scientific process? Could we even do science without the curiosity in humans that push them to ask those initial questions? Or their ingenuity to create tests of their hypotheses? Or the intuition that helps them draw connections and conclusions from disparate pieces of information?
Good life lesson.