With regards to Skull 1470:
“One point of uncertainty was the angle at which the face attached to the cranium. Alan Walker remembers an occasion when he, Michael Day, and Richard Leakey were studying the two sections of the skull. ‘You could hold the maxilla forward, and give it a long face, or you could tuck it in, making the fact short,’1 he recalls. ‘How you held it really depended on your preconceptions. It was very interesting watching what people did with it.’ Leakey remembers the incident too: ‘Yes. If you held it one way, it looked like one thing; if you held it another, it looked like something else. But there was never any doubt that it was different. The question was, was it sufficiently different from everything else to warrant being called something new?’”2
Atheism and scienceReferring to Lord Solly Zuckerman:
“His Lorship’s scorn for the level of competence he sees displayed by paleoanthropologists is legendary, exceeded only by the force of his dismissal of the australopithecines as having anything at all to do with human evolution. ‘They are just bloody apes,’ he is reputed to have observed on examining the australopithecine remains in South Africa.”3
“When American anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka asked in 1927, ‘What is the actual, precise, evidence for human evolution that science now possesses, and upon which it bases far-reaching conclusions?’ (my emphasis [Lewin’s]),4 he was in fact posing a question that has no answer. Not because there is no evidence for human evolution, but because3 no science works that way. No science-least of all paleoanthropology-is as objecting as Hrdlicka implies here or as is often portrayed in the philosophers’ idealized view of science_
preconceived ideas shape the progress of all sciences, but nowhere else to the degree that occurs in the search for human origins. And yes, personalities are important in the flow of all sciences, but, again, in the science of man emphatically so. Le Gros has an answer: ‘Undoubtedly, one of the main factors responsible of the frequency with which polemics enters into controversies on matters of paleoanthropology is purely an emotional one. It is a fact (which it were well to recognize) that it is extraordinarily difficult to view with complete objectivity the evidence for our own evolutionary origin, no doubt because the problem is such a very personal one.’ Ernst Mayr, one of this generation’s most prominent evolutionary biologists, concurs: ‘Human beings seem quite incapable of speaking about themselves and their history without becoming emotional in one way or another.’”5
Atheism and scienceRegarding the Taung fossil:
“Lacking large segments of the anatomical jigsaw puzzle, Smith Woodward had to make some guesses as to how the pieces he had might relate to each other. Apparently misidentifying some minor anatomical landmarks on the interior of the cranium, he assembled a skull that not only was erroneously small (just over 1,000 cubic centimeters) but also appeared to have certain primitive anatomical features. This reconstruction deeply impressed Elliot Smith. Sir Arthur Keith, however, challenged the accuracy of the reconstruction and did one of his own, eschewing the errors Smith Woodward had committed. Keith’s version not only was much bigger (about 1,500 cubic centimeters), but also lacked the primitive features erroneously present in Smith Woodward’s_
‘Why did not [Keith’s] correction immediately raise suspicions of the authenticity of the Piltdown fossils?’ asked Le Gros Clark. ‘Because of its personal nature the controversy [between Keith and Smith] certainly clouded the issues and befogged the atmosphere of scientific discussion_
In his day Elliot Smith’s authority carried great weight (and rightly so, for he was a very eminent anatomist), so that not only did he persuade himself that his original interpretation of the skull and endocranial cast had been fundamentally right, he also seems to have persuaded biologists in general that this was so.’6 But in spite of their differences of opinion, both Keith and Elliot Smith continued to accept Piltdown Man as a vindication of their own ideas, each for his own different reasons. Keith, who viewed the skull as essentially modern in form, saw it as a confirmation of the antiquity of modern types of man. At the same time, Elliot Smith claimed the cranium to be distinctly primitive in form.”7
Ales Hrdlicka is the founder of the American Society of Physical Anthropology and for many years was the editor of the society’s journal, “from which positioned wielded substantial power over what was acceptable to the establishment and what was not_Hrdlicka, he [G. Edward Lewis] says, ‘thought he was the anointed and elect prophet who had been foreordained and chosen to make such discoveries and demolish the work of anyone else.’”8 Lewis had interpreted Ramapithecus as a hominid but Hrdlicka believed it to be just an ape and so he “tore into Lewis’s work,”9 although “Hrdlicka’s paper was somewhat self-contradictory, and, says Simmons, ‘scattered with blunders and naa&#af;vett&#a9;s that a really good professional simply would not have made.’”10
“Even a causal examination of this paper is sufficient to show that it bears all the evidence of being a controversial and non-objective contribution,”11 “amateurish,”12 “It looked to me like someone coming into something he didn’t know much about, with preconceived ideas.”13 Lewis wrote a rebuttal to Hrdlicka’s criticism’s of his work but the editors of the American Journal of Science refused to publish it, “because they said Hrdlicka was an important man, and I was a young man.”14
Hrdlicka had attempted to discredit Lewis’ position based on the evolutionary concepts of the time whereby “To have the first hominids appearing in the eastern part of the Old World was therefore simply unacceptable. ‘So he did a hatchet job on Lewis’ work,’15 says Spencer.” Lewis had discovered Ramapithecus but not long after this clash with the authority of the time he “left Yale and never really made another important contribution to paleoanthropology.”16
“Some people even admitted that they were giving their fossil a new genus and species name so as to call attention to how important they thought it was. Everyone who had a fossil come into their hands for description wanted it to be something new-perhaps consciously, perhaps unconsciously-for the purposes of self-aggrandizement.”17
Atheism and science
Regarding various descriptions of Ramapithecus‘ anatomy and habits:
“Here then, was a very complete picture of an animal-not just what it looked like, but also how it lived. And all based on a few fragments of upper and lower jaw and teeth_’What we saw in the fossils was the small canines, and the rest followed, all linked together somehow. The Darwinian picture has a long tradition, and it was very powerful,’”18
“Pilbeam and Simmons managed to maintain their support of Ramapithecus [as a hominid], however, mainly by adjusting their lines of argument in concert with the shifting evidence,”19 “Pilbeam began to realize that the fossil material then available simply wasn’t adequate to support the kinds of sweeping conclusions that had been made,”20 “before the decade was out Rama’s ape would be just that-an ape.”21
“An unfortunate tendency has developed of late,” Bernard Campbell observed, “for anthropologists who are mainly engaged in university teaching, rather than in actual field studies, to start lengthy discussions and criticism on the basis of preliminary reports, often without even viewing the original specimens, or casts thereof. This sort of controversy, often accompanied by dogmatic pronouncements, must be deplored.”22
“The character of the KBS Tuff controversy was in large part colored by the combination of these two factors: Fitch and Miller’s solid adherence to their original figure, despite their inability to replicate it adequately; and Leakey’s unswerving loyalty to these two men and their contentions. Each party had very good reasons for acting the way it did. In addition, Leakey clearly had a vested interest in the older date, if for nothing else that because the claim for the oldest Homo, oldest stone tools, and so on was good for fund-raising.”23
“Richard [Leakey] ran an expedition and as joint leader and main operator of the practical side he felt that he had a right to loyalty from the expedition members. Inevitably that meant agreement with him on all important factors associated with the expedition_if you did not agree on important issues you could either back down or leave. Most of us backed down a few times and then eventually left_Despite this, my own preference would be to work for an expedition run by Richard.”24
Donald Johanson, “acknowledges that the search is often spiced by hopes that are not always strictly scientific. ‘We have a passion to find the oldest, the most complete, the biggest-brained, the most enigmatic fossil,’ he recently told an audience at a public lecture at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.25 Many anthropologists feel like this, but few are candid enough to express it publicly.”26
“Michael Day anatomist, “Nine-tenths of your importance in this field comes from your finds_There is a tremendous bias towards finders. And with this goes an unwarranted weight on their opinions_I can easily be accused of sour grapes,” 27 which he states because he is not a finder.
“With the emotional elements of adventure, sacrifice and reward all compounded in the discovery of a new fossil, together with the soul-stirring aspects of ancestor worship, it might seem that the odds are heavily stacked against an objective analysis by the individual who by custom has the right of first pronouncement. Earnest Hooton, a prominent Harvard anthropologist of the 1930s and ’40s, recognized this trap as ‘the psychology of the individual discoverer and describer.’ He wrote that ‘The tendency towards aggrandizement of a rare or unique specimen on the part of its finder or the person to whom its initial scientific description has been entrusted, springs naturally from human egoism and is almost ineradicable.’”28
“The individual lucky enough to have first access to a particular specimen is therefore likely to ‘leave no bone unturned in his effort to find new and striking peculiarities which he can interpret functionally or genealogically, Unless he is very experienced, he is prone to discover new features which are partially the creations of his own concentrated imagination.’”29
“But [Earnest] Hooton identifies an even greater danger. This is ‘the psychological conflict in which the discoverer or describer is torn between his desire to find primitive, unique, or anthropoidal features which will allow him to place his specimen nearer to the apes than any previously recorded, and his equally powerful urge to demonstrate the direct and central position of his new type in the ancestry of modern man.’When the former impulse is in the ascendancy, says, Hooton, ‘the author is likely to blow the dust off his Greek and Latin dictionaries and perpetrate some horrid neologism in creating a new zoological species, genus or even family, thereby committing simultaneously mortal sins in both philology and taxonomy.’ When the latter impulse succeeds, the describer ‘may seize upon metrically or morphologically insignificant features common to both [modern man and the fossil under study] as evidence of their genetic relationship.’
In other words, on the one hand you exaggerate the difference between your fossil and modern humans, thus getting for yourself a nice, ancient, discrete ancestor. And on the other, you overlook the differences and exaggerate the similarities, thus setting your fossil on the threshold of the noble Homo sapiens.”30
“If all this were not bad enough, Hooton warns that ‘in addition to the frailties inseparable from the enactment of the role of original describer, one must also discount the author’s previous commitments on the subject of fossil man, the ghosts of earlier opinions which rise to haunt him in the interpretation of new evidence.’ A dispassionate analysis of new fossil evidence is possible, he says, ‘only when one awaits the reworking of the material by persons not emotionally identified with the specimen.’ Even then, an independent analyst, while not potentially blinded by emotional attachment to a fossil, will still have a particular set of preconceptions against which he will judge it. So dispassionate it may be, but totally objective it can never be.”31
Le Gros Clark “‘Probably nothing has done more to introduce confusion into the story of human evolution than the reckless propensity for inventing new (and sometimes unnecessarily complicated) names for fragmentary fossil relics that turn out eventually to belong to genera or species previously known.’ Instead of filling gaps in the story of human ancestry, this habit tended ‘to produce gaps that did not exist.’32
This problem has in some part been eased in the half-century since Hooton made his pithy remarks. But it remains inescapably true that applying the correct label is astonishingly difficult, not least because such labels are in a sense arbitrary abstractions, and especially so when the material on which the analysis is being done ins fragmentary and eroded. ‘It is one so difficult that I think it would be legitimate to despair that one could ever turn into a science.’”33
Atheism and science
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