Page 114 - Confessions of the Evolutionists

112 CONFESSIONS OF THE EVOLUTIONISTS

to be imaginative, but not fanciful, the inputs and caveats offered by the
psychologists, taphonomists, and others create the right condition in
which to be responsibly imaginative. 279
F. Clark Howell, professor and chairman of the Anthropology
Department at the University of Chicago, discusses Piltdown Man, one

of the most notorious forgeries in history:
Piltdown was discovered in 1953 to have been nothing more than an ape's
jaw placed with a human skull. It was a hoax placed on purpose. They
recognized neither the jaw to be an ape's or the skull to be a human's.
Instead, they declared each part as [from] an in-between [species] of ape
and human. They dated it to be 500,000 years old, gave it a name
(Eoanthropus Dawsoni or "Dawson's Dawn Man"), and wrote some 500
books on it. The "discovery" fooled paleontologists for forty-five years. 280

Wray Herbert is psychology editor for Science News, editor-in-
chief of Psychology Today, and science and medicine editor at US News
& World Report:
According to John Hopkins University anthropologist Alan Walker, there
is a long tradition of misinterpreting various bones as human clavicles; in
the past, he says, skilled anthropologists have erroneously described an
alligator femur and the toe of a three-toed horse as clavicles. 281

Boyce Rensberger is author of popular science books and director
of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships program at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology:
In 1984, a 12-year old boy of the Homo erectus species, dated at 1.6 million
years old, was dug up in Kenya. His body skeleton was virtually indis-
tinguishable from our own. 282
Jerald M. Loewenstein and Adrienne L. Zihlman in New Scientist,
dated December 1988:
... anatomy and the fossil record cannot be relied upon for evolutionary
lineages. Yet palaeontologists persist in doing just this.... The subjective el-
ement in this approach to building evolutionary trees, which many
palaeontologists advocate with almost religious fervour, is demonstrated
by the outcome: there is no single family tree on which they agree. On the