Subject:
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Re: The Fake Fossil (Was: Problems with Darwin's theory)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Fri, 2 Feb 2001 16:08:58 GMT
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Viewed:
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706 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Larry Pieniazek writes:
> In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Jeremy H. Sproat writes:
> > In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Bruce Schlickbernd writes:
> > > In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Jeremy H. Sproat writes:
> > > > Taken in the right perspective, this faked fossil really bears no relevance
> > > > in the whole evolution / creationism debate.
> > > Helps establish the link between dinosaurs and birds. Evolution.
> >
> > Um, it just throws a known fabrication into the debate. I'm sure that it's
> > possible that it *could* benefit one side of the argument over the other,
> > but I fail to see how.
>
> Fakes happen. Defaking stuff is fun, as Bruce alludes to. Investigating why
> people do fakes is interesting.
It tells one a lot about the scientific profession--and academia
in general--when things like that happen. Thanks to Jeremy for
providing the cites; I read both the "original" and the followup
in National Geographic. As in religion, vanity can play a role in
science--I'm as convinced as ever that Thomas Kuhn was right
(at least before the 1990s--he got really weird after that) and
that objectivity is truly a chimera.
I'll reiterate the cite I put in another section of this eternal
debate (or has it only been going on for 10,000 years? But I
digress...) because it has relevance both for the "why" it was
the sort of animal fake it was, and how it was possible that
some otherwise circumspect academics were taken in. That's
Greg Paul's _Predatory Dinosaurs of the World_, where he advances
(for the first time, as far as I'm aware, in the mainstream) that
dromaeosaurs were likely feathered, secondarily-flightless
offshoots of the same line that included archaeopterygians.
Since that book (and others on dinosaur metabolism and morphology)
appeared in the early '90s, the hot field of archosaur research
has been what was called the coelurosauria and its complicated
relationship with birds. Therefore, a feathery dromaeosaur is
a heck of a lot more interesting than a psittacosaur with lombego
(but not more interesting than a hypsipholodont with a four-
chambered heart, which *is* a genuine fossil, not a fake).
As for the vanity, Paul takes that on by rethinking and reordering
phylogenies--a lot of animals were given species names by vain
scientists who wished to "make a discovery" and be the first to
name and describe an exciting animal. (You get less of this sort
of showmanship among, say, palaeoichthyologists.) So now that
most of the early discoverers are dead, it was relatively easy
to rethink and reposition for gender dimorphism, age, and the like
and drastically reduce the number of genera known. Paul's vanity,
of course, is in being the one to perform this task and tell the
wider world about it. ;)
> But the question is not whether a particular observation is faked. The
> question, rather, is whether there the preponderance of evidence is faked.
> It's not.
See above. The Archaeopteryx specimens from Solnhofen (Bavaria)
were subjected to an insane number of tests to satisfy Creationists
who believed they might be fake--down to electron microscopy and
the matching of layered microfractures in the feather impressions.
So it's not just that "scientists won't let anyone touch their
specimens"--not when the most famous transitional fossils in the
world have been subjected to a level of scrutiny nobody would want
to face off against in a courtroom.
> The literal creationists seize on the fakes because they think it bolsters
> their case while ignoring the vast majority of the evidence which, while
> perhaps less dramatic, isn't faked and which is overwhelming.
What's quite funny is that a lot of the YECs still point to the
Glen Rose, TX "dinosaur-and-human-footprints-together" fossil
tracks, which were proven to be faked in 1931. Sorry, Fred
Flintstone, you appear to have missed your Bronto-Burgers by
about 65 million years (actually, for genus Apatosaurus (aka
Brontosaurus), by nearly twice that).
> What really is *fake* in all this is the literal creationist pretense at
> understanding the scientific process, pretense at wanting to actually
> evaluate observations honestly, and pretense that literal creationism has
> equivalent scientific validity with evolution while systematically mugging
> the truth.
Bingo. The obvious seems to escape Scientific Creationists:
Why do you need science at all? I can say we were all created
by a fuzzy pink rabbit five minutes ago with our memories intact,
the appearance of great age in the Earth, and misleading belief
systems to keep us from the bunny, and nobody can prove me wrong.
All the rest is Rube Goldberg patchwork designed to produce
legitimation from scientific authority, which the Creationist
movement desperately wants. The only reasons I've seen that YEC
could need this are to (a) openly misrepresent its core nature and
hoodwink the ill-informed into considering its basis (proselytizing)
and (b) to buttress the believers' feeling that they already have
all the answers and need no more by making Creationism look on
the surface like it's a science. That last is important and often
overlooked by scientists, because they're not thinking about the
view from inside a life of faith, but it explains a lot of the
tenacity of the Young-Earth Creationist movement. (CRS/ICR, all
of that.)
I don't care that someone's a Creationist out of religious
conviction and sheer faith; I do care when they justify it with
bad science, and then try to teach that bad science to others
under the guise of objectivity. Now where's my Junior Craniometry
Kit gone?
> That sort of fake "thinking" leads to travesties like the State of Oklahoma
> textbook disclaimer:
>
> http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/articles/5438_dissecting_the_disclaimer_12_7_2000.asp
Thanks for the link! There's a lot of good resources there.
I hadn't realised that Oklahoma had replicated the Alabama
disclaimer. When you're taking your science education leads
from Alabama, shouldn't that be an indicator of the bias
behind it?
> Note that the literal creationists prefer that it be called scientific
> creationism. I prefer to call it what it is, cause it ain't scientific.
Special Creation has no explanatory value. It has feet of
clay. Rather than changing to explain the evidence, it
changes the evidence to explain itself--ignorant at best,
malicious at worst.
> Note that I have a lot less truck with IDCers than I do with the woolyheaded
> and freedom denigrating bunch of literal creationists. By gosh, if I am
> going to be forced to pay for public schools I am darn well going to insist
> that we don't confuse kids by presenting religious beliefs as well founded
> science in them.
The "Evolution-Creation continuum" piece at the NCSE site is
especially good, IMHO. I knew about all of those groups, but
I'd never seen them arrayed on a line like that--definitely one
to print out and hang onto. "So you're a Creationist? What
kind?" :)
best
Lindsay
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