A Place to Stand

In 1912 Charles Dawson, a respectable British lawyer claimed to have discovered the fossil of the earliest known man - & he was British. It took until 1953 until he was publicly denounced by the scientific community though a few, largely foreign)!) had said so much earlier.

"In November 1953, The Times published evidence gathered variously by Kenneth Page Oakley, Sir Wilfrid Edward Le Gros Clark and Joseph Weiner proving that the Piltdown Man was a forgery and demonstrating that the fossil was a composite of three distinct species. It consisted of a human skull of medieval age, the 500-year-old lower jaw of a Sarawak orangutan and chimpanzee fossil teeth. The appearance of age had been created by staining the bones with an iron solution and chromic acid. Microscopic examination revealed file-marks on the teeth, and it was deduced from this someone had modified the teeth to give them a shape more suited to a human diet.

The Piltdown man hoax had succeeded so well because at the time of its discovery, the scientific establishment had believed that the large modern brain had preceded the modern omnivorous diet, and the forgery had provided exactly that evidence. It has also been thought that nationalism and cultural prejudice also played a role in the less-than-critical acceptance of the fossil as genuine by some British scientists...more"

Another reason it wasn't denounced is because Dawson had consistently refused to let scientists examine it presumably sharing Professor phil Jones expressed view about the Met Office's refusal to produce & subsequent loss of the data for global warming "Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it."

There has been a surprising number of people trying to blame anybody but Dawson despite him having "previous" to wit "the teeth of a reptile/mammal hybrid, Plagiaulax dawsoni, "found" in 1895 (and whose teeth had been filed down in the same way that the teeth of Piltdown man would be some 20 years later), the so-called "shadow figures" on the walls of Hastings Castle, a unique hafted stone axe, the Bexhill boat (a hybrid sea faring vessel), the Pevensey bricks (allegedly the latest datable "finds" from Roman Britain), the contents of the Lavant Caves (a fraudulent "flint mine"), the Beauport Park "Roman" statuette (a hybrid iron object), the Bulverhythe Hammer (shaped with an iron knife in the same way as Piltdown elephant bone implement would later be), a fraudulent "Chinese" bronze vase, the Brighton "Toad in the Hole" (a toad entombed within a flint nodule), the English Channel sea serpent, the Uckfield Horseshoe (another hybrid iron object) and the Lewes Prick Spur"

It suggests that people are simply unwilling to accuse the "great & good" & possibly particularly lawyers of being liars.

This is supported by the subsequent history of the subject "In the period 1930-1950 Piltdown man was increasingly marginalized and by 1950 was, by and large, simply ignored". For alleged primary scientific evidence to be ignored strongly suggests there was a general feeling that it wasn't genuine but an equally strong lack of desire to rock the boat by saying so.

The comparisons & differences with the global warming scam are clear. In both there is a political/social drive that supports it) in Dawson's day the desire to extend back the date of Britain's greatness, today because warming hysteria supports government's desire to expand its control & revenue raising options. In both cases we see non-scientists in the lead presuming a political "consensus" which most scientists are to polite to loudly describe as lies (see the numerous times politicians have stated that 99% or 99.9% of scientists support this "consensus2 when far & away the largest group to have given an opinion, the 31,000 Oregon Petitioners say otherwise). The main difference, however is the amount of state pressure pushing the warming lie, the many billions of £s paid by government to sell it, the way that the now government funded Royal Society has been strongly supportive, though now quietly hedging its bets, whereas Dawson, despite desperately wanting it, was refused membership. Most importantly & indicating the importance of modern politician's corruption of science while Piltdown Man was of purely, though considerable, academic interest, the Kyoto regulatory part of the warming lie costs $800 million every day.

Labels: Government parasitism, Science/technology