historian Tom Holland discussing the Pittdown man hoax, and the racism (eugenic idea that British were superior because mankind evolved in the UK) behind why so may eagerly accepted the hoax:
I should add: This idea no longer is accepted, and the anti white rhetoric is partly in response to this racism 100 years ago...
but using evolution to prove one's superiority is not limited to the Brits.
the Chinese propaganda machine continues to push the idea that the Peking Man proves the Chinese are superior.
All authors agree that the Chinese discussions about Peking Man—and more broadly, paleoanthropology and prehistorical archaeology—serve a nationalist agenda with its racial implications.
However, there is not only a divergence regarding the significance of such a racial aspect in the nationalism, but also and more importantly a lack of a theoretical explanation as to why the discourse is racial, although simply by creating and applying those concepts a reader informed by fundamental knowledge about racial thinking can clearly see the association between them.
This theoretical elaboration is necessary not only because it will effectively engage the Chinese defence that has rejected even nationalist—let alone racial—implications of the discourse, but also because it will contribute to our understanding of the varieties of scientific racism that appear to have nothing to do with a harmful or even dangerous racist agenda.
Of course, the Peking man fossils were lost during WWII (how convenient), and some speculate that like Richard II, they might be found under a Peking parking lot. But similar fossil finds suggest that, unlike Piltdown man, they were real.
so what do both of these finds have in common?
Both had links to Teilhard Chardin, a Jesuit whose posthumous works postulated that mankind was evolving toward an omega point (published after he died because the Vatican recognized them as heresy and forbad their publication, so he gave them to a friend who published them after he died). He is sort of a saint to the modernists, who would like to turn the old fuddy duddy Church with it's ten commandments into the Church of what's happening now, promoting the green religion and the religion of if it feels good why can it be wrong.
Well, those sins have been around for centuries, and the green religion mixes both good and bad, the bad part being the elites who want to tell farmers how to grow stuff without modern seeds or chemicals, and if the society collapses from food being scarce and expensive, well, that is not their fault.
but these things are getting push back from those nasty conservatives but also from reality.
The real danger of Teilhard's ideas is the mythology of utopia that is infiltrating society.
the evolution to a superman/omega point proposed in his books is still resonating with the transhumanist types. And the heresy part is not the science of evolution, but the fact that in this myth there is no place for Jesus as Savior of the world, and that his life and death and resurrection are important.
Of course, when even the Pope goes around saying all religions lead to God and forgets to mention Jesus, this echoes Teilhard's ideas (and is based on an assumption that religion and God are not real but psychological ways to cope with reality).
The irony is that Teilhard was there when the fossils of the Piltdown man was discovered, and strangely enough, that he found a tooth that was needed to convince many that the skull was real.
Some people even suspect he was part of the hoax, but the more charitable insist that his actions might have been a joke that went wrong. The Conversation discusses.
Nature magazine also discusses.
Regardless of who was responsible, the Piltdown hoax is a stark reminder to scientists that if something seems too good to be true, then perhaps it is. The hoax is unprecedented in its complexity (some of the Piltdown finds were more expertly modified than others, and the skill of the forger(s) is one of the aspects we are examining). But it is not the only example of trickery within palaeontological and archaeological circles.
Piltdown Man's temporary ascendancy undoubtedly cost the field. For instance, it delayed widespread acceptance of Australopithecus africanus, an early hominin found in South Africa in the mid-1920s, as a genuinely ancient relic of human evolution.
Less obviously, Piltdown Man demonstrates the power of the scientific method to expose the truth, eventually....(but only after) the discoveries at Piltdown were steadily undermined by finds made elsewhere, even though the reasons for the specimens' failure to withstand scrutiny were not fully articulated until 1953.
again, this makes one laugh. Why did it take so long? Fear of objecting to the scientific consensus? Fear of being seen as objecting to the trendy Darwinian Eugenics and maybe even allying oneself with those dumb Papists?
Dirty little secrect:
The political wish to support British racial superiority rather than science per se sort of discouraged the discussion of the fossils as a hoax.
And later investigations suggest that Dawson, who found the fossil, had faked a lot of his fossil finds.
the Conversation article quotes his letter hinting that he knew about it, so why did he keep quiet about the hoax?
and indeed he might, since according to this WAPOST article, link2 he found the canine tooth
Later "excavations" at two Piltdown sites revealed a jaw bone, teeth, stone tools and a piece of carved fossil bone deemed a "cricket bat." They also cast a cloud of suspicion over everyone who took part. A volunteer in Woodward's department, Martin Hinton, seemed a likely suspect, especially after researchers at the Natural History Museum discovered a trunk of stained bones he'd left in storage there. Some skeptics eyed Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest and prominent paleontologist, who discovered a canine tooth that figured prominently in the skull's identification.
so here is the ripple effect.
Darwininan evolution suggested there is no God because things evolved naturally. But it also suggested evolution of the fittest. Get rid of God and compassion for the weak( most religions say God wanted people be humble and help others and that greed is bad, and Christianity adds: since folk were getting it wrong and killing those who pointed this out, he sent his Son to show them.),
Get rid of true religion, and voila, Greed is good, destroying the environment in the name of profit is good, and science is god.
So Nazi eugenic ideas about untermensch were scientific, and destroying the retarded, the brain damaged, Jews, Gays, Gypsies was okay, and using Slavs and others in countries they conquered was justified.
But science demands honesty. Science is not dogma, but a description of what is observed, so future observations will change our ideas.(Catholicism at least has long held that God can be found not just in the Bible but in the book of nature, so accepts science as good. And don't point out Galileo: His theories could not be proved by science until they changed the orbits to oval instead of round, and decided the universe was larger than believed, so the parallax arguments no longer held).
And so before one condemns the Piltdown hoax, maybe condemn the medical journals and experts who pushed the various covid hoaxes without proper skepticism.
original Lancet article March 2020 Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19 insisting that Covid came from wild animals. and they cite lots of experts who say this, while calling those who question this conspiracy theorists.
In Oct 2021, they printed another article An appeal for an objective, open, and transparent scientific debate about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 that said whoops, that article and several others not only didn't prove that theory. But these articles silenced those who questioned it. (sorry about that Chief).
it took them awhile: The rival journal the BMJ noted this in July 2021:The covid-19 lab leak hypothesis: did the media fall victim to a misinformation campaign?
Scientists and reporters contacted by The BMJ say that objective consideration of covid-19’s origins went awry early in the pandemic, as researchers who were funded to study viruses with pandemic potential launched a campaign labelling the lab leak hypothesis as a “conspiracy theory.” A leader in this campaign has been Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit organisation given millions of dollars in grants by the US federal government to research viruses for pandemic preparedness.
Over the years EcoHealth Alliance has subcontracted out its federally supported research to various scientists and groups, including around $600 000 (£434 000; €504 000) to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Shortly after the pandemic began, Daszak effectively silenced debate over the possibility of a lab leak with a February 2020 statement in the Lancet. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that covid-19 does not have a natural origin,” said the letter, which listed Daszak as one of 27 coauthors.
Daszak did not respond to repeated requests for comment from The BMJ.
so we have a butterfly effect.
expert whose organization funded the covid virus research in Wuhan gets others to support the idea that it came from animals and silenced anyone who questioned this.
And of course, the establishment that went along with this, and not only didn't allow anyone (even President Trump) to question the story, but managed to censor discussions of treatment, quarantines, and vaccines.
When science is god, then questioning the priests of science is heresy, and you will be punished for doing this.
and it started with Piltdown:
Science hoax on evolution not investigated because it went along with politics of British racial superiority.
Priest who was there kept quiet for 40 years even though his letters hint he knew the truth.
Peking man bones are being used by China to prove the superiority of the Han Chinese race today.
Priest who knew about the Piltdown hoax goes on to reject the central beliefs in Catholicism: i.e. that Christ's life and death meant God intervened in history to make the world a better place and the good news that the reality behind the world is a God who loves you.
Instead, we have evolution of man to the omega point, a theories similar to the tranhumanist theories that imply man will evolve to become god.
Julian Huxley, the biologist and eugenicist (and brother to writer Aldous Huxley), was deeply impacted by Teilhard.
In 1957, Huxley wrote: “The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself —not just sporadically…but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.” This was the origin of modern transhumanism—a movement largely characterized by the concepts of emerging superintelligence, and an exponential arc of evolution.
the article goes into more of this idea, and indeed, how Pope Francis encyclical on the love of nature echoes his ideas.
This is getting into theology which is over my head but when I read this type of stuff, I notice it is about the elites evolving into supermen one with the universe, not about the guy planting rice or driving a tricycle trying to make a living, or the mom caring for her baby, or those living an ordinary life.
In transhumanism and much of the modern world, the aim of life is success, happiness, and fulfilling your desires. Hmm... hasn't this idea been a plot in many sci fi stories (Cordwainer Smith anyone?) and movies.
This requires of course health and a high IQ and oodles of money. So the implication is that the lives of ordinary folk are worthless (useless eaters anyone?)
In contrast, in traditional Christianity, every life is valuable, and so is living an ordinary life, to know, love and serve God in this world and be happy with him in the next.
So proposing evolution as God, with man's aim is not to know love and serve God, but as a cog in the evolution of a superman, who will presumably rule the world, suggests that science has evolved from a search for truth to the handmaid of the powerful to shape and control the world..
sigh.
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