The Darwin Business model

I found this blog while searching for images of "Darwin's finches" and found it interesting (I like the VISTA acronym)

How Darwin’s Theory can grow your business

Whither Piltdown Man?

How could an obvious fraud like Piltdown Man be accepted as legitimate for over a half-century? Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould defined four factors that shaped public perception (and thus acceptance) of Piltdown:

I. The imposition of strong hope upon dubious evidence. In the case of Piltdown Man, national pride was at stake. France had cornered the market on paleoanthropological findings--Neandertals, CroMagnon, cave paintings. Piltdown, if real, would have pre-dated the hominid material from France, and England would reign supreme in this area. There was no love lost between French and English scientists.

II. Reduction of anomaly by fit with cultural biases. One of the reigning cultural biases of this time was the idea that in human evolution the brain got larger (which was seen as indicating more intelligence) and other morphological change followed. This model predicted the existence of hominid fossils with relatively large skulls and simian bodies. Voila! Piltdown was exactly what paleo-anthropologists of the time would have expected to find.

III. Reduction of anomaly by matching fact to expectation. After the fraud was discovered, it was obvious to anthropologists that the skull was human, the jaw belonged to an orang-utan, and that the pieces did not belong together. Before the revelation of fraud, however, scientists favorably disposed to the idea of Piltdown saw what they wanted to see and shaped the facts to fit their model of Piltdown as the oldest human relative.

IV. Prevention of discovery by practice. During the time of Piltdown's discovery and description, many museums, including the British Museum of Natural History, were not inclined to grant access to their material. Instead, it was treated proprietarily. In the case of Piltdown, researchers could look but not touch. Only a set of plast models of the bones could be handled. but only in the original bones could the fraud be detected--the artificial staining and filing down of the teeth did not show up in the plaster casts. Even famed paleoanthropologist Louis Leaky was not allowed to closely examine the original bones.

Could a hoax like Piltdown be perpetrated today? Human nature hasn't changed, so we are still susceptible to the first three factors Gould described. Fortunately, professional standards have evolved, and reproducibility, transparency and accessibility to specimens are required before extradordinary claims are widely accepted.

Reference: Gould, S.J., 1980, The Panda's Thumb, Chapter 10, Piltdown Revisited (p. 108-124).

Paleontological hoaxes, II

In 1912 Charles Dawson, lawyer and amateur archeologist, brought human skull fragments to a paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History and said the bones had been found by workmen in a gravel pit a few years earlier. Subsequently Dawson found other bits of worn and stained teeth, an ape-like jaw, and flint tools. These findings were presented at a meeting of the Geological Society of London as a new human ancestor. Dawson made further discoveries, strengthening this interpretation, and for the next 30 years Piltdown man was considered a legitimate part of human prehistory and included in textbooks.

However, in 1953 Piltdown was exposed as a hoax. Chemical tests showed the bones to be much younger than originally claimed. Once the seeds of doubt were planted, critical observation revealed that the bones had been stained and the teeth artificially worn, and the flint tools were found to have been shaped with modern blades. Dawson died before the hoax was revealed, so we may never with certainty whodunit and what the motive was, but we can entertain several possibilities....

A history of hoaxes, 1

The earliest recorded deliberate paleontological fraud was perpetrated around the year 1725 on a professor , Dr. Johann Beringer, by colleagues and/or students who felt that that pompous professor needed to be brought down a peg. The story goes that those seeking to discredit Beringer salted a mountain side with rocks carved with a variety of figures, both natural and unnatural. The stones were brought to Beringer's attention, and before it was all over Beringer had paid a lot of money to purchase these stones as well as to pay people to find more. He published a treatise on the stones before he realized the hoax.

Legend has it that he finally found his own name carved in one of the rocks. His reputation on the verge of ruin, Beringer vainly attempted to buy back all of the copies of his book, he "ruined himself financially, and shortly died of chagrin and mortification."* [Actually, he died 14 year after publication of the treatise.]

Why didn't he realized these fanciful stones were fake? Beringer explicitly addressed the possibility that the stones were relicts of an earlier culture and the possibility that they were faked. Amazingly, he dismissed these alternatives and concluded that the stones were natural.

Beringer's fatal flaw was that he lost objectivity. He fastened on a favored interpretation-that the stones were authentic--and blinded himself to alternative explanations. The perpetrators probably knew that the vanity of their victim would produce the desired result.

There is a modern post-script to this story--Beringer brought a lawsuit against the perpetrators, and won.

*Reference: The Lying Stone of Dr. JohannBartholomew Adam Beringer. Translated and annotated by M.E. Jahn and d.J. Woolf, 1963.

See also http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/archive/permalink/the_lying_stones_of_dr._beringer/

There's one born every minute

The recent apparent hoax by a Colorado couple seeking fame and fortune by preying on the credulity of the general public and abetted by their considerable skills as trained actors is the inspiration for this week’s blog. Hoaxes succeed where access to information in a situation is controlled by the party perpetrating the hoax, and fields of study that rely on unique, one-of-a kind observations or objects are more susceptible to hoaxes. Think art forgeries or in paleontology, unique fossils purported to be missing links. In the history of paleontology several episodes stand out, they range in time from the 1800s to the 1990s, but the reasons for the hoaxes are essentially the same as the recent one in the news because this aspect of human nature hasn’t changed. PT Barnum is supposed to have said, " There’s a sucker born every minute"*; the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes put it more eloquently as, “there is nothing new under the sun.”

*And PT Barnum is in fact associated with a paleontological/anthropological hoax, the Cardiff Giant (shown here). See www.roadsideamerica.com/ story/2172

My favorite e-mail request

My office door is my placard, my protest sign, my refrigerator-door-away-from-home. I try to be selective in choosing what is posted on my office door, because of the limited space, so I am especially fond of this brief item, which originated as a post to a paleontology listserve. It's so utterly delightful in its incomprehensibility, yet I know personally several folks who understand exactly what this person is asking:

To the amphibiophiles on this list,

Is anybody of you aware of published descriptions and/or figures of the epipterygoid bone in rhinesuchid, lydekkerinid or wetlugasaurid temnospondyls?

Any reference is highly appreciated.

Oh, my spellchecker did not like that request, at all!