3 thoughts on “Piltdown Mann”

  1. Don’t know if you want to be using Piltdown “Mann” as an analogy to this current dust-up.

    Piltdown Man was exposed as a fraud, and I think there were a couple others. Nebraska Man supposedly was not fraudulent but a case of mistaken identity of the most fragmentary of fossils — some teeth from a pig. I remember seeing at someone’s house some 30 years ago a Creationist poster with the traditional progression of putative human ancestors, you know, the kind of Descent of Man Parade that has been parodied in so many editorial and sports-page cartoons. That poster labeled all of these frauds and posers for human ancestors.

    Piltdown and Nebraska Man were also a case of “jumping the gun”, and I think they preceded the “Out of Africa” theory of the origins of humans — nowadays no one would go looking in Nebraska or wherever-in-England for a distant human ancestor.

    Also, out of the Leakeys’ and others work in East Africa, there is a lot more fossil evidence. Out of Darwin’s theory, people thought there just had to be fossil evidence of human evolution just as for any other creature in the natural world, only quite some time went by post Darwin before people started finding such fossils instead of making them up.

    I have been following the Global Warming debate for years and years now (perhaps ever since I talked to my friend at Caltech in about 1980). The history of humanity is a long-term slow, steady exponential growth in the use of energy resources, and that we will run out of fossil fuels or have some major impact on the natural environment at some time is perhaps as inevitable as finding valid instead of fraudulent fossils of human ancestors.

    On the other hand, I have been following the temperature record controversy ever since I discovered the John Daly Web site (the recent e-mail comments crowing about John Daly’s untimely passing I find sickening, and folks have some ‘splainin about that one), along with the concerns about Urban Heat Islands and the divergence between space-based and terrestrial temperature records.

    That the “Earth has a fever” has always been the weakest leg of the Global Warming hypothesis, that Global Warming is already happening and that the temperature records are indisputable. It may turn out to be a real case of crying wolf, with the wolf coming 20 or 50 or 100 years from now.

    But as far as the temperature record evidence for Global Warming, we are in the pre-Leakey era of fossil-finding, not the post.

  2. The Piltdown Man comparison is a propos, but we should be cautious: The CRU scandal hasn’t disproved AGW any more than the Piltdown hoax disproved evolution.

    Warmergate has provided a great opportunity to demand a thorough re-examination of the evidence, but that’s all. Any evidence NOT originating from UEA has to be assumed to be valid until we can prove otherwise, and it may well turn out that other researchers were more scrupulous and honest and yet got results that confirm AGW.

    The point is, we won’t know until we’ve checked, so let’s stow the celebrations until then – and bear in mind that it may yet turn out that AGW is real after all.

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