In 1922, Henry Fairfield Osborn, the director of the American Museum of Natural History, declared that he had found a fossil molar tooth belonging to the Pliocene period in western Nebraska near Snake Brook. This tooth allegedly bore common characteristics of both man and ape. An extensive scientific debate began surrounding this fossil, which came to be called "Nebraska man," in which some interpreted this tooth as belonging to Pithecanthropus erectus, while others claimed it was closer to human beings. Nebraska man was also immediately given a "scientific name," Hesperopithecus haroldcooki.
Many authorities gave Osborn their support. Based on this single tooth, reconstructions of Nebraska man's head and body were drawn. Moreover, Nebraska man was even pictured along with his wife and children, as a whole family in a natural setting.
All of these scenarios were developed from just one tooth. Evolutionist circles placed such faith in this "ghost man" that when a researcher named William Bryan opposed these biased conclusions relying on a single tooth, he was harshly criticized.
In 1927, other parts of the skeleton were also found. According to these newly discovered pieces, the tooth belonged neither to a man nor to an ape. It was realized that it belonged to an extinct species of wild American pig called Prosthennops. William Gregory entitled the article published in Science in which he announced the truth, "Hesperopithecus Apparently Not an Ape Nor a Man."(William K. Gregory, "Hesperopithecus Apparently Not An Ape Nor A Man," Science, vol. 66, issue 1720, 16 December 1927, p. 579) Then all the drawings of Hesperopithecus haroldcooki and his "family" were hurriedly removed from evolutionary literature.
 Nebraska man, and Henry Fairfield Osborn, who named it. |
What used to be called the "recapitulation theory" has long been eliminated from scientific literature, but it is still being presented as a scientific reality by some evolutionist publications. The term "recapitulation" is a condensation of the dictum "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," put forward by the evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel at the end of the nineteenth century.
 With his faked embryo drawings, Ernst Haeckel deceived the world of science for a century. |
This theory of Haeckel's postulates that living embryos re-experience the evolutionary process that their pseudo-ancestors underwent. He theorized that during its development in its mother's womb, the human embryo first displayed the characteristics of a fish, and then those of a reptile, and finally those of a human.
It has since been proven that this theory is completely bogus. It is now known that the "gills" that supposedly appear in the early stages of the human embryo are in fact the initial phases of the middle-ear canal, parathyroid, and thymus. That part of the embryo that was likened to the "egg yolk pouch" turns out to be a pouch that produces blood for the infant. The part that was identified as a "tail" by Haeckel and his followers is in fact the backbone, which resembles a tail only because it takes shape before the legs do.
 Haeckel's fake drawings. |
These are universally acknowledged facts in the scientific world, and are accepted even by evolutionists themselves. Two leading neo-Darwinists, George Gaylord Simpson and W. Beck have admitted:
Haeckel misstated the evolutionary principle involved. It is now firmly established that ontogeny does not repeat phylogeny.(G. G. Simpson, W. Beck, An Introduction to Biology, Harcourt Brace and World, New York, 1965, p. 241)
The following was written in an article in New Scientist dated October 16, 1999:
[Haeckel] called this the biogenetic law, and the idea became popularly known as recapitulation. In fact Haeckel's strict law was soon shown to be incorrect. For instance, the early human embryo never has functioning gills like a fish, and never passes through stages that look like an adult reptile or monkey.(Ken McNamara, "Embryos and Evolution," New Scientist, vol. 12416, 16 October 1999. (emphasis added))
In an article published in American Scientist, we read:
Surely the biogenetic law is as dead as a doornail. It was finally exorcised from biology textbooks in the fifties. As a topic of serious theoretical inquiry it was extinct in the twenties...(Keith S. Thomson, "Ontogeny and Phylogeny Recapitulated," American Scientist, vol. 76, May/June 1988, p. 273)
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Another interesting aspect of "recapitulation" was Ernst Haeckel himself, a faker who falsified his drawings in order to support the theory he advanced. Haeckel's forgeries purported to show that fish and human embryos resembled one another. When he was caught out, the only defense he offered was that other evolutionists had committed similar offences:
After this compromising confession of 'forgery' I should be obliged to consider myself condemned and annihilated if I had not the consolation of seeing side by side with me in the prisoner's dock hundreds of fellow - culprits, among them many of the most trusted observers and most esteemed biologists. The great majority of all the diagrams in the best biological textbooks, treatises and journals would incur in the same degree the charge of 'forgery,' for all of them are inexact, and are more or less doctored, schematised and constructed.(Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe: Where Darwin Went Wrong, Ticknor and Fields, New York, 1982, p. 204)
In the September 5, 1997, edition of the well-known scientific journal Science, an article was published revealing that Haeckel's embryo drawings were the product of a deception. The article, called "Haeckel's Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered," had this to say:
The impression they [Haeckel's drawings] give, that the embryos are exactly alike, is wrong, says Michael Richardson, an embryologist at St. George's Hospital Medical School in London... So he and his colleagues did their own comparative study, reexamining and photographing embryos roughly matched by species and age with those Haeckel drew. Lo and behold, the embryos "often looked surprisingly different," Richardson reports in the August issue of Anatomy and Embryology.(Elizabeth Pennisi, "Haeckel's Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered," Science, 5 September, 1997. (emphasis added))
Science explained that, in order to be able to show the embryos as similar, Haeckel deliberately removed some organs from his drawings or else added imaginary ones. Later in this same article, the following information was revealed:
Not only did Haeckel add or omit features, Richardson and his colleagues report, but he also fudged the scale to exaggerate similarities among species, even when there were 10-fold differences in size. Haeckel further blurred differences by neglecting to name the species in most cases, as if one representative was accurate for an entire group of animals. In reality, Richardson and his colleagues note, even closely related embryos such as those of fish vary quite a bit in their appearance and developmental pathway. "It (Haeckel's drawings) looks like it's turning out to be one of the most famous fakes in biology," Richardson concludes.(Elizabeth Pennisi, "Haeckel's Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered," Science, 5 September, 1997. (emphasis added))
The Science article goes on to discuss how Haeckel's confessions on this subject were covered up from the beginning of the last century, and how the fake drawings began to be presented in textbooks as scientific fact:
Haeckel's confession got lost after his drawings were subsequently used in a 1901 book called Darwin and After Darwin and reproduced widely in English language biology texts.(Elizabeth Pennisi, "Haeckel's Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered," Science, 5 September, 1997. (emphasis added))
In short, the fact that Haeckel's drawings were falsified had already emerged in 1901, but the whole world of science continued to be deceived by them for a century.
In 1912, a well-known doctor and amateur paleoanthropologist named Charles Dawson came out with the assertion that he had found a jawbone and a cranial fragment in a pit in Piltdown, England. Even though the jawbone was more ape-like, the teeth and the skull were like a man's. These specimens were labelled the "Piltdown man." Alleged to be 500,000 years old, they were displayed as an absolute proof of human evolution in several museums. For more than 40 years, many scientific articles were written on "Piltdown man," many interpretations and drawings were made, and the fossil was presented as important evidence for human evolution. No fewer than 500 doctoral theses were written on the subject.(Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1980, p. 59) While visiting the British Museum in 1921, leading American paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn said "We have to be reminded over and over again that Nature is full of paradoxes" and proclaimed Piltdown "a discovery of transcendant importance to the prehistory of man." (Stephen Jay Gould, "Smith Woodward's Folly," New Scientist, 5 April 1979, p. 44)
For 40 years, Piltdown man was accepted as the greatest evidence for human evolution. Evolutionist fossil experts claimed to have found a lot of transitional features in the skull. It only emerged later that the fossil was a fake. |
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In 1949, Kenneth Oakley, from the British Museum's Paleontology Department, attempted to use "fluorine testing," a new test used for determining the date of fossils. A trial was made on the fossil of Piltdown man. The result was astonishing. During the test, it was realized that the jawbone of Piltdown man did not contain any fluorine. This indicated that it had remained buried no more than a few years. The skull, which contained only a small amount of fluorine, showed that it was only a few thousand years old.
It was determined that the teeth in the jawbone, belonging to an orangutan, had been worn down artificially and that the "primitive" tools discovered with the fossils were simple imitations that had been sharpened with steel implements. In the detailed analysis completed by Joseph Weiner, this forgery was revealed to the public in 1953. The skull belonged to a 500-year-old man, and the jaw bone belonged to a recently deceased ape! The teeth had been specially arranged in a particular way and added to the jaw, and the molar surfaces were filed in order to resemble those of a man. Then all these pieces were stained with potassium dichromate to give them an old appearance. These stains began to disappear when dipped in acid. Sir Wilfred Le Gros Clark, who was in the team that uncovered the forgery, could not hide his astonishment at this situation, and said: "The evidences of artificial abrasion immediately sprang to the eye. Indeed so obvious did they seem it may well be asked-how was it that they had escaped notice before?" (Stephen Jay Gould, "Smith Woodward's Folly," New Scientist, 5 April 1979, p. 43. (emphasis added)) In the wake of all this, "Piltdown man" was hurriedly removed from the British Museum where it had been displayed for more than 40 years.
Ota Benga: The African Native Put Into a Cage
After Darwin advanced the claim with his book The Descent of Man that man evolved from ape-like living beings, he started to seek fossils to support this contention. However, some evolutionists believed that "half-man half-ape" creatures were to be found not only in the fossil record, but also alive in various parts of the world. In the early 20th century, these pursuits for "living transitional links" led to unfortunate incidents, one of the cruellest of which is the story of a Pygmy by the name of Ota Benga.
 OTA BENGA: "The pygmy in the zoo" |
Piltdown Man, Nebraska Man, Ota Benga... These scandals demonstrate that evolutionist scientists do not hesitate to employ any kind of unscientific method to prove their theory. Bearing this point in mind, when we look at the other so-called evidence of the "human evolution" myth, we confront a similar situation. Here there are a fictional story and an army of volunteers ready to try everything to verify this story.
Even if evolutionists are unsuccessful in finding scientific evidence to support their theories, they are very successful at one thing: propaganda. The most important element of this propaganda is the practice of creating false designs known as "reconstructions."
Reconstruction can be explained as drawing a picture or constructing a model of a living thing based on a single bone-sometimes only a fragment-that has been unearthed. The "ape-men" we see in newspapers, magazines, and films are all reconstructions.
Since fossils are usually fragmented and incomplete, any conjecture based on them is likely to be completely speculative. As a matter of fact, the reconstructions (drawings or models) made by evolutionists based on fossil remains are prepared speculatively precisely to validate the evolutionary thesis. David R. Pilbeam, an eminent anthropologist from Harvard, stresses this fact when he says: "At least in paleoanthropology, data are still so sparse that theory heavily influences interpretations. Theories have, in the past, clearly reflected our current ideologies instead of the actual data."(David R. Pilbeam, "Rearranging Our Family Tree," Human Nature, June 1978, p. 45. (emphasis added)) Since people are highly affected by visual information, these reconstructions best serve the purpose of evolutionists, which is to convince people that these reconstructed creatures really existed in the past.
 Reconstruction drawings reflect only evolutionists' imaginations, not scientific discoveries. |
At this point, we have to highlight one particular point: Reconstructions based on bone remains can only reveal the most general characteristics of the creature, since the really distinctive morphological features of any animal are soft tissues which quickly vanish after death. Therefore, due to the speculative nature of the interpretation of the soft tissues, the reconstructed drawings or models become totally dependent on the imagination of the person producing them. Earnst A. Hooten from Harvard University explains the situation like this:
To attempt to restore the soft parts is an even more hazardous undertaking. The lips, the eyes, the ears, and the nasal tip leave no clues on the underlying bony parts. You can with equal facility model on a Neanderthaloid skull the features of a chimpanzee or the lineaments of a philosopher. These alleged restorations of ancient types of man have very little if any scientific value and are likely only to mislead the public ... So put not your trust in reconstructions.(Earnest A. Hooton, Up From The Ape, McMillan, New York, 1931, p. 332. (emphasis added))
As a matter of fact, evolutionists invent such preposterous stories that they even ascribe different faces to the same skull. For example, the three different reconstructed drawings made for the fossil named Australopithecus robustus (Zinjanthropus) are a famous example of such forgery.
The biased interpretation of fossils and outright fabrication of many imaginary reconstructions are an indication of how frequently evolutionists have recourse to tricks. Yet these seem innocent when compared to the deliberate forgeries that have been perpetrated in the history of evolution.
There is no concrete fossil evidence to support the "ape-man" image, which is unceasingly promulgated by the media and evolutionist academic circles. With brushes in their hands, evolutionists produce imaginary creatures; nevertheless, the fact that these drawings correspond to no matching fossils constitutes a serious problem for them. One of the interesting methods they employ to overcome this problem is to "produce" the fossils they cannot find. Piltdown man, which may be the biggest scandal in the history of science, is a typical example of this method.
Archaeoraptor: The Dino-Bird Hoax
Unable to find what they were looking for in Archaeopteryx, the advocates of the theory of evolution pinned their hopes on some other fossils in the 1990s and a series of reports of so-called "dino-bird" fossils appeared in the world media. Yet it was soon discovered that these claims were simply misinterpretations, or, even worse, forgeries.
The first dino-bird claim was the story of "feathered dinosaur fossils unearthed in China," which was put forward in 1996 with a great media fanfare. A reptilian fossil called Sinosauropteryx was found, but some paleontologists who examined the fossil said that it had bird feathers, unlike modern reptiles. Examinations conducted one year later, however, showed that the fossil actually had no structure similar to a bird's feather. A Science article titled "Plucking the Feathered Dinosaur" stated that the structures named as "feathers" by evolutionary paleontologists definitely had nothing to do with feathers:
Exactly 1 year ago, paleontologists were abuzz about photos of a so-called "feathered dinosaur," which were passed around the halls at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. The Sinosauropteryx specimen from the Yixian Formation in China made the front page of The New York Times, and was viewed by some as confirming the dinosaurian origins of birds. But at this year's vertebrate paleontology meeting in Chicago late last month, the verdict was a bit different: The structures are not modern feathers, say the roughly half-dozen Western paleontologists who have seen the specimens. ...Paleontologist Larry Martin of Kansas University, Lawrence, thinks the structures are frayed collagenous fibers beneath the skin-and so have nothing to do with birds.(Ann Gibbons, "Plucking the Feathered Dinosaur," Science, vol. 278, no. 5341, 14 November 1997, pp. 1229 - 1230)
A yet more sensational case of dino-bird hype broke out in 1999. In its November 1999 issue, National Geographic published an article about a fossil specimen unearthed in China which was claimed to bear both bird and dinosaur features. National Geographic writer Christopher P. Sloan, the author of the article, went so far as to claim, "we can now say that birds are theropods just as confidently as we say that humans are mammals." This species, which was said to have lived 125 million years ago, was immediately given the scientific name Archaeoraptor liaoningensis.(National Geographic, Vol. 196, No. 5, November 1999, "Feathers for T. Rex")
 National Geographic's great hit, the perfect "dino-bird." Archaeoraptor soon turned out to be a hoax. All other "dino-bird" candidates remain speculative. |
However, the fossil was a fake and was skillfully constructed from five separate specimens. A group of researchers, among whom were also three paleontologists, proved the forgery one year later with the help of X-ray computed tomography. The dino-bird was actually the product of a Chinese evolutionist. Chinese amateurs formed the dino-bird by using glue and cement from 88 bones and stones. Research suggests that Archaeoraptor was built from the front part of the skeleton of an ancient bird, and that its body and tail included bones from four different specimens.
The interesting thing is that National Geographic published a high-profile article about such a crude forgery-and, moreover, used it as the basis for claiming that "bird evolution" scenarios had been verified-without expressing any doubts or caution in the article at all. Dr. Storrs Olson, of the famous Smithsonian Institute Natural History Museum in the USA, later said that he warned National Geographic beforehand that this fossil was a fake, but that the magazine management totally ignored him. According to Olson, "National Geographic has reached an all-time low for engaging in sensationalistic, unsubstantiated, tabloid journalism."(Tim Friend, "Dinosaur-bird link smashed in fossil flap," USA Today, 25 January 2000)
In a letter he wrote to Peter Raven of National Geographic, Olson describes the real story of the "feathered dinosaur" hype since its launch with a previous National Geographic article published in 1998 in a very detailed way:
Prior to the publication of the article "Dinosaurs Take Wing" in the July 1998 National Geographic, Lou Mazzatenta, the photographer for Sloan's article, invited me to the National Geographic Society to review his photographs of Chinese fossils and to comment on the slant being given to the story. At that time, I tried to interject the fact that strongly supported alternative viewpoints existed to what National Geographic intended to present, but it eventually became clear to me that National Geographic was not interested in anything other than the prevailing dogma that birds evolved from dinosaurs.
Sloan's article takes the prejudice to an entirely new level and consists in large part of unverifiable or undocumented information that "makes" the news rather than reporting it. His bald statement that "we can now say that birds are theropods just as confidently as we say that humans are mammals" is not even suggested as reflecting the views of a particular scientist or group of scientists, so that it figures as little more than editorial propagandizing. This melodramatic assertion had already been disproven by recent studies of embryology and comparative morphology, which, of course, are never mentioned.
More importantly, however, none of the structures illustrated in Sloan's article that are claimed to be feathers have actually been proven to be feathers. Saying that they are is little more than wishful thinking that has been presented as fact. The statement on page 103 that "hollow, hairlike structures characterize protofeathers" is nonsense considering that protofeathers exist only as a theoretical construct, so that the internal structure of one is even more hypothetical.
The hype about feathered dinosaurs in the exhibit currently on display at the National Geographic Society is even worse, and makes the spurious claim that there is strong evidence that a wide variety of carnivorous dinosaurs had feathers. A model of the undisputed dinosaur Deinonychus and illustrations of baby tyrannosaurs are shown clad in feathers, all of which is simply imaginary and has no place outside of science fiction.
Sincerely,
Storrs L. Olson
Curator of Birds
National Museum of Natural History
Smithsonian Institution ("Open Letter: Smithsonian decries National Geographic's "editorial propagandizing" of dinosaur-to-bird evolution;" http://www.trueorigin.org/ birdevoletter.asp)
This revealing case demonstrates two important facts. First, there are people who have no qualms about resorting to forgery in an effort to find evidence for the theory of evolution. Second, some highly reputable popular science journals, which have assumed the mission of imposing the theory of evolution on people, are perfectly willing to disregard any facts that may be inconvenient or have alternative interpretations. That is, they have become little more than propaganda tools for propagating the theory of evolution. They take not a scientific, but a dogmatic, stance and knowingly compromise science to defend the theory of evolution to which they are so strongly devoted.
Another important aspect of the matter is that there is no evidence for the thesis that birds evolved from dinosaurs. Because of the lack of evidence, either fake evidence is produced, or actual evidence is misinterpreted. In truth, there is no evidence that birds have evolved from another living species. On the contrary, all discoveries show that birds emerged on the earth already in full possession of their distinctive body structures.
LATEST EVIDENCE: OSTRICH STUDY REFUTES THE DINO-BIRD STORY
The latest blow to the "birds evolved from dinosaurs" theory came from a study made on the embryology of ostriches. Drs. Alan Feduccia and Julie Nowicki of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill studied a series of live ostrich eggs and, once again, concluded that there cannot be an evolutionary link between birds and dinosaurs. EurekAlert, a scientific portal held by the American Association for the The Advancement of Science (AAAS), reports the following: Drs. Alan Feduccia and Julie Nowicki of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill... opened a series of live ostrich eggs at various stages of development and found what they believe is proof that birds could not have descended from dinosaurs... Whatever the ancestor of birds was, it must have had five fingers, not the three-fingered hand of theropod dinosaurs," Feduccia said... "Scientists agree that dinosaurs developed 'hands' with digits one, two and three... Our studies of ostrich embryos, however, showed conclusively that in birds, only digits two, three and four, which correspond to the human index, middle and ring fingers, develop, and we have pictures to prove it," said Feduccia, professor and former chair of biology at UNC. "This creates a new problem for those who insist that dinosaurs were ancestors of modern birds. How can a bird hand, for example, with digits two, three and four evolve from a dinosaur hand that has only digits one, two and three? That would be almost impossible." 1 In the same report, Dr. Freduccia also made important comments on the invalidity-and the shallowness-of the "birds evolved from dinosaurs" theory: "There are insurmountable problems with that theory," he [Dr. Feduccia] said. "Beyond what we have just reported, there is the time problem in that superficially bird-like dinosaurs occurred some 25 million to 80 million years after the earliest known bird, which is 150 million years old." If one views a chicken skeleton and a dinosaur skeleton through binoculars they appear similar, but close and detailed examination reveals many differences, Feduccia said. Theropod dinosaurs, for example, had curved, serrated teeth, but the earliest birds had straight, unserrated peg-like teeth. They also had a different method of tooth implantation and replacement."2 This evidence once again reveals that the "dino-bird" hype is just another "icon" of Darwinism: A myth that is supported only for the sake of a dogmatic faith in the theory. 1 - David Williamson, "Scientist Says Ostrich Study Confirms Bird 'Hands' Unlike Those Of Dinosaurs," EurekAlert, 14-Aug-2002, http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-08/uonc-sso081402.php |
The Global Darwinist Dictatorship Must Apologize to the Entire World! >>> |
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