By Dr. Robert Thorson

When I was a kid in the late 1950s, I remember being riveted by the case of Piltdown man, “one of the most famous scientific frauds in history.” Though the hoax is a century old, it remains an excellent “cautionary tale to scientists not to see what they want to see.”

These quotes come from a fascinating article published last month by Britain’s Royal Society in its online journal. Isabelle De Groote and coauthors, using modern science, finally fingered Charles Dawson as the sole culprit. In 1912, this gentlemanly country solicitor and amateur archaeologist created a fake assemblage of fossils, claimed it came from a gravel deposit in the Piltdown hamlet of Sussex, United Kingdom, and presented the results as a “missing link” between our apish ancestry and brainy modernity.

His purpose was pure ego-fulfillment – the craving for peer recognition, to become a Fellow of the Royal Society and perhaps be knighted. Accordingly, he named the alleged human ancestor after himself, “Eoanthropus dawsoni,” which translates as “Dawson’s dawn ape.”

What especially interests me is why this hackneyed job of forgery survived in the peer-reviewed literature for 40 years. Extraordinary claims are supposed to require extraordinary evidence. Why did Piltdown man stay on the pedestal for four decades? Because he satisfied the racial, ethnic and sexist bias of those who loved him. His existence supported the deeply held, late-colonial belief that England was the cradle of human evolution.

Dawson’s peers also liked the idea that their skull topped that of Homo heidelbergensis from nearby Germany, with whom Britain would soon be at war. Of course we now know that we all have African origins, and that light-colored skin is an evolutionary adaptation to northward dispersal.

Looking backward, the Piltdown fakery was obvious. Skull fragments, teeth and assorted bones didn’t fit, particularly the orangutan jaw and the Medieval human braincase. File marks, acid etching and stain were applied. Yet, it took until 1953 to reveal the hoax. When I learned about it in the late 1950s, I was greatly disappointed because, in that era, scientists were then being held in the highest regard (post-Sputnik and pre-Rachel Carson).

This brings me to of my favorite recent quotes. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said: “The good thing about science is that it’s true, whether or not you believe in it.” This is certainly true for fundamental laws and principles. The problem comes with the earlier stages of goal-setting, program-building, research funding, peer review and general acceptance. Here science as an institution is more vulnerable than I would like. Tyson prefaced his quote with this remark: “Once science has been established, once a scientific truth emerges from a consensus of experiments and observations, it is the way of the world.”

He’s also right here, but history keeps showing us that the scientific consensus is capable of rapid shifts. This is extremely well documented by Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” published by the University of Chicago Press in 1962.

Within my own lifetime, the theory of plate tectonics revolutionized the earth sciences. During the mid- 20th century, the scientific consensus led by Americans dismissed the idea as impossible because they put theory ahead of observations. During the mid-19th century, the American consensus dismissed the then-radical idea of glacial theory because the idea of catastrophic floods (like Noah’s) was deeply ingrained in the culture. Even Charles Darwin – then a young geologist – fell into this trap by honoring his biases and allegiances above the facts. In his autobiography, he wrote of being “ashamed” by this episode.

By the way, the scientific consensus on climate change is not wrong. There’s been too much scrutiny for too long. That science, unlike early 20th century paleoanthropology, is robust.

As we rush to embrace a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) future, let’s keep the case of Piltdown man in mind. He helps remind me that institutional science is a very messy human business.