Scientific Cenobites, part 9 of 9

Louis Leakey has stated,

"The part played by prejudice in relation to scientific controversy was very strong in the thirties and remains so to this day."1

Paleoanthropology has been described as "a field where opinion can sometimes overwhelm irrefutable fact, the natural tendency to polarize to one viewpoint against another has been enhanced."2

Atheism and science
Richard Leakey has commented:

"One of the sadnesses I have is that so often when the general public hears about studies of human origins, they hear it in the context of emotional arguments, personality cults, and personality assassination attempts."3

The KBS Tuff controversy "is one of those stories in which in retrospect the 'right answer' seems perfectly obvious but at the time was obscured by a cloud of uncertainty and vested interest in a particular point of view. It is also a story that demonstrates how very unscientific the process of scientific inquiry sometimes can be."4

"'The interpretation of incremental release diagrams not yielding plateaux is presently very subjective and many differences of opinion have been expressed about them.'5 In other words, unless the age spectrum produced in any particular case was very simple and straightforward, it would not always be possible to understand what exactly it means. This issue, for most of the geochronologists at any rate, was to be at the core of the KBS Tuff controversy."6

"'Yes, it sounds pretty stupid when you think properly about it,'7 Harris now says. 'Our position at the time was that Fitch and Miller's number of the KBS Tuff is a good date, well established by geochronology. Our science-paleoanthropology-is interpretive, so we have to look for other explanations of the apparent discrepancy between the faunas. I was therefore amenable to the faunal-barrier idea. I can now see that we were seeking ways of justifying the date rather than objectively trying to clarify the evidence."8

"I'm married to a clinical psychologist who constantly points out to me how unobjective scientists are in general and unobjective I am in particular."9

"'I got myself so deeply wedded to their date that I think I lost the ability to assess the evidence truly objectively'10_to some extent the evidence that was being produced was itself subjectively influenced, and tended, in the case of the fission-track dating at least, to give the answer that was expected of it rather than the one that was objectively correct_the KBS controversy therefore illustrates not only that it is possible to be wrong in science, even with the apparently straightforward task of obtaining a single date for a single volcanic tuff; but also that typically there is a degree of uncertainty in science that is not often made public, because it is contrary to the mythology of what science is supposed to be like."11

"In looking back over events, Gleadow and Hurford now realize there were several factors that led them astray. For instance, says Gleadow, 'It was never true that Tony and I were doing the work independently of each other. We developed the techniques together, we looked down the microscope together, we agree what were tracks and what weren't, together.'12 The same applied to Naeser. 'We worked so closely together, all three of us, that is was in no sense independent.'" With regards to the dates that they produced, "_these ages apparently agree closely with each other but this is mainly due to the close communication between these authors on track identification and discrimination in these samples.'"13

"From Leakey's point of view, the KBS Tuff controversy was educational, in nothing else. 'It taught me a lot about the scientific community, in hindsight,'14 he now comments. 'One realized that even in the most pure of sciences, which geophysics should be, there is a potential to identify careers, status, and results-and there's a strong political element, too. I should have known this, because I had never really developed the respect that I suppose I should have done for science. But I was upset at times to realize that we may have been given a line that wasn't necessarily secure, even in their own minds.'"15

"No scientist likes to see his pet theory swept aside, and this is especially so in paleoanthropology, where individual researchers tend to be more intimately involved with and proprietary about their theories than in other sciences."16

Donald Johanson "had been made aware just how much his preconceptions had influenced his statements on his own fossils and on the shape of human evolutions in these crucial early stages. 'Yes, I was guilty of personal prejudices and beliefs,'17 he now admits. 'I was trying to jam the evidence of dates into a pattern that would support conclusions about fossils which, on closer inspection, the fossils themselves would not sustain.'"18

"One kept running into the idea that paleoanthropology was not a science, and this sometimes made fund-raising difficult.'19 It is certainly true that in the spectrum of the sciences, from ('hard') physics to ('soft') biology, human evolutionary studies are usually regarded as being extremely 'soft.'"20

"after analyzing the same set of fossils, three different research groups came to three different conclusions."21

Atheism and science
Donald Johanson has state,

"Anthropologists who deal with human fossils tend to get very emotionally involved with their bones."22

With regards to William King Gregory and Henry Fairfield Osborn:

"here we have two great scientists of their time, major figures in American anthropology: they looked at the same evidence and yet saw different things, primarily because one was using the lens of Huxley and Darwin while the other was gazing up to heights of Parnassus."23

"It is clear that [paleontologist, Marcellin] Boule went beyond the evidence of his eyes-perhaps to press more persuasively his version of the Truth. Michael Hammond suspects that, given the evolutionary model that was prevailing at the turn of the century, a simple, objective description of the robusticity of Neanderthal anatomy might have been inadequate to persuade many anthropologists that the species should be excluded from human ancestry altogether.
'Without the stooping carriage, the morphological differences between the Neanderthals and modern man would not have been sufficient to so definitively expel the Neanderthals from a place in the evolutionary origin of man,' guessed Hammond. To ensure expulsion, Boule required Neanderthals to display a distinctly apelike, stooping gait and many other 'primitive' characteristics; he would exaggerate the differences from modern humans and minimize the similarities_

[Boule's] perceptions-primarily that human history was like a bush, not a ladder-demanded that Neanderthals be as different as possible from modern humans, and so he needed to exaggerate those differences which did exist and even invent some which didn't. The result was that Neanderthal looked more brutish than he really was_'_is the Neanderthals were not ancestral to man, there must have existed other populations undergoing other evolutionary developments.'24
In other words, Boule's conclusions provided a clear prediction which needed to be confirmed by the discovery of the right kind of fossils if his line of argument was to carry weight. 'It was precisely at this time that the Piltdown Man emerged with its saintly human forehead lacking the great [browridge] of the Neanderthal.'25 At one stroke, the gap was filled_

The forgery was perfectly tailored, not technically but theoretically, and in the timing of the series of discoveries too. For instance, the first discoveries announced included parts of the obviously humanlike cranium and the equality obviously apelike jaw. But there was no canine tooth, which was a subject of some considerable interest because of the unusual wear pattern it might bear. Sir Arthur Smith Woodward predicted publicly what he thought such a tooth would look like, and within a few months one was found. His prediction was vindicated to the finest detail."26

Anthropologist, David Pilbeam:

"I have come to believe that many statements we make about the hows and whys of human evolution say as much about us, the paleoanthropologists and the society in which we live, as about anything that 'really' happened."27

Roger Lewin took "the enthusiasm with which meager fossil evidence was interpreted-or more properly, overinterpreted-as a sure sign of incipient humanity."28

Atheism and science
Regarding Louis Leakey:

"'It was one of his creeds that man went back a very, very long way'29_.He wanted to believe in ancient Homo, and so suspended the degree of critical judgment he might have applied to the evidence_.the great antiquity of man-so dominated Leakey's view of the past that it would lead him repeatedly to see in fossils what he wanted to see_.it is easy to see that Leakey's eagerness to find an early ancestor to 'true man' had led him to overinterpret the anatomical evidence."30

"One reason the ecological hypothesis flourished among Leakey and his colleagues in Kenya was their separation from modern scholars in evolutionary biology. 'We were pretty isolated in Nairobi,'31 says Harris. 'Most of the people I saw were part of the Koobi For a team, who subscribed to the same sorts of ideas. We were convincing ourselves that we were right.'"32

"[Garniss] Curtis' radiometric dating put the rocks at about 17 million years, while Louis contended, from the evidence of the other fossils at the site, that they were twice that old. 'Louis wanted those rocks to be old, because of his belief in early Homo, but I knew they were much younger,'33 remembers Curtis. They younger date turned out to be right, but by the time this was proved Curtis and Leakey had parted company because of their disagreement, and Curtis vowed never again to set foot on the African continent while Louis Leakey was alive."34

H.J. Lipson (Professor of Physics, University of Manchester, UK),

"In fact, evolution became in a sense a scientific religion; almost all scientists accepted it and many are prepared to 'bend' their observations to fit in with it."35

Julian Huxley described his views as "something in the nature of a religion."36

Lynn Margulis (biologist) considered neo-Darwinism to be "a minor twentieth century religious sect within the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon biology."37

Stuart Kauffman, in referring to natural selection noted that "we might as well capitalize as though it were the new deity."38

1. 1. Roger Lewin, Bones of Contention (New York, NY: A Touchstone Book published by Simon & Schuster Inc., 1987), p. 144 citing By the Evidence, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974, p. 22
   
2. 2. Lewin, pp. 172-173
   
3. 3. Lewin, p. 173 citing "African Origins: A Review of the Record," in Darwin's Legacy, edited by Chales L. Hamrum, published by Harper & Row, 1983, p. 25
   
4. 4. Lewin, p. 190
   
5. 5. "Improvements in Potassium-Argon Dating: 1962-1975," in World Archaeology, vol. 7, p. 202 (1975)
   
6. 6. Lewin, p. 194
   
7. 7. Interview with the author, Los Angeles, 18 Nov. 1985
   
8. 8. Lewin, p. 199
   
9. 9. Ibid., p. 233 citing a letter, Curtis to R. Leakey, 30 Aug. 1975
   
10. 10. Ibid., p. 235 citing an interview with the author, Nairobi, 23 Jan. 1985
    
11. 11. Ibid., p. 235
    
12. 12. Ibid., p. 246 citing an interview with the author, Berne, Switzerland, 14 June 1985
    
13. 13. Ibid., p. 246 citing "Fission Track Age of the KBS Tuff and Associated Hominid Remains in Northern Kenys," in Nature, vol. 284, p. 225 (1980)
    
14. 14. Ibid., p. 251 citing an interview with the author, Nairobi, 22 Jan. 1985
    
15. 15. Ibid., p. 251
    
16. 16. Ibid., p. 271
    
17. 17. Ibid., p. 284 citing an interview with the author, Berkley, 2 Oct. 1984
    
18. 18. Ibid., p. 284 citing a letter, Mayr to Tobias, 14 Sep. 1981
    
19. 19. Ibid., pp. 288-289 citing an interview with the author, Nairobi, 26 Jan. 1985
    
20. 20. Ibid., pp. 288-289
    
21. 21. Ibid., p. 299
    
22. 22. Ibid., p. 300 citing "The Evolution Revolution," Chicago Sun Times, 26 Aug. 1979, article by Paul Galloway
    
23. 23. Ibid., p. 57
    
24. 24. "The Expulsion of the Neanderthal from Human Ancestry," in Social Studies in Science, vol. 12, p. 23 (1982)
    
25. 25. "A Framework of Plausibility for an Anthropological Forgery," Anthropology, vol. 3, p. 50 (1979)
    
26. 26. Lewin, pp. 68-70
    
27. 27. "Rethinking Human Origins," in Discovery, vol. 13, p. 9 (1978)
    
28. 28. Ibid., p. 87
    
29. 29. Ibid., p. 129 citing an interview with the author, New York, 10 April 1984
    
30. 30. Ibid., pp. 129-131, 133, 140
    
31. 31. Interview with the author, Los Angeles, 19 Dec. 1985
    
32. 32. Lewin, p. 199
    
33. 33. Ibid., p. 207 citing an interview with the author, Berkley, 3 Oct. 1984
    
34. 34. Ibid., p. 207
    
35. 35. H.J. Lipson, F.R.S, "A Physicist Looks at Evolution," Physics Bulletin, Vol. 31, 1980
    
36. 36. Julian Huxley, Evolution in Action (New York: Mentor, 1953), p. 135
    
37. 37. Charles Mann, "Lynn Margulis: Science's Unruly Earth Mother," Science 252 (1991):381
    
38. 38. Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Complexity (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1995), p. 8