by Ann Coulter
The only time “radiocarbon dating” was used in connection with the theory of evolution was the time it was used to expose the Piltdown Man as a hoax being pawned off as proof of evolution. It was one of the greatest scientific frauds of all time, right up there with the Pepsi challenge and that commercial where ordinary laundry detergent gets red wine out of a white blouse. For half a century, Piltdown Man constituted a major piece of evidence for Darwin’s theory. After decades of being embarrassed by the fossil record’s stubborn refusal to come to Darwin’s aid, in 1912 the Piltdown Man miraculously appeared in a gravel pit in Sussex, England. Amateur paleontologist Charles Dawson claimed to have discovered a skull with a humanlike cranium and an apelike jaw in Piltdown quarry. It was a creature that was not quite ape, not quite man, but a transitional species between the two, rather like the actor Pauly Shore. This Pauly Shore-like fossil wouldn’t have proved evolution, but it would have given evolutionists a possible link between apes and man on their imaginary “tree of life.”
Like a doctor’s excuse note written to a seventh-grade teacher signed, “Timmy’s mommy,” it was almost uncanny how precisely Piltdown Man matched what prevailing scientific theory predicted the “missing link” would look like. The New York Times headline for the article on the Piltdown Man proclaimed, “Darwin Theory Is Proved True.” (My headline the day Clinton was impeached: “God Theory Is Proved True.”) The Piltdown fossil was “peer-reviewed”—so we know it would pass muster with the editors of Scientific American, still flush with success after triumphantly exposing the “Ohio flight hoax.” Experts confirmed the age and origin of the bones. Indeed, the Piltdown Man received the approval of Arthur Smith Woodward, the leading geologist at the British Museum (Natural History). Eoanthropus dawsoni was born.
Dawson was showered with praise, fame, and awards. If only Vanity Fair had been around, Dawson could have been photographed in his Jaguar and hailed for “speaking truth to power.” He was made a fellow of the Geological Society and a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. (He was even offered a position writing editorials for Scientific American.)
For more than forty years, the Piltdown Man was taught as scientific fact. Then, in 1953, it was exposed as a complete and utter fraud—in part through the process that so dazzles the editors of Scientific American: radiocarbon dating. (Note to Scientific American: Steer clear of any mention of “radiocarbon dating” when disparaging the critics of evolution as uneducated rubes.)
Yes, the same process that recently helped us pin down the exact year of Helen Thomas’s birth also determined that the Piltdown Man’s skull was from a thousand-year-old human fossil and the jaw from a modern orangutan. It wasn’t even a particularly good fake: The jaw had been stained with potassium bichromate and the teeth filed down to make them look more human. (Cher had a similar procedure done recently and she looks amazing.) Evolution’s Piltdown Man makes Scientology’s “e-meter” look like a particle accelerator at Los Alamos.
There was even a Piltdown bird, an incredible fossil that was half-dinosaur, half-bird—which, amazingly, was entirely composed of white meat, had four drumsticks, and was self-basting. “Archaeoraptor” made the cover of National Geographic with the sensational headline “Feathers for T. rex?” And then “Archaeoraptor” was exposed as a hoax, too.
On the empirical side of evolution there was the celebrated peppered moth. According to the peppered moth of legend, when pollution first began to blacken tree trunks in industrial England in the mid-nineteenth century, the once-pale moths turned black. It was theorized that light moths against sooty tree trunks were easily spotted by birds and eaten, while the dark moths evaded predators, and survived to reproduce. A new black peppered moth had “evolved”—just as Darwin said it would. Thus began the secular Left’s short-lived love affair with air pollution.
It wasn’t a particularly dazzling example of evolution. Black, white, or purple, they were still peppered moths. Nothing new was created. The moths didn’t become birds or grow opposable thumbs or develop a capacity for introspection. The miracle engine of natural selection had merely produced a minor variation within the species of animals known as “moths.” New Yorkers not only transform from pale to dark, but also from fat to skinny, during the annual summer migration to the Hamptons, and no one writes scientific articles about that. This is not the sort of metamorphosis that turns a mosquito into a German shepherd.
Still, it was something, and the Darwiniacs didn’t have much. Until the peppered moth, evolution fetishists had not been able to produce a single example of natural selection in real time. Here, at last, a light gray moth had been magically transformed into an altogether different and distinct life form—a slightly darker gray moth. Voila!
Evolutionists were so excited about the peppered moth’s changing hue, they couldn’t be bothered with testing the theory. It had to be true. The Darwiniacs happily announced that the peppered moth proved evolution and presumably went back to calling critics of evolution anti-science know-nothings.
It wasn’t until the early fifties that anyone thought to test the theory. Oxford biologist E. B. Ford sent his assistant out to capture hundreds of the moths and stage an experiment. For two years black moths were bused out of the inner-city areas to the suburbs, while white moths were bused into the inner-city areas. Then both groups were monitored to see how long each survived. (Is it just me, or does this scenario sound oddly familiar?) After two years of observation, Ford triumphantly announced that birds easily spotted light moths on black city trees and dark moths on the light country trees. There it was—evolution was proved.
For the next fifty years, the peppered moth experiment was a major part of the “mountains of evidence” for evolution referred to by Scientific American. Evolution fundamentalist Jerry Coyne called the peppered moth the “prize horse” of natural selection. Every schoolchild has seen the photo of the light peppered moth clearly visible on a black tree trunk next to a photo of the dark moth nearly invisible against the same tree trunk.
It was so logical, so intuitive, and so fake. Decades later, researchers who had not been informed by the editors of Scientific American or Judge John Jones III that questioning evolution was a hanging offense noticed some problems. American lepidopterist Ted Sargent and others pointed out that peppered moths do not rest on tree trunks, but on the undersides of high branches. Not only that, but the peppered moth sleeps during the day, coming out to fly only at night, when the birds are asleep.
It turned out Ford and his assistant had rigged the game by physically placing light moths on black tree trunks in the bright light of day—someplace the moths would never have been if left to their own devices. It was rather like testing the theory that birds developed wings to avoid sharks by dumping wingless birds into a shark tank and seeing if they survived. As described in the New York Times, “The most famous example of evolution in action must now become the most infamous.”
But what about those photos? The famous photos of the peppered moths were staged, often by literally gluing dead moths to tree trunks. Their “proof” of evolution was suddenly reduced to a variation on Monty Python’s dead-parrot sketch. (“I took the liberty of examining that parrot when I got it home, and I discovered the only reason that it had been sitting on its perch in the first place was that it had been nailed there.”) Now let’s examine how evolutionists responded—you know, the ones who claim to be slaves to the scientific method. Except for a thimbleful of serious scientists who admitted the jig was up, the cult members wholly ignored the truth about the peppered moth. They demonized Sargent, the lepidopterist who had exposed the fraud, marginalized his work, and attempted to ruin his career. To this day, evolutionists cite the peppered moths as proof that evolution is based on “science.” The staged photos still appear in biology textbooks, as detailed in Jonathan Wells’s book Icons of Evolution.
An article in the New Scientist on July 9, 2005, authoritatively stated, “Evolutionary biologists have long known that t
he process can happen rapidly—Charles Darwin himself pointed out the observable changes wrought by pigeon fanciers and dog breeders. A century later biologists showed that peppered moths in England’s industrial heart-land had evolved darker colours to camouflage themselves against soot-blackened trees.”
Maybe the new name for the New Scientist should be the 1950s Scientist. And I don’t think selective breeding directed by a human being goes in the “hidden hand of nature” column.
Also in 2005—three years after it had been acknowledged in the New York Times that the peppered moth example was a fraud—University of Rochester biology professor H.
Allen Orr wrote an article in the New Yorker treating the peppered moth scandal as an open question: “[D]id the peppered moth evolve dark color as a defense against birds or for other reasons?” (“And what role, if any, did the several empty cans of black spray paint found at the scene play in their evolutionary odyssey?”) Orr called the darkening of the peppered moth one of the “minor squabbles among evolutionary biologists” that had been inflated by skeptics of evolution.
Peppered moths sleep during the day; they fly at night; they do not normally alight upon tree trunks. These are observable facts, sort of like the Earth revolving around the sun. It would be as if a college professor had lightly dismissed the “minor squabble” among scientists about “whether it’s possible to sail off the edge of the Earth” and denounced critics of the flat Earth theory as “fanatical pro-elliptical orbists.” What is so peculiar about the Darwiniacs is that they perpetrate comical frauds in defense of their religion and then angrily accuse their opponents of being driven by religious zeal. They’re constantly acting like you’re the idiot for refusing to admit the fact that we’re living on the back of a giant turtle.
At least the evolutionists still had the embryo drawings. Almost every biology book for the past century has included pictures of vertebrate embryos made by German biologist and enthusiastic eugenicist Ernst Haeckel, purportedly demonstrating the amazing similarity of fish, chickens, and humans in the womb. Without the Darwinist priesthood to explain, it’s not clear what this proved in the first place. It seems that Haeckel believed the development of the embryo imitated an organism’s entire evolution as a species—a theory precisely as scientific as molding an animal out of Play-doh and claiming that you have just demonstrated how God made the animals. Haeckel’s other big contribution to science, by the way, was the scientific claim that “wooly-haired Negroes” were “psychologically nearer to the mammals (apes and dogs) than to civilized Europeans … [and therefore] we must … assign a totally different value to their lives.”
If Haeckel’s imaginative theory were true, then he could show what humans looked like 500 million years ago by pointing to a fertilized human egg. And he could show what humans looked like, say, 100 million years ago by showing a baby in the second trimester. And he could show what humans looked like 1 million years ago by pointing to James Carville. Finally and most important, if his wackadoodle theory were true, then Haeckel could “prove” all vertebrates evolved from a similar-looking organism 500 million years ago. (I note in passing, evolution would still not explain why some of us became humans and others never made it past the gecko stage.) You can see why the scientific community sat up and took notice at this point. The last scientific theory to generate this kind of buzz was alchemy.
Amazingly enough, according to Haeckel’s drawings, vertebrate embryos did look alike.
To give you a sense of the mountains and mountains of evidence supporting the theory of evolution, until Haeckel’s drawings turned out to be frauds, his crackpot theory constituted one of the main pieces of evidence in support of evolution. Charles Darwin himself said the “facts” in embryology were “second to none in importance”’ and “by far the strongest single class of facts” supporting his theory.
And then, in the 1990s, British embryologist Michael Richardson was looking at vertebrate embryos through a microscope and noticed that they look nothing at all like Haeckel’s drawings. Richardson and his team of researchers examined vertebrate embryos and published actual photos of the embryos in the August 1997 issue of the journal Anatomy & Embryology. It turned out that Haeckel had used the same woodcuts for some of the embryos and doctored others to make sure that the embryos looked alike. “It looks like,” Richardson said, “it’s turning out to be one of the most famous fakes in biology”—which, in a field crowded with other evolutionary “proofs,” was quite a claim.
After Richardson published his photos of the embryos, the scientific community demonstrated its fearless commitment to the truth by completely ignoring his expose. It turned out that Haeckel’s drawings had been known to be fakes for a century. Stephen Jay Gould responded in the March 2000 issue of Natural History magazine, saying he had known all along. And yet the keepers of the state religion had kept mum.
Fully five years later, the New York Times reported that biology textbooks were still running Haeckel’s doctored drawings. The Times specifically singled out the third edition of Molecular Biology of the Cell, “the bedrock text of the field,” as one of the culprits.
Caught red-handed hawking fake evidence, one of the authors of the “bedrock text” justified the use of the Haeckel fakeries with the sort of pompous non sequitur you always get from the cult members: He said Haeckel’s drawings were “overinterpreted.” If they were fakes, why were they being interpreted at all? Why were they still in his textbook?
If it took evolutionists fifty years to notice the “ask me about my prehuman grandchildren” decal on the back of Piltdown Man’s skull, needless to say the Darwiniacs aren’t giving up just because Haeckel’s drawings were fake.
You’re probably asking yourself, Why would the New York Times be printing the truth? The only reason the Times even mentioned the continued publication of Haeckel’s phony drawings was to complain that the fakery was helping intelligent design proponents who were screaming from the rooftops about the long-running hoax. As the Times said, “Intelligent design has helped its cause by publicizing some embarrassing mistakes in leading biology textbooks.” The article concluded with this stirring declaration of faith: “Biologists say the findings do not shake their confidence in the theory of evolution.” No evidence will ever shake their confidence in the theory of evolution.
Then there was the famous Miller-Urey experiment in 1953, which seemed to re-create the beginnings of life in a test tube. In a genuinely groundbreaking experiment, scientists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey reconstructed what was thought to be the Earth’s early atmosphere. They sent a spark of electricity through the primordial soup and—wham!—simple amino acids appeared. They had produced the building blocks of life with the laboratory equivalent of a bolt of lightning. It could only be a short step to discovering how life came from nonlife on the early Earth. Next stop, David Hasselhoff in a test tube!
The first problem to arise was that for the next twenty years, scientists couldn’t get close to the next step, which was to produce proteins. Simple amino acids aren’t even proteins, much less life, so the bridge between nonlife and life remained elusive. The primitive “building blocks” created by Miller have no proven pathway to life. Still, it was something.
But the real fly in the primordial soup arose in the early seventies, when geochemists realized that the Earth’s early atmosphere was probably nothing like the gases used in the Miller-Urey experiment. Miller-Urey’s experiment used an “atmosphere” modeled on what we knew of Jupiter, composed of methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water. In the 1970s, geochemists discredited this theory of the Earth’s early atmosphere and concluded that it probably contained more carbon dioxide, almost no hydrogen, and possibly some oxygen. Creation of even simple amino acids would have been impossible in such an environment. As Miller himself has said, “Either you have a reducing atmosphere [i.e., with lots of hydrogen atoms] or you’re not going to have the organic compounds required for life.”
The revolutio
nary 1953 Miller-Urey experiment has been moot since the seventies. It proved nothing about the origin of life because the atmosphere assumed by the experiment was the opposite of what existed on ancient Earth. There is still no plausible account for the origins of life. You would think that fact might interest people who are always boasting that they are impartial scientists, going wherever the evidence leads them, with no ideological predispositions.
Guess what is still taught in biology textbooks as proof of evolution? That’s right!
The 1953 Miller-Urey experiment.
The Darwin cult has the audacity to compare the theory of evolution to Einstein’s theory of relativity, saying that it is “just a theory,” too. Okay, but when Einstein announced his theory of general relativity, he also offered a series of empirical tests that would prove it false.
That’s what made it a “scientific theory” and not, say, “an astrological profile.” If light had not appeared to bend away from the Sun during the 1919 solar eclipse or if his equations could not account for Mercury’s orbit around the Sun, Einstein would have abandoned the theory. In the end, of course, his theory accounted for both phenomena and has been repeatedly retested and proved true.
By contrast, Darwin imagined a mechanism that would account for how life in its infinite variety might have arisen and offered a nondisprovable standard to test his theory.
You will recall, Darwin’s test for his theory was this: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”
The great philosopher of science Karl Popper said any theory that cannot conceivably be refuted is not science. The very fact that it is nondisprovable is an “immunizing stratagem,” distinguishing pseudoscience from real science. Either there is no evidence that could possibly disprove Darwin’s theory of evolution—or it has been disproved for about half a century. So it’s possible that Darwin produced an actual scientific theory, but his disciples have turned it into a pseudoscience by their refusal to admit it can be—and has been—disproved.