Creation Station
Anthropology and Archaeology
Anatomy of a Hoax
by Sean Meek, Director of Project CREATION
Hoaxes have been part of the human experience for a very long time. Hoaxes have been major part of the Creation/Evolution controversy since it started. A hoax by Ernst Haeckel of Germany in the 19th century was of faked pictures of embryos to fool people into believing there was an evolutionary relationship between them. In the early 20th century the Piltdown man was a hoax in which the skull cap of a human and the jaw of an ape were put together and artificially aged to trick people into believing it was an English "ape man". The Nebraska man hoax took place in the 1920's when the fantasy of an American "ape man" species was created out of the discovery of a single tooth. A tooth that later was proved to have come from a pig, but not before it was trumpeted to the world as proof of evolution. More recently the peppered moth hoax was exposed in which moths were glued to trees in order to trick people into believing that they lived there and that polluted air had caused a change in their color.
These are just a few of many such hoaxes perpetrated on the world to support the religion of evolutionism. But the hoaxes of the evolutionists are not just things of the past; they are an ongoing tool of those who promote the religion of evolutionism. One of the most recent hoaxes was one put forward by the National Geographic in its promotion of a fossil given the name archaeoraptor, a supposed dinosaur-to-bird transitional creature. For years many evolutionists have been pushing the idea that dinosaurs turned into birds. As ludicrous as this idea is, the evolutionists have no better candidate to explain the appearance of birds. The fossil named archaeoraptor is simply the latest candidate for the dinosaur-to-bird transition. It was heavily promoted by the National Geographic, but there was just one problem with it, it was a fake. The Chinese farmer who found it had glued the fossil tail of a bird unto the fossil of a small dinosaur in order to make it more valuable."Nebraska Man" family sketch that was invented based on the discovery of one tooth in 1922 that turned out to be from a pig.
It was presented in the November 1999 issue of National Geographic with great fan fare and certainty with quotes such as "We can now say that birds are theropods (dinosaurs) just as confidently as we say that humans are mammals." Within two months the hoax had fallen apart. Some scientists had cautioned National Geographic that the fossil might be a fake, but they were ignored. Two science magazines had refused to publish the claims, because the fossil had not been properly reviewed. Only after another fossil was discovered showing the first to be a fake did the editors of National Geographical finally admit, what by then everyone else knew, that it was a fake. A year after the first story the magazine finally printed a not quite retraction in which the author blamed everyone, except National Geographic, for what had happened. The not quite retraction was five pages long and at the back of the October 2000 issue. The not quite retraction didn't get the ten-page full color coverage that the original story had received, but that is no great surprise, they never do.
The real question about hoaxes like this though is why? Why are evolutionists so intent on finding something to make their story sound credible that they are still using Haeckel's hundred year old faked embryo pictures and falling for crudely faked fossils? The answer is desperation. In true science, scientists let the evidence lead to them to new discoveries. For the disciples of the religion of evolutionism, it's the other way around. The story comes first and the evidence has to be made to fit the story. For 140 years evolutionists have been looking for their smoking gun. Some bit of evidence that would really support their story, archaeoraptor is another instance of where they didn't find it.
Charles Darwin wrote in his book The Origin of Species that one of the greatest objections to his theory were the gaps in the fossil record. Those gaps are still there. The fossil gaps between families and the higher classifications are both so large and so persistent that some evolutionists have even invented a theory to explain them away called punctuated equilibrium. The theory is that change in animals in the past was so quick that it left no record of its happening. This truly is the perfect theory; the proof of its happening is that there is no evidence of its ever having happened. The more that these evolutionists find no evidence of change ever having happened, the stronger their punctuated equilibrium theory gets, at least to them. There is a real Alice in Wonderland logic to it all.
Hoaxes have been part of the human experience for a very long time; the sad thing is that for an issue of such great importance, so many people are willing to be fooled again and again.
As you read or hear about some
new claim that supposedly "proves" some aspect of the evolutionist
story, keep the archaeoraptor in mind. An expression fits this
situation perfectly, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame
on me. Don't be too ready to believe anything the
science/evolutionist establishment puts forward. In promoting the big
lie of evolution, they use lots of little lies.
