A few years after the Piltdown Man hoax, Nebraska Man was found, but this was a case of honest error, albeit one compounded by enthusiasm.
A much older fossil than Piltdown Man is archaeopteryx, which is believed to be the missing link between dinosaurs and birds. The first such fossil was discovered in 1861, which being only two years after the publication of The Origin Of Species, might have been considered suspicious. In 1987, a team of specialists from two of the UK’s most prestigious institutions published THE FEATHERS FLY Is Archaeopteryx a Fake?
The consensus appears to be that it is indeed the real thing, especially as a number of specimens have been found in recent years, but in view of the antics of Phineas T. Barnum among others, skepticism is always warranted.
One field in which fraud abounds is parapsychology. For many years, the pre-eminent researcher in that was Dr J.B. Rhine. Rhine’s wife Louisa worked with him and outlived him; on her death she donated her papers to Duke University. Her book Something Hidden, about this research, was published posthumously. At times, Rhine produced remarkable results, but some of these were tainted. Although he has been severely criticised, Rhine was probably not himself dishonest because he did catch many people who tried to pull the wool over his eyes, and reported this. It does seem however that he was somewhat selective in his reporting.
Like the Rhines, parasychologist Marcello Truzzi was an honest researcher, but he was extremely gullible, as evinced by his book The Blue Sense, which he co-wrote with Arthur Lyons.
There are many other examples of both outright fraud and self-deception, such as cold fusion, but one of the biggest and most significant frauds is that perpetrated on the world by Dr Alfred Kinsey, whose spurious researches – and crimes – have been extensively documented by Judith Reisman.
How can all this be? The simple answer is that human testimony is and always has been frail. Some do it for money, as with the on-line science journals. some for prestige, Charles Dawson probably faked Piltdown Man for devilment, and there can be multiple motives. The bottom line is that no one is ever to be trusted. All the above are what might be called rogue incidents, apart from the first which is really a modern version of what used to be known as vanity publishing. There are though far more organised and sinister perversions of science, ones that even rigorously controlled double blind studies have not defeated. One question the reader might ask himself concerns smoking; is smoking really so dangerous, or is the major cause of lung cancer smoking and something else, as Simon Wolff believed? And let’s not even think about either the drug industry or Monsanto.
[The above article was first published October 16, 2013. It was archived through the Wayback Machine but in 2025, I found the link to it in my on-line bibliography wasn’t working. This was one of a large number of such links. After contacting the Internet Archive about this in September 2025, they replied thus:
“We are aware of condition such that the index of some archives (required for playback) can fall out of sync. Please know that those indexes will be updated in the near future and the archives will, once again, replay. I understand how frustrating this can be. Rest assured we are working to address this issue once and for all.”]
Back To Digital Journal Index