Tuesday, September 22, 2015
Piltdown Hoax
1. The Piltdown Hoax was brought to our attention in 1912 by scientist Charles Dawson. he claimed that a workman had given him a fragment of a jaw bone a few years before. the Pitdown hoax is a site located in England. Charles with the help of others decided to continue digging and was able to find other parts. but then many years later they came to the conclusion that their rare findings were all forged even the original. if the findings would've been real this would have the effected the scientific community by supporting Darwin's evolution theory.
2. all scientists are very motivated people. I feel with this scenario negatively affected the scientific process was because all possibilities or explanations were over looked of how that piece of skull couldve come to be. Dawson and the others who helped had immediately jumped to the conclusion the skull could connect primates and humans. This possibly happened because of all the commotion and the pressure to make a grand scientific discovery Dawson had put on himself.
3. a scientist in 1949 tested all the fossils together by using fluorine but this just made the discovery more confusing when the fossils had a similar amount. A few years later Joseph Weiner had taken a closer look at the fossils and to his surprise he found that the teeth were actually grinned down and asked Kenneth Oakley to confirm his findings. over time scientists were able to use more advance testing to finally the determine that all the fossils did not belong together
4. i think it would be possible to remove the human factor but it it wouldn't be smart because our curiosity is what brings new ideas theories and findings to science. without and curiosity science would not have came to the conclusions it has today such as intriguing many others to clarify certain things just like the scientists that worked together here to investigate.
5. what i learned through this event is that not everything we read or are taught is true. in our world today it is it is always better to investigate and build our knowledge through research. it never hurts to ask questions and to become well informed about anything you want to know.
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You kind of jump from digging up the fossil find to finding out it was a hoax. A lot of stuff happened in between that should have been included here: Who was involved? What specific bones did they find? What was the significance of the find, i.e., what would it have taught us? How long before the hoax was uncovered? Who figured out that it was a hoax? How?
ReplyDeleteWith regard to human faults, this WAS a hoax, which means someone deliberately created it. Why? What might have been their motivations? Those are the faults we are looking for. How about greed? Ambition? And other than the culprits, can you find fault with anyone else? How about the scientific community? Why did they accept this find so readily without proper scrutiny?
Who was the scientist that performed the fluorine analysis? Can you describe this process? And why were scientists still studying this find some 40 years after it was uncovered? What aspect of science does that represent?
"...our curiosity is what brings new ideas theories and findings to science."
Precisely. Well said.
Good life lesson.