Scientific Hoaxes
1. Global Starvation Predicted by Thomas Malthus - 1798
Malthus' "Essay on the Principles of Population" was published in 1798. In it, a scientific treatise proposed global starvation as the worldwide population was to far outstrip mankind's ability to grow crops to feed humanity. Both Charles Darwin and Wallace independantly arrived at similar theories of Natural Selection after reading Malthus.
2. Haekel's Faked Drawings circa 1870
"Ontogony recapitulates phylogeny." Everyone in biology classes learned this elementary proverb of Darwinism. Except it was a fraud.
"Haeckel had exaggerated the similarities [between embryos of different species] by idealizations and omissions. He also, in some cases — in a procedure that can only be called fraudulent — simply copied the same figure over and over again.…Haeckel’s drawings never fooled expert embryologists, who recognized his fudgings right from the start ." - Harvard biology professor Stephen J Gould
3. Piltdown Man
Eoanthropus dawsoni, or Piltdown man, was found in a gravel pit at Piltdown in Sussex in 1912 by Charles Dawson, and for 40 years Piltdown man, with his huge, humanlike braincase and apelike jaw, remained on display in what is now the Natural History Museum in London as an example of the notorious "missing link" between humanity and its primate ancestors.
On November 21, 1953, however, scientists pronounced it a crude forgery, the marriage of a modern human skull and an orangutan's jaw, and decided that the entire package of fossil fragments at Piltdown - which included a ludicrous prehistoric cricket bat - had been planted by someone.
The world of paleontology went pink, and the conspiracy theorists went ape. There was no shortage of potentially guilty men to name, and for the next five decades, they named them.
4. The Miller-Urey Experiment - 1953
Single-digit percentages of two or three different amino acids were produced in precise laboratory experiments, beginning with water, nitrogen, oxygen, and high voltages of electricity, intended to simulate primordial earth conditions. This electrified the evolutionary biology community into making yet another quantum extrapolation leap of pseudo-science. Only decades later was the finding made that primordial conditions were not at all like those of the Miller-Urey Experiment, where by the way, a hopelessly inadequate number of hopelessly dilute amino acids had been synthesized in racemic mixtures, rather than the levorotary, optically active enantiomers of which living tissue is comprised.
5. The amazing Tasaday tribe
In 1971 Manuel Elizalde, a Philippine government minister, discovered a small stone age tribe living in utter isolation on the island of Mindanao. These people, the Tasaday, spoke a strange language, gathered wild food, used stone tools, lived in caves, wore leaves for clothes, and settled matters by gentle persuasion. They made love, not war, and became icons of innocence; reminders of a vanished Eden.
They also made the television news headlines, the cover of National Geographic, were the subject of a bestselling book, and were visited by Charles A Lindbergh and Gina Lollobrigida. Anthropologists tried to get a more sustained look, but President Marcos declared a 45,000-acre Tasaday reserve and closed it to all visitors.
After Marcos was deposed in 1986, two journalists got in and found that the Tasaday lived in houses, traded smoked meat with local farmers, wore Levi's T-shirts and spoke a recognizable local dialect. The Tasadays explained that they had only moved into caves, donned leaves and performed for cameras under pressure from Elizalde - who had fled the country in 1983 along with millions from a foundation set up to protect the Tasaday. Elizalde died in 1997.
5. Global Starvation Predicted by The Club of Rome - 1972
Intellectuals calling themselves The Club of Rome commissioned "The Limits to Growth" predicting mass starvation based on the same principles as those used by Thomas Malthus 226 years earlier. It was published in 1972.
6. Archaeoraptor Liaoningensis: Fake Dinosaur-bird ancestor
National Geographic magazine November, 1999
Dinosaur bones were put together with the bones of a newer species of bird and they tried to pass it off as a very important new evolutionary intermediate.
