by Emma Taylor
When you read about a scientific study in a book or a magazine, you probably take for granted that the methods used to conduct it or gather the information were, in fact, sound and honest. Yet there exists cases throughout history where scientists and reporters have been tricked, professionals faked results and everyday people pulled off elaborate hoaxes that fooled college professors, academics and experts alike. Here are ten of the biggest and most outrageous of these scientific hoaxes ever perpetrated, helping you learn from the past and hopefully prevent future fakers in the field.
Piltdown Man: This paleontological fraud is perhaps one of the most famous and long-lived of any in history. Spanning forty years, the hoax began in 1912 when the remains of what was purported to be the “missing link” between man and ape was unearthed in a gravel pit in England. Clues like a primitive “cricket bat” found alongside the body should have tipped off experts that the find was a bit of a hoax, but it wasn’t until 1953 that the truth was uncovered: the skull was cobbled together from a modern human and an orangutan– not an unknown form of early man as it was asserted to be.
The Cardiff Giant: One of the most famous hoaxes in American history, the discovery of this giant petrified human body was made in 1869. Workers digging for a new well supposedly discovered the remains of a ten foot tall man. In reality, what they discovered was the creation of George Hull, a wealthy tobacconist hoping to make a mockery of passages in the Bible stating there were once giants who lived on Earth. The absurdity of his creation, carved out of gypsum, didn’t stop people from believing it was the real deal, though the experts immediately declared it a fraud. The public was in love with it and a copy created by P.T. Barnum was the inspiration for the quote “a sucker is born every minute.” Adding to the ridiculousness, Barnum declared the original giant a fake, prompting its creator to sue him in court. When it was revealed that the original was in fact a fake itself, the judge threw out the case, stating Barnum couldn’t be sued for calling Hull out on the truth.
Tasaday Tribe: Throughout the 1970′s, this tribe of purportedly uncontacted Stone Age people in the rainforests of the Philippines was the talk of the anthropological and academic community. As soon as interest in the group piqued, however, officials moved to make their land a protected area and banned all contact with them – claiming only a limited number of scholars have ever interacted with them. This should have set off warning bells, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that the extent of the fraud was exposed. As it turned out, the group wasn’t isolated at all, wearing modern clothes and living in modern houses, not caves as they had been said to do. They had been pressured by local leaders to pretend to be something they were not, bribed with money, cigarettes and food. What was the purpose of this hoax? Money set aside to help protect this tribe was being stolen and spent by a less than scrupulous politician who, until his death in 1997, swore the tribe wasn’t a hoax.
Kammerer’s Lamarckian Inheritance: Anyone who’s spent time learning about evolution and genetics has likely heard of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a predecessor to Darwin who claimed that change in species occurred through changes to individuals throughout their lives that were passed onto offspring. Paul Kammerer, a leading proponent of this theory, set out to prove its validity with an experiment performed on midwife toads in the 1920s. He believed that he could change the appearance of land-dwelling toads to resemble those that lived in the water simply by changing their habitat. It seemed that his results supported this, with the third generation of the toads bearing characteristics distinctive of their water-dwelling cousins. While his ideas helped spurred on the field of epigenetics, what he found during his studies was a fraud, with the toads having been injected with ink to give them the distinctive black pad of the water dwellers. Kammerer denied all wrong-doing, but he was so upset by the fraud that he committed suicide only two weeks later– a sad end to a sad story.
The Sokal Affair: Many scientists end up faking results to gain esteem and further their careers, but this physicist set out creating a fraud to simply prove a point. Alan Sokal contributed an article to several scientific journals in an attempt to see if they would publish something fairly nonsensical so long as it sounded good and appealed to their ideological preconceptions. As it turned out, they would. This hoax launched a huge debate on the scholarly merit of sociological studies of the physical sciences, academic ethics, the quality of academic journals and a whole host of other issues. The article appeared in publication in 1996, but the ramifications of it are still being felt in the scholarly world today.
Bower and Chorley’s Crop Circles: You might laugh off the idea of crop circles being anything other than a hoax, but when this British duo began creating geometric shapes in fields during the 1970s using only a baseball cap and a board, they were widely regarded as potential evidence of alien life visiting earth. What these fakers can’t have expected, however, is to have set off a worldwide bevy of copycats, some creating immensely complex designs that helped convince paranormal enthusiasts the world over that alien life exists. They weren’t the only alien hoaxsters, however, as a famously televised “alien autopsy” in 1995 used animal parts, jam, meat and plastic.
Perpetual Motion Machine: Physicists have long denied the possibility of a perpetual motion machine, a device that creates more energy than it consumes, allowing it to continue moving indefinitely. While this machine would violate both the first and second laws of thermodynamics, that hasn’t stopped people from making a few bucks off creating one. In 1812, Charles Redheffer claimed to have invented a perpetual motion machine. A scam artist, Redheffer tried to make money from his machines in several cities, being exposed as a fraud in every one. Most audaciously, in New York, Redheffer simply hid the power source for the machine behind a few boards. Officials removed them, exposing an old man turning a crank while eating a loaf of bread.
The Lying Stones: Many of the hoaxes on this list have been created by someone hoping to get ahead, but this one stemmed from people hoping to pull someone else down. Irritated by the arrogance of their colleague, the coworkers of Professor Johann Beringer decided to take him down a few notches. Local boys whom he had paid to bring him any interesting fossils they might find brought in some strange specimens, containing reliefs of suns, worms, plants, insects, birds, snails and even Hebrew letters. Intrigued, he felt compelled to publish the findings, putting forth various theories as to what the stones could be– at one point even discussing whether they could be modern frauds. He ultimately rejected this idea, however, because he thought it impractical for someone to want to pull off such an elaborate hoax. Beringer should have trusted his instincts, however, as he was the victim of an elaborate prank perpetrated by his fellow academics, a fraud for which he pursued charges – and won. While Beringer worked for several years after this, history hasn’t been kind to his memory, using his story as an example of the danger of pursuing unsupported hypothesis.
The Mechanical Turk: This impressive, chess playing automaton was built in the late 18th century, and at the time, its creators claimed it was a huge leap forward in technology and innovation. From 1770 until its exposure as a fake in the 1820′s as a fake, this “machine” was taken from town to town, showing off its skill at chess. As you may have already guessed, this early robot wasn’t a robot at all, only a chess master hidden within a machine. While the automaton was later revealed to be a fraud, it played against and beat big names like Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin during its heyday.
Archaeoraptor: We’d like to think that archaeological fakes are a thing of the past, but unfortunately those in the fields of physical science still need to be on the lookout for them today. Billed as being the link between birds and early theropod dinosaurs, this fossil saw publication around the world– though doubts about its authenticity were rampant from the very start. First brought to light in 1999, it was not until 2002 that the fossil was definitively proven to be a fake, with different parts of it coming from different species. There have been lasting ramifications of this fraud, however, highlighting the fossil trade in China as well as the publication of scientific finds in non-academic journals.
Haeckel’s Embryonic Recapitulation: German biologist and naturalist Ernst Haeckel, was a staunch adherent to Darwin’s theory of evolution. In 1866 and 1874, Haeckel published materials that contained a drawing that compares three stages of embryonic development of 8 different organisms including human. Soon after the book’s release, Wilhelm His Sr., a professor of anatomy at the University of Leipzig, knew the drawings were inaccurate so he confronted Haeckel. Haeckel supposedly confessed and told Prof. His that it was the fault of the draftsman who drew the plate. What he didn’t tell the professor is that Haeckle was the draftsman and it was he who had drawn the plate.
Knowing it to be wrong, evolutionists still continued to publish the drawing in textbooks for over 100 years. Even though the drawing was known to be wrong, no one bothered to actually compare real embryos until Michael Richardson from St George’s Hospital Medical School did so in 1997. Richardson did compare the embryos and found that there was a significant difference between all of the embryos at the three stages that Haeckel had used and that Haeckel’s fraudulent drawing was far more than the minor inaccuracies that many evolutionists claimed in their defense of it. Haeckel’s drawing was definitely a deliberate act of fraud that was created to convince people in to believing in evolution. Sadly, I have seen Haeckel’s drawing still being published in high school and college textbooks today.
Peppered Moths: In the late 1950’s, a British physician by the name of H.B.D. Kettlewell, decided to investigate why the peppered moths of Great Britain had changed color over the decades. The majority of peppered moths use to be a light gray color, but since the industrial revolution, it seemed that the predominant color had changed to a dark gray.
Kettlewell concluded that before the industrial revolution, the lichens found on many tree trunks were light in color, providing adequate camouflage for the light colored moths. Birds that preyed on the moths would be more likely to spot and eat the darker moths. The industrial revolution produced a significant amount of pollutants released into the air. Consequently, the lichens on the trees became darker over time. With the darker lichens, the darker moths now blended into the tree trunks and the light colored moths would now stand out and become easy prey for the birds.
He had photos of the moths on the light and dark tree trunks. He then had films of the birds picking off the darker moths on lighter lichens and light moths on the darker lichens. His work was touted as proof of evolution through natural selection. However, it was later discovered that the photos that Kettlewell included with his report were actually of dead moths that had been pinned or glued to the tree trunks for the purpose of the study. He also used laboratory moths that were then placed on the tree trunks.
As it turns out, the moths don’t rest on tree trunks in the daytime anyway, which further undermined the validity of his famous study. Kettlewell had purposely used unnatural staged situations to help prove his belief in evolution.
Millions of Years: There has been a great deal said about this on our website already. Basically, millions of years is a mechanism based upon unprovable assumptions designed to question and undermine the belief in the biblical account of Creation and the Genesis Flood. Every radiometric dating method used to prove millions of years are based upon the assumption that there were millions of years. Secondly, it assumes a knowledge of the original amount of all parent elements, which is impossible to know. Thirdly, it assumes that the rates of radiometric decay have always been constant and have never been altered, which has already proven to be false.
Fourthly, it assumes that no other external factors can alter the first three assumptions and we know that volcanic activity can produce new materials that date back millions of years. As for the geological layers, evolutionary geologists claim that they are the results of millions of years of both slow gradual and catastrophic processes. They deny that thousands of feet of sedimentary rock, some that stretch for several thousand miles, and found nearly all over the entire earth provide any evidence of the worldwide flood as described in Genesis 6-9. The sole purpose of the perpetuation of the millions of years hoax is to destroy the foundations of Genesis and ultimately the Gospel message of the Cross.
Theory of Evolution: The concept of evolution had been around for a number of years before Charles Darwin. His grandfather, Erasmus Darwin wrote about evolutionary principles in the 1790’s in his book Zoonomia. It wasn’t until the millions of years hoax had prepared the ground for the seeds of evolution to take root in the time of Charles Darwin in 1859. Most likely, had it not been for Thomas Huxley, it is quite probably that very few people would have paid much attention to Charles Darwin’s book. Huxley, who had a devout hatred for the Church and Christianity understood the ramification of evolution and became the loudest and most influential advocate and promoter of the theory of evolution.
Why do I include evolution as a hoax? There is no evidence for the evolution of life from nothing. The very idea goes against every law of biology, chemistry and genetics. If you have been following my series on the Simple Cell posted on Fridays, you will know that the cell is so complex that there is no way one could have somehow formed on its own is some supposed primordial ooze. If you can’t get the first cell to have evolved, the rest of biological evolution collapses.
The Laws of Information teach that information can only result from a source of intelligence. This also negates the possibility of evolution being true. Yet this hoax is pushed in virtually every avenue and media form as a supposed fact. Those that endorse this hoax the strongest and loudest do so because they would prefer to believe that they came from an ape rather than acknowledge that they were created. Admitting that you were created also means to acknowledge that you have a Creator that you need to be accountable to, and this they do not want.
Source: http://www.accreditedonlinecolleges.com/blog/2011/10-most-flagrant-science-frauds-of-all-time/
When you read about a scientific study in a book or a magazine, you probably take for granted that the methods used to conduct it or gather the information were, in fact, sound and honest. Yet there exists cases throughout history where scientists and reporters have been tricked, professionals faked results and everyday people pulled off elaborate hoaxes that fooled college professors, academics and experts alike. Here are ten of the biggest and most outrageous of these scientific hoaxes ever perpetrated, helping you learn from the past and hopefully prevent future fakers in the field.
Piltdown Man: This paleontological fraud is perhaps one of the most famous and long-lived of any in history. Spanning forty years, the hoax began in 1912 when the remains of what was purported to be the “missing link” between man and ape was unearthed in a gravel pit in England. Clues like a primitive “cricket bat” found alongside the body should have tipped off experts that the find was a bit of a hoax, but it wasn’t until 1953 that the truth was uncovered: the skull was cobbled together from a modern human and an orangutan– not an unknown form of early man as it was asserted to be.
The Cardiff Giant: One of the most famous hoaxes in American history, the discovery of this giant petrified human body was made in 1869. Workers digging for a new well supposedly discovered the remains of a ten foot tall man. In reality, what they discovered was the creation of George Hull, a wealthy tobacconist hoping to make a mockery of passages in the Bible stating there were once giants who lived on Earth. The absurdity of his creation, carved out of gypsum, didn’t stop people from believing it was the real deal, though the experts immediately declared it a fraud. The public was in love with it and a copy created by P.T. Barnum was the inspiration for the quote “a sucker is born every minute.” Adding to the ridiculousness, Barnum declared the original giant a fake, prompting its creator to sue him in court. When it was revealed that the original was in fact a fake itself, the judge threw out the case, stating Barnum couldn’t be sued for calling Hull out on the truth.
Tasaday Tribe: Throughout the 1970′s, this tribe of purportedly uncontacted Stone Age people in the rainforests of the Philippines was the talk of the anthropological and academic community. As soon as interest in the group piqued, however, officials moved to make their land a protected area and banned all contact with them – claiming only a limited number of scholars have ever interacted with them. This should have set off warning bells, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that the extent of the fraud was exposed. As it turned out, the group wasn’t isolated at all, wearing modern clothes and living in modern houses, not caves as they had been said to do. They had been pressured by local leaders to pretend to be something they were not, bribed with money, cigarettes and food. What was the purpose of this hoax? Money set aside to help protect this tribe was being stolen and spent by a less than scrupulous politician who, until his death in 1997, swore the tribe wasn’t a hoax.
Kammerer’s Lamarckian Inheritance: Anyone who’s spent time learning about evolution and genetics has likely heard of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a predecessor to Darwin who claimed that change in species occurred through changes to individuals throughout their lives that were passed onto offspring. Paul Kammerer, a leading proponent of this theory, set out to prove its validity with an experiment performed on midwife toads in the 1920s. He believed that he could change the appearance of land-dwelling toads to resemble those that lived in the water simply by changing their habitat. It seemed that his results supported this, with the third generation of the toads bearing characteristics distinctive of their water-dwelling cousins. While his ideas helped spurred on the field of epigenetics, what he found during his studies was a fraud, with the toads having been injected with ink to give them the distinctive black pad of the water dwellers. Kammerer denied all wrong-doing, but he was so upset by the fraud that he committed suicide only two weeks later– a sad end to a sad story.
The Sokal Affair: Many scientists end up faking results to gain esteem and further their careers, but this physicist set out creating a fraud to simply prove a point. Alan Sokal contributed an article to several scientific journals in an attempt to see if they would publish something fairly nonsensical so long as it sounded good and appealed to their ideological preconceptions. As it turned out, they would. This hoax launched a huge debate on the scholarly merit of sociological studies of the physical sciences, academic ethics, the quality of academic journals and a whole host of other issues. The article appeared in publication in 1996, but the ramifications of it are still being felt in the scholarly world today.
Bower and Chorley’s Crop Circles: You might laugh off the idea of crop circles being anything other than a hoax, but when this British duo began creating geometric shapes in fields during the 1970s using only a baseball cap and a board, they were widely regarded as potential evidence of alien life visiting earth. What these fakers can’t have expected, however, is to have set off a worldwide bevy of copycats, some creating immensely complex designs that helped convince paranormal enthusiasts the world over that alien life exists. They weren’t the only alien hoaxsters, however, as a famously televised “alien autopsy” in 1995 used animal parts, jam, meat and plastic.
Perpetual Motion Machine: Physicists have long denied the possibility of a perpetual motion machine, a device that creates more energy than it consumes, allowing it to continue moving indefinitely. While this machine would violate both the first and second laws of thermodynamics, that hasn’t stopped people from making a few bucks off creating one. In 1812, Charles Redheffer claimed to have invented a perpetual motion machine. A scam artist, Redheffer tried to make money from his machines in several cities, being exposed as a fraud in every one. Most audaciously, in New York, Redheffer simply hid the power source for the machine behind a few boards. Officials removed them, exposing an old man turning a crank while eating a loaf of bread.
The Lying Stones: Many of the hoaxes on this list have been created by someone hoping to get ahead, but this one stemmed from people hoping to pull someone else down. Irritated by the arrogance of their colleague, the coworkers of Professor Johann Beringer decided to take him down a few notches. Local boys whom he had paid to bring him any interesting fossils they might find brought in some strange specimens, containing reliefs of suns, worms, plants, insects, birds, snails and even Hebrew letters. Intrigued, he felt compelled to publish the findings, putting forth various theories as to what the stones could be– at one point even discussing whether they could be modern frauds. He ultimately rejected this idea, however, because he thought it impractical for someone to want to pull off such an elaborate hoax. Beringer should have trusted his instincts, however, as he was the victim of an elaborate prank perpetrated by his fellow academics, a fraud for which he pursued charges – and won. While Beringer worked for several years after this, history hasn’t been kind to his memory, using his story as an example of the danger of pursuing unsupported hypothesis.
The Mechanical Turk: This impressive, chess playing automaton was built in the late 18th century, and at the time, its creators claimed it was a huge leap forward in technology and innovation. From 1770 until its exposure as a fake in the 1820′s as a fake, this “machine” was taken from town to town, showing off its skill at chess. As you may have already guessed, this early robot wasn’t a robot at all, only a chess master hidden within a machine. While the automaton was later revealed to be a fraud, it played against and beat big names like Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin during its heyday.
Archaeoraptor: We’d like to think that archaeological fakes are a thing of the past, but unfortunately those in the fields of physical science still need to be on the lookout for them today. Billed as being the link between birds and early theropod dinosaurs, this fossil saw publication around the world– though doubts about its authenticity were rampant from the very start. First brought to light in 1999, it was not until 2002 that the fossil was definitively proven to be a fake, with different parts of it coming from different species. There have been lasting ramifications of this fraud, however, highlighting the fossil trade in China as well as the publication of scientific finds in non-academic journals.
Haeckel’s Embryonic Recapitulation: German biologist and naturalist Ernst Haeckel, was a staunch adherent to Darwin’s theory of evolution. In 1866 and 1874, Haeckel published materials that contained a drawing that compares three stages of embryonic development of 8 different organisms including human. Soon after the book’s release, Wilhelm His Sr., a professor of anatomy at the University of Leipzig, knew the drawings were inaccurate so he confronted Haeckel. Haeckel supposedly confessed and told Prof. His that it was the fault of the draftsman who drew the plate. What he didn’t tell the professor is that Haeckle was the draftsman and it was he who had drawn the plate.
Knowing it to be wrong, evolutionists still continued to publish the drawing in textbooks for over 100 years. Even though the drawing was known to be wrong, no one bothered to actually compare real embryos until Michael Richardson from St George’s Hospital Medical School did so in 1997. Richardson did compare the embryos and found that there was a significant difference between all of the embryos at the three stages that Haeckel had used and that Haeckel’s fraudulent drawing was far more than the minor inaccuracies that many evolutionists claimed in their defense of it. Haeckel’s drawing was definitely a deliberate act of fraud that was created to convince people in to believing in evolution. Sadly, I have seen Haeckel’s drawing still being published in high school and college textbooks today.
Peppered Moths: In the late 1950’s, a British physician by the name of H.B.D. Kettlewell, decided to investigate why the peppered moths of Great Britain had changed color over the decades. The majority of peppered moths use to be a light gray color, but since the industrial revolution, it seemed that the predominant color had changed to a dark gray.
Kettlewell concluded that before the industrial revolution, the lichens found on many tree trunks were light in color, providing adequate camouflage for the light colored moths. Birds that preyed on the moths would be more likely to spot and eat the darker moths. The industrial revolution produced a significant amount of pollutants released into the air. Consequently, the lichens on the trees became darker over time. With the darker lichens, the darker moths now blended into the tree trunks and the light colored moths would now stand out and become easy prey for the birds.
He had photos of the moths on the light and dark tree trunks. He then had films of the birds picking off the darker moths on lighter lichens and light moths on the darker lichens. His work was touted as proof of evolution through natural selection. However, it was later discovered that the photos that Kettlewell included with his report were actually of dead moths that had been pinned or glued to the tree trunks for the purpose of the study. He also used laboratory moths that were then placed on the tree trunks.
As it turns out, the moths don’t rest on tree trunks in the daytime anyway, which further undermined the validity of his famous study. Kettlewell had purposely used unnatural staged situations to help prove his belief in evolution.
Millions of Years: There has been a great deal said about this on our website already. Basically, millions of years is a mechanism based upon unprovable assumptions designed to question and undermine the belief in the biblical account of Creation and the Genesis Flood. Every radiometric dating method used to prove millions of years are based upon the assumption that there were millions of years. Secondly, it assumes a knowledge of the original amount of all parent elements, which is impossible to know. Thirdly, it assumes that the rates of radiometric decay have always been constant and have never been altered, which has already proven to be false.
Fourthly, it assumes that no other external factors can alter the first three assumptions and we know that volcanic activity can produce new materials that date back millions of years. As for the geological layers, evolutionary geologists claim that they are the results of millions of years of both slow gradual and catastrophic processes. They deny that thousands of feet of sedimentary rock, some that stretch for several thousand miles, and found nearly all over the entire earth provide any evidence of the worldwide flood as described in Genesis 6-9. The sole purpose of the perpetuation of the millions of years hoax is to destroy the foundations of Genesis and ultimately the Gospel message of the Cross.
Theory of Evolution: The concept of evolution had been around for a number of years before Charles Darwin. His grandfather, Erasmus Darwin wrote about evolutionary principles in the 1790’s in his book Zoonomia. It wasn’t until the millions of years hoax had prepared the ground for the seeds of evolution to take root in the time of Charles Darwin in 1859. Most likely, had it not been for Thomas Huxley, it is quite probably that very few people would have paid much attention to Charles Darwin’s book. Huxley, who had a devout hatred for the Church and Christianity understood the ramification of evolution and became the loudest and most influential advocate and promoter of the theory of evolution.
Why do I include evolution as a hoax? There is no evidence for the evolution of life from nothing. The very idea goes against every law of biology, chemistry and genetics. If you have been following my series on the Simple Cell posted on Fridays, you will know that the cell is so complex that there is no way one could have somehow formed on its own is some supposed primordial ooze. If you can’t get the first cell to have evolved, the rest of biological evolution collapses.
The Laws of Information teach that information can only result from a source of intelligence. This also negates the possibility of evolution being true. Yet this hoax is pushed in virtually every avenue and media form as a supposed fact. Those that endorse this hoax the strongest and loudest do so because they would prefer to believe that they came from an ape rather than acknowledge that they were created. Admitting that you were created also means to acknowledge that you have a Creator that you need to be accountable to, and this they do not want.
Source: http://www.accreditedonlinecolleges.com/blog/2011/10-most-flagrant-science-frauds-of-all-time/
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