In the desperate scramble to find controversy where there is none, doubting that which is beyond all reasonable doubt is big business, says Ted Nield. From the April 2003 issue of Geoscientist, the monthly colour magazine.
The counterpart to the old adage that people will believe anything, is that they can also disbelieve anything. Just for the hell of it, folks are quite capable of ignoring not only evidence, but also the opinions of the most highly qualified people. Thus according to some, NASA never went to the moon and all living creatures were created unique and immutable in seven days by God. Libraries of books have attempted to prove that someone other than Charles Dawson was behind the Piltdown forgery. Credulity goes both ways, and there are no limits, especially since, where there is controversy there is money to be made.
In a free society, of course, people can think any damned nonsense they like, and MM would defend to the death their right to do so, no matter how much it may annoy scientists. Freedom is indivisible. However, individual choice is not the only issue. Unfortunately the world is run by pusillanimous beings whose common sense and moral fibre are both so weak that all it takes is two or more contrarian lunatics gathered together on a Web site for a foundation stone of modern knowledge to become, to their minds, "controversial". And that is when the woe starts.
On small issues this hardly matters. MM is often asked by visitors to the William Smith 1815 map to say something about the 1915 painting that hangs on the adjacent wall - The examination of the Piltdown Skill, by John Cooke (picture). This canvas graces every book that has ever been written on the supposed controversy surrounding the authorship of the hoax, first published in our very own Quarterly Journal.
Every man in the painting has stood accused of more than unwitting complicity, as have many others not pictured - including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and assorted embittered NHM technicians. One very famous Fellow of ours believed the culprit was Teilhard de Chardin - about which more below. But there has in fact never been any genuine doubt that the villain was Charles Dawson. He (back row, second from right) was first fingered by the fraud's discoverer Kenneth Oakley in 1953, and has since been unambiguously nailed by the author John Evangelist Walsh (see Further Reading).
Perhaps because Oakley's finger of blame pointed to the only amateur in the group, people's frequently misplaced sympathy for the underdog has fuelled a whole industry of speculation. People love a scandal, and the scandal would be oh, so much better if the culprit were a pillar of the scientific establishment rather than some sad solicitor from Sussex with a picturesque quirk for academic honours he was not prepared to work for honestly. And the causes of the late, great Steve Gould's animus towards Teilhard are not hard to imagine.
Less explicable than the Piltdown contrarians, however, are those who subscribe to the curious notion that the Apollo missions were all faked somewhere in Nevada. This all began when author Bill Kaysing wrote a (vanity published) book called We Never Went to the Moon. There are many other Moon hoax proponents, and you can find out about most of them at the references given below. The theory really hit the big-time on February 15 last year when Fox Television aired a programme called Conspiracy theory: did we land on the moon?". It was all a great Cold War conspiracy to fool the Russkies. Why did that flag flutter? Why no stars in the sky? Why the non-parallel shadows?
At one time the Moon Hoax theory was said to command the belief of 20% of US citizens, and this so alarmed NASA that it engaged science journalist James Oberg to write a book refuting the claims. To take the absurd charges seriously was news in itself, but bigger news came on November 8, when NASA terminated Mr Oberg's contract - perhaps an ill-advised act of economy that proved a PR disaster as sceptics seized upon it with a collective "Aha!". (Mr Oberg is now completing his book, A pall over Apollo - the "fake moon flights" myth, and is putting together a commercial deal that will ensure its publication. MM wishes him luck.)
But even disbelieving the moon-landings is a mere nothing compared with disbelieving organic evolution, especially when one considers the global effect that the (imaginary) "controversy" over Darwinism has upon those aforementioned pusillanimous officials, who should know better. MM well remembers a media interview with the Governor of the Bank of England at the time when non-royal faces first appeared on UK banknotes. Florence Nightingale was to grace the tenner, George Stephenson the fiver, and Isaac Newton the oncer, in a kind of inverse square law of eminence. The Governor was asked why Darwin had not been chosen. He looked shifty. The words "whiff of controversy" passed his lips, and the interview moved on - leaving MM speechlessly fumbling in his pockets for a penknife. Perhaps this was the exception that proved the rule. In Threadneedle Street, there is no money to be made in controversy.
This famous "whiff", though, is a very potent aroma to the cautious and the political. And for that reason, one of the things that creationists tend to do to generate this whiff is to compose long lists of "disbelieving" PhDs. It hardly matters if these people are misquoted, quoted out of context, unheard of, untraceable, or gained their doctorates by mail order from the Groundhog University of Punxsutawney. They'll do, by sheer force of listing, to make the weak-kneed educators of the world wring their hands and institute equal time policies.
So, against this depressing background, it cheered MM's flinty heart considerably to see, this February, a press notice emanating from the respected US National Center for Science Education proclaiming the "Steve List". Teach Evolution! shouted the headline; "Over two hundred scientists named Steve agree!"
"Project Steve" describes itself as: "a tongue-in-cheek parody of a long-standing creationist tradition of amassing lists of "scientists who doubt evolution", On the Project's Web site (below) you can find plenty of these among the links. "Project Steve mocks this practice with a bit of humour, and because "Steves" are only about 1% of scientists, it incidentally makes the point that tens of thousands of scientists support evolution." It also honours the late Stephen Jay Gould (picture), Honorary Fellow of the Geological Society of London, and NCSE supporter.
If you are a Steve and fancy joining your illustrious namesakes Gould and Jones, go along to the Steve Project Web site and sign up. Standing up and being counted for the Sage of Down seems to be catching on. Take, as a closing example, the signatories to a recently published Humanist Society letter to The Times, urging the UK to adopt a new public holiday on Darwin's birthday (February 12) before his bicentennial in 2009.
That, surely, might really catch on - if officials can refrain from turning the idea down on the grounds of controversy, of course.
Further reading
- Call for creation of Darwin Day: Times Letters 12.2.03, p23; Project Steve: http://www.ncseweb.org/steves/.
- The Great Moon Hoax: Moon rocks and common sense prove Apollo astronauts really did visit the Moon. http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast23feb_2.htm.
- James Oberg on www.jamesoberg.com .
- Unravelling Piltdown by John Evangelist Walsh 1996, Random House.
- Moon hoax believers at http://www.redzero.demon.co.uk/moonhoax/proponents.html.
- For rebuttals of the moon hoax theory - www.badastronomy.com