Abnormal Interests

Or this from Florida Baptist Witness:

Although open hostility from those who hold to neo-Darwinism sometimes makes it difficult for design scholars to gain a fair hearing for their ideas, research and articles by intelligent design scholars are being published in peer-reviewed publications.

Notice the comparison of science institutions and Nazis in the Creation Digest article.

The whole creationist reaction to the scientific critique of Stephen C. Meyer’s recent paper in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington seems to rest in large part on the belief that science is somehow closed and self confirming as an institution. One sees the same in the related creationist reaction to the Sternberg non-affair at the Smithsonian. See the Panda's Thumb article by Wesley Elsberry for a good survey of the Sternberg hullabaloo.

One should remember that it was scientists that debunked the Piltdown Man hoax. Why don't sciences opponents find these frauds and errors? Because, they very seldom study the evidence. They simply rail against it. Without a theory it is had to know what is supported by evidence and what isn't. It is even harder to know what evidence to and not test if one denies or ignores the salience of most evidence that does not support one's own position.

A quick side point, scientists are often accused by creationist of denying the evidence for design or if you will "Intelligent Design". However, scientists do not deny the evidence for design. They see the evidence and find it irrelevant. Just as the outward appearance of a smooth stone is irrelevant to the internal chemical or atomic structure of that stone, so is the appearance of design irrelevant to the origin of species. In both cases, one must look a lot deeper.

Now, that all this is out of the way, how much harm was done by Protsch? Here is what the Guardian has to say,

But his university inquiry was told that a crucial Hamburg skull fragment, which was believed to have come from the world's oldest German, a Neanderthal known as Hahnhöfersand Man, was actually a mere 7,500 years old, according to Oxford University's radiocarbon dating unit. The unit established that other skulls had been wrongly dated too.

Another of the professor's sensational finds, "Binshof-Speyer" woman, lived in 1,300 BC and not 21,300 years ago, as he had claimed, while "Paderborn-Sande man" (dated at 27,400 BC) only died a couple of hundred years ago, in 1750.

Here's what P Z Myers at Pharyngula has to say,

I’d never heard of him before, and his Hahnhöfersand Man, Binshof-Speyer Woman, and Paderborn-Sande Man are specimens I hadn’t heard of, either.

By the way, I think it is "Hahnöfersand" and not "Hahnhöfersand" but I will continue to use the latter for the sale of continuity, if nothing else.

A search of Fossil Hominids returned nothing at all on any of them. They do not show up in Michael Day's Guide to Fossil Man (1993), but it might be a little old these days.

Anthropologists knew the problems with these specimens last year. As an August 2004 article in the News Telegraph said,

Yet recent research at Oxford University's carbon-dating laboratory has suggested that they date back a mere 7,500 years. By that time, Homo sapiens was already well-established and the Neanderthals were extinct.

Chris Stringer, a Stone Age specialist and head of human origins at London's Natural History Museum, said at the time: "What was considered a major piece of evidence showing that the Neanderthals once lived in northern Europe has fallen by the wayside. We are having to rewrite prehistory.

(Update, February 23, 2005) Robert Holloway, in a comment below tells me that Stringer never made this quotation. Here is what Stinger said of the quotation,

This is a made-up quote as I never placed great weight on the significance of the Hahnofersand find in the first place. It was never called a Neanderthal as far as I know, but certain people saw "mixed" features in its morphology. Its removal is certainly not rewriting anything I have ever said about the Neanderthals, let alone rewriting prehistory!

According to Holloway the quotation originated on the WorldNet Daily! If I had known this, I wouldn't have used it (End of up date)

Protsch claimed that the Oxford team had made an error.

Creationists were all over this when it first broke in 2004. This from Creation Science Movement (sic),

Once again the evidence for the supposed evolution of man is crumbling before our eyes. It is not apparent that Prof. Von Zieten deliberately committed fraud, but the overwhelming desire to find evidence for evolution often clouds the scientist’s judgement.

No, Protsch von Zieten did commit fraud and even if he was only wrong, these new dates have next to nothing to do with the overwhelming evidence for the evolution of man.

The Human Fossil Record, Volume 1, Terminology and Craniodental Morphology of Genus Homo (Europe) (2001) by Jeffrey H. Schwartz and Ian Tattersall apparently mentions the Hahnhöfersand specimen but I'm too cheep to own the volume ($195.00) and too lazy to check it out at the library before I post this. Perhaps, I will update this post later. Archeology.info does mention the Hahnhöfersand site as representing the earliest of the non-Neanderthal remains from Central Europe. But this is likely not "Hahnhöfersand Man." This arrears to be a reference to a H. sapiens. Stringer and Gamble, In Search of the Neanderthals, (1993) (pp. 179.180) mentions the Hahnhöfersand specimen but this is also a H. sapiens. Marvin L. Lubenow has a truly misguided article that is found on Answers in Genesis that mentions the Hahnhöfersand reference in Stringer and Gamble. His paper looks like a scientific paper but it is nonsense. No great body of scientific literature or research developed around any of these Protsch "Men" and "Women."

Bottom line, while any fraudulent evidence can cause harm and set back or divert research, Protsch's fraud did a minimum of scientific harm but could provide another bonanza for the creationist.