Patrick J. Buchanan Waxes Greatly About That of Which He Knows Not

An article making the rounds on the conservative blogs by Patrick Buchanan, one-time GOP presidential candidate, trots out more half-truths about evolution and global warming. Titled, the Hoax of the Century, Buchanan makes the following statements:

With publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, the hunt was on for the "missing link." Fame and fortune awaited the scientist who found the link proving Darwin right: that man evolved from a monkey.

In 1912, success! In a gravel pit near Piltdown in East Sussex, there was found the cranium of a man with the jaw of an ape.

"Darwin Theory Proved True," ran the banner headline.

Evolution skeptics were pilloried, and three English scientists were knighted for validating Piltdown Man.

It wasn't until 1953, after generations of biology students had been taught about Piltdown Man, that closer inspection discovered that the cranium belonged to a medieval Englishman, the bones had been dyed to look older and the jaw belonged to an orangutan whose teeth had been filed down to look human.

Because Buchanan knows so little about evolution and the fossil record, he imagines that the above paragraphs are quite pithy. They are not. Is it true that Piltdown took in some well-known scientists? Yes, it is. What is largely responsible for this, however, is how good a hoax it was. To this day, we don't know for sure who perpetrated it, although the cloud of suspicion hangs over the head of Charles Dawson, who died in 1915, three years after the "remains" were found. Dawson took advantage of the fact that, in its infancy, the study of human evolution simply did not have the tools necessary to uncover such a hoax.

What Buchanan does not say is that, despite the fact that many people did accept it, many also did not. Ales Hrdlicka, the founder of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists and Franz Weidenreich, describer of the Zhoukoudian (Peking Man) fossils both thought that the remains were questionable. Hrlicka came right out and pronounced it a hoax while Weidenreich admitted that he did not understand how it could fit with what was known of human ancestry at that time.

The other thing that Buchanan does not say is that Weidenreich had great reason to wonder. Beginning in the early 1800s all the way up through the uncovering of Piltdown and beyond, a huge assortment of fossil human remains had been discovered all over the Old World. There had been Neandertal discoveries in Europe, at the sites of Spy, La Chapelle-aux-Saints, La Ferrassie, St. Cesaire just to name a few. In Africa, one of the key predictions of Darwin, that human ancestral remains would be found there, had been borne out, with the discoveries of Australopithecus remains in the 1920s and 1930s. Homo erectus remains had been discovered in East Asia beginning in the 1890s and more was to come. Somehow, Buchanan, in his effort to make his point about human evolution, fails to mention any of these.

Simply put, by the time Piltdown was dethroned and removed from the human fossil "tree," most workers in the field had already considered doing so. There was simply no place for it. It was an anomaly in the record of human evolution. It is not the first time that science has been taken in by a hoax and it will not be the last.

He continues:

In 1922, Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History, identified a tooth fossil found in Nebraska to be that of an "anthropoid ape." He used his discovery to mock William Jennings Bryan, newly elected to Congress, as "the most distinguished primate which the State of Nebraska has yet produced."

Invited to testify at the Scopes trial, however, Osborn begged off. For, by 1925, Nebraska Man's tooth had been traced to a wild pig, and Creationist Duane Gish, a biochemist, had remarked of Osborn's Nebraska Man, "I believe this is a case in which a scientist made a man out of a pig, and the pig made a monkey out of the scientist."

Not only is this untrue, it conflicts broadly with another creationist myth, that Osborn did testify and embarrassed William Jennings Bryan at the trial. The truth of the matter is that Osborn was not even on the list of witnesses that the defense brought. The NCSE report on this "myth" has this to say:

Quite simply, Henry Fairfield Osborn never testified at the Scopes trial. He was not even on the list of scientific witnesses that the defense team organized. The front page of the New York Times for July 14, 1925, has a boxed article entitled "List of Scientists and Ministers to Aid Scopes if Evidence Is Admitted on Evolution and the Bible." This article begins with the statement: "The complete list of witnesses for the defense in the Scopes trial called so far and who are either here or on the way was announced today as follows. . . ." The article goes on to list the names, positions, and affiliations of fifteen people; Osborn is not among them.

Not only was he not there, he wasn't planning to be there. Now let's turn to Nebraska Man. When I was doing my graduate work in anthropology, I took a course on forensics. One of the things we were taught is that when doing experiments to see how bone will behave, pig bone is always used because it behaves the most like human bone. Pig teeth, in fact, are very similar to human teeth and a very worn pig tooth and a very worn human tooth are similar in appearance. Osborn was sent a human tooth in isolation from any provenance. While this doesn't entirely excuse his mistake, it does make it a bit more understandable. As Jim Foley, on the TalkOrigins page notes:

Most other scientists were skeptical even of the more modest claim that the Hesperopithecus tooth belonged to a primate. It is simply not true that Nebraska Man was widely accepted as an ape-man, or even as an ape, by scientists, and its effect upon the scientific thinking of the time was negligible. For example, in his two-volume book Human Origins published during what was supposedly the heyday of Nebraska Man (1924), George MacCurdy dismissed Nebraska Man in a single footnote:"In 1920 [sic], Osborn described two molars from the Pliocene of Nebraska; he attributed these to an anthropoid primate to which he has given the name Hesperopithecus. The teeth are not well preserved, so that the validity of Osborn's determination has not yet been generally accepted."

Further, as far as a primate tooth in North America was concerned, this was not so odd. Fossil primate remains are known from North America. Adapids were present in the Eocene epoch (55 to 34 mya) and were, depending on where Ida fits, the precursors to the Omomyids (Tarsiers) and maybe the lemuriforms and lorisiforms as well. As late as the late Eocene, one finds fossil tarsiers in North America. Then the line dies out and the only branches that survived were those in the Old World. It is not until the end of the Oligocene (34 to 23 mya) that one begins to find large-bodied primates in the Old World that were the precursors of today's apes and humans. In the early 1920s, very little attention had been turned to North America in terms of fossil hominid research and so, while the idea of a Pliocene primate would certainly raise eyebrows today, in Osborn's time, it would not have done so.

From here, Buchanan turns his attention to global warming, the "great hoax of the 21st" century. I am not qualified to evaluate his arguments in this area because I do not have the necessary background. I can say, however, that his attention to detail and truth in evaluating evolution are appalling and if he approaches global warming the same way, he is way out of his depth. This sort of "gotcha" editorial should be an embarrassment to conservatives everywhere.

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The Nonsense of Pat Buchanan

Former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan has written a column that, sadly is all too common from conservatives these days. He has rolled into one column nearly every myth and misrepresentation about evolution out there. Let's start at the top:

"You have no notion of the intrigue that goes on in this blessed world of science," wrote Thomas Huxley. "Science is, I fear, no purer than any other region of human activity; though it should be."

As "Darwin's bulldog," Huxley would himself engage in intrigue, deceit and intellectual property theft to make his master's theory gospel truth in Great Britain.

And the support for this allegation is where? Not in this column, that's for sure. No matter. He moves on. Talking about Eugene Windchy's book The End of Darwinism: And How a Flawed and Disastrous Theory Was Stolen and Sold, Buchanan says:

That Darwinism has proven "disastrous theory" is indisputable.

"Karl Marx loved Darwinism," writes Windchy. "To him, survival of the fittest as the source of progress justified violence in bringing about social and political change, in other words, the revolution."

"Darwin suits my purpose," Marx wrote.

Darwin suited Adolf Hitler's purposes, too.

"Although born to a Catholic family, Hitler become a hard-eyed Darwinist who saw life as a constant struggle between the strong and the weak. His Darwinism was so extreme that he thought it would have been better for the world if the Muslims had won the eighth century battle of Tours, which stopped the Arabs' advance into France. Had the Christians lost, (Hitler) reasoned, Germanic people would have acquired a more warlike creed and, because of their natural superiority, would have become the leaders of an Islamic empire."

Charles Darwin also suited the purpose of the eugenicists and Herbert Spencer, who preached a survival-of-the-fittest social Darwinism to robber baron industrialists exploiting 19th-century immigrants.

Some of these are so old, they are getting whiskers. Hitler, once again, did not use natural selection as the underpinnings of his hatred of the Jews. He simply didn't. And to continue to peddle this nonsense only makes Buchanan look foolish. Herbert Spencer's adaptations of Darwin's theory was misapplied, since Darwin never meant his theory to be extrapolated outside of the biological realm. As Derek Freeman wrote for Current Anthropology in 1974:

The disparity between Spencer's "general doctrine of evolution" and Darwin's theory of the origin of species was thus immense. Spencer's doctrine, not having resulted from any kind of sustained empirical enquiry, was explicitly deductive in its structure, and rested on the metaphysical supposition that all evolutionary change was due to the persistence of an immanent "Power" that was (Spencer 1904 [1882], vol 1: 554) both "unknown and unknowable." In marked contrast, Darwin's theory, as he published it in 1859, was authentically scientific, for, without recourse, for all practical purposes, to metaphysics or "final causes," it postulated, on the basis of massive factual evidence, a non-teleological mode of evolutionary change and incorporated a precise definition of the mechanism of natural selection which (as has been conclusively demonstrated) does indeed result in the genetic evolution of populations of living organisms.¹

The problem is that Buchanan has no idea what evolution actually is and has confused what Spencer believed with what Darwin empirically showed. Buchanan continues:

Darwin also lied in "The Origin of Species" about believing in a Creator. By 1859, he was a confirmed agnostic and so admitted in his posthumous autobiography, which was censored by his family.

Darwin did not lie about believing in a creator. When his beloved daughter Anne died, it shattered Darwin's belief in a personal, loving God. It is also nonsense that Darwin's family suppressed it. Darwin wrote:

Another source of conviction in the existence of God, connected with the reason and not with the feelings, impresses me as having much more weight. This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.

This conclusion was strong in my mind about the time, as far as I can remember, when I wrote the Origin of Species; and it is since that time that it has very gradually with many fluctuations become weaker. But then arises the doubt—can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions? May not these be the result of the connection between cause and effect which strikes us as a necessary one, but probably depends merely on inherited experience? Nor must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation in a belief in God on the minds of children producing so strong and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains not yet fully developed, that it would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God, as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake.

I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.

He didn't "lie" about his belief in a creator. That is a simplistic read of Darwin's thoughts on God. Darwin freely admitted he was an agnostic but that is a far cry from lying about it. The real clue that Buchanan has no idea what he was talking about comes toward the end, though, with this:

Darwin's examples of natural selection – such as the giraffe acquiring its long neck to reach ever higher into the trees for the leaves upon which it fed to survive – have been debunked. Giraffes eat grass and bushes. And if, as Darwin claimed, inches meant life or death, how did female giraffes, two or three feet shorter, survive?

What Buchanan is actually recounting here is Lamarckian evolution. Darwin used Lamarck's example of the giraffe to show that Lamarck was wrong. The problem is that Buchanan doesn't know the difference. Darwin showed that the giraffe didn't stretch its neck and pass on the characteristic to its offspring. He showed that the giraffes with longer necks outcompeted those with shorter necks and this trait was passed on to their offspring. Not the same thing. As far as the females not getting any food, he makes it seem as if there was no food at the lower branches. This is nonsense. The giraffes evolved long necks over time because the ones with longer necks could exploit a feeding niche that no other animal could, which ensured their survival. As Buchanan, himself, says, giraffes also eat grass. Plenty of that around. He also trots out this lie:

For 150 years, the fossil record has failed to validate Darwin.

"The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontologists," admitted Stephen J. Gould in 1977. But that fossil record now contains even more species that appear fully developed, with no traceable ancestors.

If Buchanan actually knew anything about the fossil record, he would know that this isn't true. It is also absolutely telling that he uses a quote that is 32 years out-of-date. And it was even a controversial statement when Gould said it then. Furthermore, if Buchanan had done his homework, he would have discovered this quote of Gould's:

"Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists--whether through design or stupidity, I do not know--as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups."²

But that doesn't fit the narrative, so it has to be ignored. Buchanan simply swiped that quote from a stock of misquotes that creationists have been collecting for years. That Buchanan has been marginalized in the GOP is little consolation because this kind of thought keeps showing up in conservative sources. That so little thought, preparation or accuracy is put into such work is a very disturbing.

¹Freeman, D. (1974) The evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. Current Anthropology 15(3): 211

²Gould, Stephen J. (1983) Evolution as Fact and Theory. Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes.Norton, New York.


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