A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Blurs

How was National Geographic able to publish an artist’s reconstruction of Homo floriensis (aka Hobbit Man) the same day Nature published the find? (See 10/27/2004 headline).  Martin Kemp (U. of Oxford, UK) explains in the Dec. 2 issue¹ how Peter Schouten, an artist, got the gig:

Tim Flannery, director of the South Australian Museum …. suggested to Richard ‘Bert’ Roberts of the University of Wollongong that Schouten be asked to produce a picture of Flores Man.  The resulting painting was purchased jointly by the university and the National Geographic Society, and the society then acquired the image rights (their television channel will air a programme on the discovery early next year).  The image was released to the public as soon as the original scientific papers appeared in Nature….

Kemp seems a bit put off at all this.  He takes pride in the fact that Nature was “rigorously sober” and “impeccably” scientific in its portrayal of the scientific data, and avoided caricaturing the individual in artwork:

Scientists will readily recognize that Schouten, like any artist relying largely on bones, had to make some key assumptions, not least with respect to fleshy and surface features, including secondary sexual characteristics.  For a historian of images, a series of questions arise about the ‘character’ with which the envisaged figure is endowed.  We cannot portray any figure without giving it some kind of definite persona, however subjectively its characteristics may be read by different spectators.  The features that speak most powerfully to us – the eyes, nose and mouth – are among the most speculative.

Kemp notes that Schouten made the male individual look stoical and macho, spear in hand, holding its prey over its shoulder, hairy and transitional.  “Darwinian ‘ape-men,’” he observes, “are almost invariably portrayed as miserable and destitute, living in grinding discomfort, clearly waiting desperately for evolution to happen – even if not in their lifetimes.”  The guy does “not look like a bundle of fun,” he quips.
    Are these portrayals helpful in educating the public?  “Such images flourish in the popular domain but tend to be denigrated within science,” he adds, and ends with a note of cynicism about the power of the artist over the work of the scientist:

But the battered skull and bony fragments do not stick in our memory in the way that Schouten’s skilful painting does.  The process of discovery and publication has thrown up an instant icon that will be very hard to dislodge.  We can change our mind about recorded facts, but a potent image, for good or for ill, tends to become indelible.

¹Martin Kemp, “Science in culture,” Nature 432, 555 (02 December 2004); doi:10.1038/432555a.

The history of Darwinist propaganda can be understood as a series of indelible icons of evolution that often have little or nothing to do with the facts, but become very hard to dislodge.  This is the propaganda value of visualization.  The Darwin fish, the horse series, hairy ape-men in a cave, Darwin’s finches, peppered moths on tree trunks, Darwin’s tree of life, Haeckel’s embryos – these all illustrate Thumb’s second postulate, “An easily-understood, workable falsehood is more useful than a highly-complex, incomprehensible truth.”  (Useful to whom?)