SCT: Smithsonian Photo Tour, cont.
The dogma continues as
the museum tackles fossils
and human evolution
These articles were first published in Science & Culture Today.
Smithsonian Glosses Over the Cambrian Explosion
by David Coppedge
Science & Culture Today, November 19, 2021
Recently we had the opportunity to visit the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, which exalts Charles Darwin as the uncontested hero of biology. (See, “At the Smithsonian, the Nation’s Museum, It’s All Darwin, All the Time.”) But Mr. Darwin has feet of clay. The Cambrian Explosion, even he realized, threatened his narrative of slow, gradual evolution — a weakness that was exacerbated in the 20th century by fossils from the Burgess Shale.
A Chengjiang trilobite fossil from China. Many have soft tissue impressions. (Illustra Media)
Starting in 1909, Charles Doolittle Walcott shipped boxes of Cambrian fossils to the Smithsonian from the newly discovered Burgess Shale in western Canada. The full significance of these fossils was not appreciated until 50 years later, when scientists dusted off the Smithsonian crates and looked at the fossils carefully. Here were vivid impressions of complex animals, they saw, that appeared fully formed without ancestors. Even details of soft parts had been preserved. Stephen Jay Gould also observed that these fossils challenge Darwinian gradualism.
The Smithsonian’s curators today know full well how these discoveries, and subsequent fossils from China, made Darwin’s Doubt worse than Darwin had known. How, then, would they sell the Cambrian Explosion (CE) to the public?
Presentation Strategies
The method could be called interpolation: present the “before” with confidence, present the “after” with confidence, and then deal with the CE as a minor difficulty in between that surely must fit in somehow….
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Evolution Theater:
Smithsonian Whitewashes Human Origins
by David Coppedge
Science & Culture Today, November 24, 2021
We had the opportunity to revisit the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and wrote about it here and here, with many accompanying photos. Having seen the one-sided promotion of Darwinism at the nation’s own museum, you should not be surpried that the Hall of Human Origins continues the dark tradition of Darwinian views about humanity.
The entry poster teaches Darwinian gradualism, but the Cambrian explosion and other fossil explosions defy this simplistic description.
Entering the Hall of Human Origins, the viewer is greeted by a panorama of species becoming more “white” as they evolve. One exception is the Hobbit of Indonesia (Homo floresiensis) which is portrayed as exceptionally dark. This selective focus ignores the many blunders and hoaxes of paleoanthropology (Piltdown Man, Nebraska Man, Ida) and the less credible fossils (Ardipithecus, Orrorin). Nor does the exhibit mention the continual changes of opinion about early man that appear frequently in the media (e.g., New Scientist, Phys.org). Instead, visitors are treated to a single line of descent mimicking the discredited “march of man” icon that keeps popping up in cartoons. Real paleontologists admit a reticulate pattern where it’s not at all clear who is ancestral to whom. This complexity is ignored….
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Darwinian racism continues at the Smithsonian to this day. Exhibits portray dark skinned hominins as less evolved.