Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
and were arguing about how it should best be reconstructed, militant
fundamentalists were denouncing it as a fraud. In 1923, for example,
the orator and politician William Jennings Bryan, who would later act
as counsel for the prosecution in the infamous Scopes trial against
teaching evolution in public schools, ridiculed paleontologists in an
address to the West Virginia state legislature: “The evolutionists have
attempted to prove by circumstantial evidence (resemblances) that man
is descended from the brute. . . . If they find a stray tooth in a gravel pit,
they hold a conclave and fashion a creature such as they suppose the
possessor of the tooth to have been, and then they shout derisively at
scientists about this particular “discovery.”
In 1912 when Piltdown was causing such a stir, 19-year-old Raymond
Arthur Dart, who had been brought up as a religious fundamentalist,
was experiencing his “first frank confrontation with evolutionary ideas”
was raised on a cattle farm in a pioneer family of devout Methodists
and Baptists, and his childhood ambition was to become a medical mis-
sionary. From an early age, he had a “passion for learning and books,”
a childhood interest in anatomy. His brothers, for example, returned
from the field one day to find that Raymond had neglected his chores
he would discover what was to become the world's most famous fossil or
of knowing the prolonged negative effect that the Piltdown discovery
would have on the reception to his find.
Given today's often polarized discussions about the relative merits
of science and religion, it is perhaps surprising that, rather than reject
his religious upbringing in favor of evolutionary theory, Dart sought to
reconcile the two. His biographers report that as an adult Dart would
Furthermore,
