Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould

Author:Stephen Jay Gould [Gould, Stephen Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780393340860
Google: o6g2tvN0nJoC
Amazon: B004CRSN60
Barnesnoble: B004CRSN60
Goodreads: 9915968
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Published: 1983-04-15T05:00:00+00:00

DOUBTS

I was just the right age for primal fascination—twelve years old—and a budding paleontologist when news of the fraud appeared on page one of the New York Times one morning at breakfast. My interest has never abated, and I have, over the years, asked many senior paleontologists about Piltdown. I have also remarked, both with amusement and wonder, that very few believed the official tale of Dawson acting alone. I noted, in particular, that several of the men I most admire suspected Teilhard, not so much on the basis of hard evidence (for their suspicions rested on what I regard as a weak point among the arguments), but from an intuitive feeling about this man whom they knew well, loved, and respected, but who seemed to hide passion, mystery, and good humor behind a garb of piety. A. S. Romer and Bryan Patterson, two of America’s leading vertebrate paleontologists and my former colleagues at Harvard, often voiced their suspicions to me. Louis Leakey voiced them in print, without naming the name, but with no ambiguity for anyone in the know (see his autobiography, By the Evidence).5

I finally decided to get off my butt and probe a bit after I wrote a column on Piltdown for other reasons (Natural History, March 1979). I read all the official documents and concluded that nothing excluded Teilhard, although nothing beyond his presence at Piltdown from the start particularly implicated him either. I intended to drop the subject or to pass it along to someone with a greater zeal for investigative reporting. But at a conference in France last September, I happened to meet two of Teilhard’s closest colleagues, the leading paleontologist J. Piveteau and the great zoologist P. P. Grassé. They greeted my suspicions with a blustering “incroyable.” Then Père François Russo, Teilhard’s friend and fellow Jesuit, heard of my inquiries and promised to send me a document that would prove Teilhard’s innocence—a copy of the letter that Teilhard had written to Kenneth Oakley on November 28, 1953. I received this letter in printed French translation (Teilhard wrote it in English) in October 1979 and realized immediately that it contained an inconsistency (a slip on Teilhard’s part) most easily resolved by the hypothesis of Teilhard’s complicity. When I visited Oakley at Oxford in April 1980, he showed me the original letter along with several others that Teilhard had written to him. We studied the documents and discussed Piltdown for the better part of a day, and I left convinced that Romer, Patterson, and Leakey had been right. Oakley, who had noted the inconsistency but interpreted it differently, agreed with me and stated as we parted: “I think it’s right that Teilhard was in it.” (Let me here express my deep appreciation for Dr. Oakley’s hospitality, his openness, and his simple, seemingly inexhaustible kindness and helpfulness. I always feel so exhilarated when I discover—and it is not so rare as many people imagine—that a great thinker is also an exemplary human being.) Since then, I

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