Part V: The Fallacy of Anthroplogical Reconstructions

Chapter 2

How Reconstructions Deceive

It is common knowledge, now, not only that Neanderthal Man walked erect precisely as healthy modern man does but that he actually had a greater cranial capacity, in excess of 1600 cc., compared with modern man’s 1400 cc. Many today believe that Neanderthal Man is still with us and that we would scarcely look at him twice were we to meet him on the street in modern clothes. The impressions which can be created by an artist, starting with the same basic skull, are apt to be quite varied indeed, as will be seen by the three drawings in Fig. 14 which I have copied from the sources indicated.
In 1939, a year earlier, Alberto Carlo Blanc and Sergio Sergi reported in Science the finding of a Neanderthal skull in a cave at Monte Circeo in Italy: (6)

Two other Neanderthal skulls have been found in Italy, one in 1929 and the other in 1935, both in the Sacopastore region near Rome, but neither is as well preserved as the new discovery. However, the occipital opening at the base of one of the skulls was particularly well preserved enabling Professor Sergi to establish for the first time that Neanderthal Man walked erect and not with an ape-like posture with head thrust forward as previously believed. The horizontal plane of the opening in the skull shows that the bones of the neck fitted perpendicularly into the opening, causing the posture to be erect as in present day man.

It is true that this news may have come too late for the printer to agree readily to making any changes in the dust jacket of the book or the illustrations in it, yet it seems likely that if this had been a publication dealing with physics or chemistry in which a basic error of such importance to fundamental theory had been made known to the author one year before his book was published, he would most assuredly have made some attempt — for his own reputation’s sake, if not in the interests of truth — to correct the error, either by changing the text or appending a correction notice. But anthropology apparently does not feel any such necessity.
A report from the Associated Press, (7) on the finding of Tepexpan Man not far from Mexico City underscores the uncertainty of popular reconstructions. Following the usual custom, the public had at first

6. Monte Circeo: reported in Science, vol.90, 1939, supplement, p.13.
7. Newman, M. T., Globe and Mail, Toronto, April 4, 1951.

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been presented with a portrait of this gentleman, appropriately downgraded in appearance to fit current theories of man’s evolution. But in an interview, M. T. Newman said, “Look at some of the reconstructed heads of this individual…They look thick-headed, stupid, and bestial. But now we are trying to be more realistic. . . Obviously, early man had to be intelligent or he would not have survived.” The Smithsonian Institute had taken the same skull, and T. D. Stewart and a Washington artist, Leo Steppat, set to work reconstructing the head. The result was, in the words of Dr. Newman, “Not a bad looking fellow — not too far removed from a typical southwestern Indian.” The fact is that there is a strong tendency on the part of anthropologists to take advantage of public gullibility and to supply, upon the slightest pretext, hypothetical missing links, because as Wilson Wallis said, (8) “Since the day of Darwin, the evolutionary idea has largely dominated the ambitions and determined the findings of physical anthropology, sometimes to the detriment of the truth.”
Recently, in a notice in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, which I presume was written by the editor (the same T. D. Stewart), the following warning with respect to such reconstructions was issued: (9)

From the skull, it is quite impossible to reconstruct the character of the hair, eyes, nose, lips, ears, eyebrows, skin creases, fullness, or expression. In short, it is impossible to reconstruct the appearance of the face.
Nevertheless, such fancy reconstructions are to be found in almost every book dealing with the evolution of man. It is highly desirable that they should be dropped for they do real harm. Their creators have endowed them with traits and expressions which follow the formula that the earlier the type, the more brutal; the later the type, the nobler of expression. The probabilities are that the expression of early man was no less benign than our own.

How completely true this observation is was beautifully borne out in 1937 when Karl Absolon reported his amazing findings at Vestonice. A summary of his work appeared in the Illustrated London News (10) and here we have a series of photographs of the beautiful carved head, done in ivory. In Dr. Absolon’s words, it is “the earliest known portrait of a human being.” In his article, he remarked:

There was little hope of obtaining anything clearer anthropologically than current reconstructions. It can therefore be imagined what a surprise it was for anthropology when the sculpture portrait of fossil man was brought to light in Vestonice. Some heretic, some sacrilegious

8. Wallis, Wilson, “The Structure of Pre-Historic Man,” in The Making of Modern Man, Modern Library Series, 1931, p.75.
9. Stewart, T. D. in American Journal of Physical Anthropology, vol.6, 1948, p.321 f.
10. Absolon, Karl, Illustrated London News, London, Oct. 2, 1937.

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man had deserted the religion of his fathers, and in defiance of all tradition carved the portrait of a true face. The portrait shows a very noble, fine, animated face — a long nose, arched ridges over the eyes, and a long chin.

Absolon remarked, “The face recalls some classical portrait from some old oriental civilization, or even a modern drawing, such as the head of Christ by the Dutch painter, Jan Toorop, in his Night in the Cathedral.”
Wood Jones was always speaking out against reconstructions of any kind, which were merely intended to prejudice the viewer’s mind in favour of an evolutionary history. He said, with some scorn: (11)

In the story of the origin of the proto-human stock, and the subsequent emergence of man, there is but little legitimate room for most of the fancy portraits with which pseudoscience has been so ready to arrest uninstructed attention. We have all grown used to the picture of the slouching brute with shaggy hair and elongated arms that is lumbering into a stage of partial uprightness as it toils along the pathway of the origin of man.
One of the most recent and most sumptuous publications upon the comparative cerebral anatomy of the primates has shown this progress in graphic form that renders the ascent the more vivid, since it depicts it as taking place up the laborious slopes of a hillside. Here the slouching hairy beast toils lumbering upwards, seizing sticks and stones as weapons by the way, and passing from stark hirsute nakedness to the comparative modesty of a skin apron and ultimately to the decent obscurity of a cave.
Were it well attested that man was derived from the stock of the large brachiating anthropoid apes, especially were there any justification for the greatly laboured “gorilloid” heritage in man, these pictures might claim sanction, as do those of the ancestral horses from the findings of comparative anatomy and paleontology, but this sanction is wholly lacking.
There is no justification for the picture of the slouching, semi-erect Ape Man, though every investigator who . . . attempts an interpretation of the remains of some ancient human skeleton seeks first to determine evidences of the presence of these characters.

If one were to compare the impression created in the mind by the carved head found by Dr. Absolon and the reconstruction of Neanderthal Man which was displayed in the British Museum, there is no doubt that, of the first, one would certainly say, Here is a thoughtful, intelligent individual — perhaps even a philosopher. And one would say of the other, Here is a brutal man little influenced by culture and probably with essentially animal tastes and little power of reflection. We associate a low intelligence with unrefined features. Sometimes the association is justified, but sometimes it is not. If one compares the reconstructed face of Pithecanthropus erectus shown in

11. Jones, F. Wood, Man’s Place Among the Mammals, Arnold, London, 19 29, pp.362-365.

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Fig 16 with the photograph of a Russian delegate to the Cairo Conference which took place in 1958, the fallacy of such association becomes at once apparent. For however much we may disagree with Russian ideology, the fact remains that this delegate must have been a shrewd and highly intelligent man, since the Russians would not make the mistake of sending an idiot to represent them. It may be that this delegate did indeed have a larger brain than Pithecanthropus, with whom we are comparing his head form. But it is not at all certain that cranial capacity is related to intelligence, and therefore Pithecanthropus could have had much more intelligence than we give him credit for, in spite of the fact that his cranial capacity, according to Howells, (12) was between 950 and 1000 cc. in volume. According to Jan Lever, (13) Anatole France had a cranial capacity of only 1100 cc., as did also Gambetta and Justus von Liebig. Franz von Weidenreich questioned seriously whether anything at all could be determined with respect to intelligence on the basis of cranial capacity. (14) Franz Boas expressed the same opinion: (15)

By analogy we associate lower mental traits with brute-like features. In our naive everyday parlance, brutish features and brutality are closely connected. . . . We are also inclined to draw inferences in regard to mentality from a receding forehead, a heavy jaw, large and heavy teeth, perhaps even from inordinate length of arms, or an unusual development of hairiness. It appears that neither cultural achievement (in this case, associated weapons, etc.) nor outward appearance is a safe basis on which to judge the mental aptitude of races.

It is not surprising, therefore, to find Gaylord Simpson, (16) in a review of LeGros Clark’s History of the Primates: An Introduction to the Study of Fossil Man, remarking with manifest approval, “The book contains no restorations of prehistoric men or other fossil primates, and is not provided with a graphic phylogenetic tree.” Simpson adds, “This is a well written, modest book, for which we should be duly thankful.” After all this, it is amazing to find Sir Gavin de Beer publishing an impressive Atlas of Evolution in 1964, which is replete with “wholly speculative portraits” of fossil protohominids and men such as Proconsul, Java Man, Pekin Man, Neanderthal Man, etc. (17) As an illustration of how wildly such modern reconstructions of a

12. Howells, William, Mankind So Far, Doubleday Doran, New York, 1945, p.138.
13. Lever, Jan, Creation and Evolution, Grand Rapids International Publication, 1958, pp.158, 159.
14. Weidenreich, Franz von, “The Human Brain in the Light of Phylogenetic Development,” Scientific Monthly, Aug., 1948, p.103.
15. Boas, Franz, The Mind of Primitive Man, 2nd edition., New York, 1939, pp.16, 17.
16. Simpson, G G., in Science, vol.110, 1949, p.455.
17. Cousins, Frank W., Fossil Man: A Reappraisal of the Evidence, Evolution Protest Movement, England, 1966, p.46.

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Fig. 16. This series of four photographs (A, B, C, D) shows the stages of reconstruction of Pithecanthropus erectus. (E) The Russian delegate to the 1958 Cairo Conference.

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single specimen can differ from each other, Fig. 2 (Part I, Chapter 1) shows three alternatives for Zinjanthropus, which many anthropologists, including a number of Christian anthropologists, believe to have been one of man’s ancestors. I venture to suggest that “one of man’s ancestors” is an understatement. If there is any scientific validity whatever in these three reconstructions, Zinjanthropus must have been three of man’s ancestors. It makes one wonder if anthropologists are even taking themselves seriously, let alone expecting the intelligent public to do so.
There are other kinds of reconstructions which are equally deceiving and more so, because the deception is so subtle. The originators of such illustrations must know that they are less than honest, and yet they do not hesitate to adorn their works thus nor is any protest against such misrepresentations raised by their colleagues.
An excellent example of what I mean will be found in an authoritative work by Weidenreich entitled Apes, Giants, and Man. In Fig. 17, which is redrawn with precision from the original, two series of three skulls in section are shown, with the brains indicated by stippling. The object of this particular series is to show how the brain may be enlarged progressively in two different “species.” I have put the word “species” in quotes for a very good reason. In column 1 we have three animals who genuinely belong to one species, an Irish Wolfhound, an English Bulldog, and a King Charles Spaniel. In column 2, as a parallel series, are shown the skull of a gorilla, of Pithecanthropus, and of a modern European. The object of these two series of skull outlines with the size of the brain indicated, is simply to convince the unwary that just as a wolfhound can become a spaniel (by artificial selection, of course), so the gorilla can become man (by natural selection, of course). What has changed the facial form of the first series is the fact that the brain has been enlarged for some reason by a process of breeding. The assumption is then made that the same thing probably took place with respect to man, his enlarged brain resulting in the kind of facial form which so distinguishes him from the apes. Pictorially, the two series of skulls present a convincing parallelism. But anyone who does a little thinking about the matter will soon see that there are several major fallacies in this scheme.
To begin with, it is obvious to any lover of dogs that despite the affection and gentleness of spaniels which makes them such desirable pets, they do not have the intelligence that the wolfhound has, i.e., the intelligence of the Alsatian type of dog, the type used for police dogs and for “seeing eyes” for blind people. And if it came to survival, there is not much doubt whether

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the first animal or the last animal in Weidenreich’s series would stand the best chance. Altogether, then, even granting that these are indeed one species so that some kind of natural selective process might by a strange freak of circumstance bring about the evolution of the spaniel out of the English Bulldog out of the Irish Wolfhound, it would certainly be a freak circumstance and not the normal pattern as visualized by the evolutionists themselves. If the spaniel were turned wild, it is almost certain that after a few generations it would revert to the wolf dog type, so that Weidenreich’s canine series really demonstrates precisely the opposite of what he is trying to prove.
Turning, then, to column 2, we have an even more ridiculous situation, really, because we know that gorillas and modern men do not belong to the same species — whatever may be said of Pithecanthropus. Thus, in reality, the whole business is not merely unscientific, it is positively deceitful. It only shows how a false concept can so dominate the thinking of an otherwise highly intelligent man that even devotion to truth is weakened. In any struggle between the first specimen and the last specimen in column 1, the first specimen would undoubtedly be the victor. By contrast it is most likely that the reverse would be true in column 2. In what sense, therefore, does this contribute anything either for or against the theory of the evolution of man?
It is interesting to find in the same volume which contains this highly deceiving series of drawings, that the learned author draws attention to the way in which Thomas Huxley committed the unforgivable sin of presenting the same kind of deceptive diagram. Weidenreich reproduces the famous series of four skeletons (Fig. 15) from Huxley’s original work, in which we see an orangutan walking behind a chimpanzee, walking behind a gorilla, walking behind a man. The “message” is clear. However, Weidenreich points out that the first three figures have been “doctored,” the apes being depicted in an abnormally erect position. On the other hand, the man has been depicted with a slight stoop. As Weidenreich put it, (18) “In other words, the individual skeletal elements in Huxley’s drawing are nearly correct in their form and proportions, but the poses Huxley has given them are artificial and not characteristic.” Thus, the stooping gorilla becomes “Pithecus erectus” and the upright man becomes “Anthropus ebentus” in order to fool the public. It is rather like the pot calling the kettle black to find Weidenreich commenting thus on Huxley’s diagram.

18. On Huxley’s diagram, see F. Weidenreich, Apes, Giants, and Man, University of Chicago Press, 1948, p.6.

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Haeckel was by no means alone in this tendency to doctor drawings to suit. He was apparently accused by his colleagues of “dishonesty” in this regard, and his words of admission are rather revealing. (19)

I should feel utterly condemned and annihilated by the admission, were it not that hundreds of the best observers and biologists lie under the same charge. The great majority of all morphological, anatomical, histological, and embryological diagrams are not true to nature but are more or less doctored, schematized, and reconstructed.

Thomas Huxley mentions embryological reconstructions. In a paper entitled, “Darwin and Embryology,” Sir Gavin de Beer made this statement: (20)

Seldom has an assertion like that of Haeckel’s “theory of recapitulation,” facile, tidy, and plausible, widely accepted without critical examination, done so much harm to science.

De Beer then shows how determined an effort was made to demonstrate his theory by a number of workers in the field, especially Hyatt and Wurtenburger who, as he points out, published a beautiful series of fossil ammonites. These were arranged in sequences which seemed to prove the theory of recapitulation. De Beer then remarked: (21)

So seductive did this picture appear that some years were to go by before A. Pavlov in 1901 showed that, if ammonite shells are arranged in such a sequence, the stratigraphical order of the geological succession has to be reversed [his emphasis]. In other words, Wurtenburger’s and Hyatt’s series falsified the evidence and were utterly valueless.

A similar case is reported in much more recent times by Professor G. Gaylord Simpson: (22)

In fishes, there is a recent seriation from forms with no bone to forms with extensive bone. Comparative anatomists formerly unanimously agreed that this corresponded with a historical sequence in the stated direction, but directly historical studies (by A. S. Romer) now indicate that the real time sequence was in the other direction [emphasis mine].

In short, unanimous agreement among the experts is no guarantee whatever of truth. One wonders whether, if a Christian paleontologist had conducted the historical studies which Romer did, would he even have been able to find a publisher, let alone have convinced Gaylord Simpson of the truth of the matter? Science is far

19. Haeckel’s reply as given in Dawn, Sept., 1931, p.267.
20. de Beer, Sir Gavin, “Darwin and Embryology,” in A Century of Darwin, edited by S. A. Barnett, Heinemann, London, 1958, p.159.
21. Ibid., p.160.
22 Simpson, G. Gaylord, “Historical Biology Bearing on Human Origins,” Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology, vol.15, 1950, p.56.

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from the objective exercise it would appear to be in the eyes of the general public. Reconstructions leave so much to the imagination that they invite sensationalism and this strongly appeals to the public, helping to promote sales and thus to provide a wider exposure of a man’s ideas — always a rewarding experience.
We are still in the company of pots calling kettles black, for this particular form of public entertainment (or deception — Barnum equated them) is still as popular as ever. Speaking at the Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology in 1950, G. Gaylord Simpson made this remark: (23)

In passing, I may say that a prudent paleontologist is sometimes appalled at the extent of restoration indulged in by the anthropologists, some of whom seem quite willing to reconstruct a face from a partial cranium, or a whole skull from a piece of the lower jaw, and so on.
Of course, this temerity is inducted by the great popular interests of the subject and the fact that fragments do not impress the public.
Then, too, the worst examples are in popular publications and are not likely to mislead the professionals, but
still. . . .!

This quotation terminates precisely as Simpson terminated it. One might suppose from this that he would himself avoid at all costs the presentation of reconstructions of any kind which involved the slightest element of deceit. Yet, unfortunately, he was himself so dominated by evolutionary philosophy that he could not limit himself to the evidence but extrapolated always in such a way as to make the evidence support the view he held. In presenting experimental findings for publication in scientific journals, it is important to avoid adding to the data on the basis of pure assumption. For example, in

23. Ibid., p.57.

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Fig. 18 are shown three curves which reveal the course of the effect of a certain drug on one particular physiological function of man. For reasons which are not important in the present context, we had this information for only that part of the experimental time interval covered by the solid line. Since we knew, obviously, that the drug effect was zero at zero hour of injection, we knew that the solid line would ultimately start from the y axis at zero minutes at the point marked with an asterisk. The temptation, of course, was to join the asterisk to the beginning of the solid line with a smooth curve, thus completing the graph. But this would have been quite improper from a scientific point of view: for there is no evidence to show what the course of the effect followed by the drug was during that interval. It would have been pure assumption. Yet Simpson’s works are frequently accompanied by geological trees intended to show the relationships between animals in a series, in which the solid lines represent what is known of these relationships with reasonable certainty and then dotted lines are used to assure the viewer that ultimately all the lines stem originally from a single source, thus reinforcing the “truth” of evolution. Remember that the dotted lines are purely presumptive. Although they would possibly be correct if evolution were true, from a purely scientific point of view there is still really no justification for them since actual evidence is entirely lacking. To this extent, the unsuspecting reader is deceived.
Some authors avoid putting in the dotted lines and to this extent are being more strictly scientific — or at least appear to be. They are fulfilling the letter of the law, as it were, but not really the spirit of it. For it is not at all difficult to so curve the lines towards each other without actually joining them, in such a way that the eye itself inevitably completes the process of making a “tree” out of what is otherwise merely a group of loose twigs. The “message” is the same, and it gets across to the reader. As an illustration of what I mean by this, Fig. 19 is reproduced from an excellent study of the subject by Frank Cousins (24) whose diagram was taken from de Beer’s work. The absence of actual connecting links tends to be entirely overlooked.
The extent to which this kind of pastime can be carried is rather well shown in Fig. 20 taken from a paper by Kermack and Mussett entitled “The First Mammals.” (25) The most casual study of this “suggested family tree of the vertebrate animals” will show that it doesn’t remotely resemble a genealogical tree. Not one twig is joined

24. Cousins, Frank W., ref.17, p.21.
25. Kermack, K. A. and Frances Mussett, “The First Mammals”, Discovery, April, 1959, p.145.

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Fig. 19. Animal Phylogeny, after Sir Gavin de Beer.

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to another. There are more disconnections than connections and the dotted lines which provide the only justification for titling the diagram as a tree are, of course, completely hypothetical. Yet the public becomes so accustomed to this kind of propaganda that it is no longer recognized for what it really is, but is taken as factual evidence for evolution. (26)
One cannot help but recall the statement made by W. D. Wallis in a paper entitled (27) “Presuppositions in Anthropological Interpretations,” in which he pointed out that at least two generalizations are usually implied, though never stated. The first is that more data may be inferred from older remains than would be considered sound to infer from contemporary remains. There is much less danger of being found out if one is wrong. And the second is that in dealing with prehistoric man, inferences may be made on material much less abundant than would be necessary if contemporary man were being discussed. To use his words, “The further we proceed into the gloom of the prehistoric, the clearer our vision. Hence things which could not possibly be inferred if the data were contemporary man, can, thanks to this illumination in the gathering dusk of remote ages, be inferred with confidence.”

26. It is most encouraging to note that the Geological Society of London has recently published a symposium entitled, “The Fossil Record” (Burlington House, London, 1967, xii and 828 pp.), which contains papers by 126 authorities, occupying a total of some 800 pages, with innumerable charts and graphs. The encouraging thing is that approximately 90% of these elaborate charts and graphs indicate only the overlap in time of the various animal forms which have characterized the successive geological ages, and do not connect them by hypothetical lines, such as are common to almost all other textbooks. This notable volume demonstrates clearly that such information can be displayed usefully without making evolutionary assumptions. This I would consider to be objective reporting of the data at its best.
27. Wallis, Wilson, “Presupposition in Anthropological Interpretations,” American Anthropology, vol.50, July-Sept., 1948, p.560.

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Fig. 20. Family tree of the vertebrates.
On the left is a geological time scale. Note how the dotted lines are “bent” to conform to the theory.

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Conclusion

This Paper has been entirely negative and it would be a pity to close it without saying something on the positive side. For there is, no doubt, much to be said in favour of attempting such reconstructions if the object is genuinely to inform rather than indoctrinate or deceive.
It has often been observed, and Wood Jones was one of those who wrote about the matter at some length, that a change took place in the method of research, and in the central theme and prime concern of the life sciences once Darwin’s work had established the evolutionary approach to nature. Previously, great interest had been attached to the study of the relationship between form and function. After Darwin, this interest declined rapidly and the consuming interest became the question of structure.
The great object was now to establish relationships between different species of animals rather than relationships between form and function within the animal. Since the governing principle here was structural similarity, the assumption being that animals which looked alike were related and that the more nearly they looked alike the more closely related they were, nothing else mattered much except to underscore these homologies. Series of homologous structures were sought with great eagerness and set forth pictorially in just the right way to strengthen the impression that each was merely a modification of the other and that all had a common genetic relationship. The argument that the Great Designer had employed a basic principle of operation, modifying it only as needs required, was forgotten entirely. For the same reason the question of function had been forgotten or overlooked. It was no longer a matter of interest.
Wood Jones pointed out that the older paleontologists scored their great triumphs of reconstruction because they understood so well the relationships which exist between any particular bone and the special purpose which it serves in the whole animal; and they understood also that not infrequently a specialized bone structure serving a specialized purpose usually meant a special kind of animal. Thus they saw living forms as beautifully effective integrated systems, and they were often able on the basis of a single bone to reconstruct the whole animal. Again and again their reconstructions were subsequently validated to an extraordinary degree when further remains were brought to light.

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One of the most notable of the older naturalists was Georges Cuvier who enunciated his famous Law of Correlation which stated that if an animal develops one organ in an unmistakable manner, one can infer from it the development of its other organs. (28) Animals with horns and hoofs, for example, invariably possess teeth adapted to vegetarianism. Animals with claws and ankle bones are necessarily equipped with carnivorous teeth. Reptiles with a closed system of teeth are vegetarian, while those with interlocking systems feed on other animals.
According to Cuvier, this correlation applied in the smallest detail and it must even be theoretically possible, he claimed, to reconstruct the entire body of an animal of which only a single organ is known. Wendt said, “Cuvier really was able to reconstruct the complete specimen from a single bone, from the fragment of a jaw (for example).” (29) This ability was demonstrated to his students by Cuvier on a number of occasions when the students were invited to bring him a single bone from some animal of which they had the remainder, and he would then take and reconstruct it, after the Sherlock Holmes manner, into the complete animal.
Towards the end of his book, Wendt records how some of Cuvier’s successors showed an extraordinarily “subtle detective sense” which enabled them to interpret apparently barely decipherable fragments. Weinert and Klaatsch appeared to have acquired the ability of looking at fossils through a kind of mental “X-ray apparatus.” (30) It was this ability which made it possible for these masters of the art of reconstruction to describe an animal such as Phascolomys, which was living at the time though quite unknown to science, from some sub-fossil bones. (31)
Whereas, today, the majority of reconstructions which mar the work of anthropologists are built up essentially on the basis of an evolutionary philosophy, the older naturalists were not dominated by this philosophy but were guided by a clear understanding of the relationship between form and function. In so far as our museums are now furnished with reconstructions based upon this solid foundation, they are serving the cause of Truth. In so far as they are furnished by reconstructions which are inspired primarily by evolutionary philosophy, they become centres of propaganda unworthy of the name of Science.

28. Cuvier, Georges: see Herbert Wendt, I Looked for Adam, Weidenfeld, Nicolson, London, 1955, p.152.
29. Wendt, Herbert, ref.28, p.162.
30. Ibid., p.421.
31. Jones, F. Wood, Trends of Life, Arnold, London, 1953, p.87.

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Imagination is a wonderful thing — but man’s imagination can, as Scripture says, quickly become “vain.” This is particularly so when he deliberately rejects what God has seen fit to reveal about his origin and nature — each of which bears on the other. “Convincing” as such constructs of the imagination may be, one should not put one’s trust in them where man’s supposed ancestors are concerned. They may be entertaining, but they are seldom scientific, and often they are most misleading.

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Copyright © 1988 Evelyn White. All rights reserved

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