After years of immersion in Charles Darwin's 14,000 letters at the Cambridge Library, Janet Browne--an editor of the Darwin correspondence project--has published the second half of her sprawling, magnificent biography. Integrating the best of current scholarship with her own discoveries, Browne's account is state of the art. That said, as Stephen Jay Gould once opined, "

too many Darwins dwelled within this enormously complex man"

This article was originally published with the title Putting Darwin in His Place.

1 Comments

1. 1. gnagy 04:36 PM 5/7/12

   Sorry to wake you up but consider this info below:
   
   Never underestimate the power of human imagination run wild. They can even make monkeys out of us.
   
   On December 9, 2010 in The New York Times science writer Nicolas Wade wrote: "Anthropologists have been thrown into turmoil about the nature and future of their profession after a decision by the American Anthropological Association at its recent annual meeting to strip the word “science” from a statement of its long-range plan.?
   
   A NY Times (March 12, 1961) article, “There Are Neanderthals Among Us” that discussed fossil skeletons found in La Chapelle in Europe that turned out to be those of contemporaries who were bent over from bone disease.
   
   In pro-evolutionist Bill Bryson’s best seller, “A Short History of Nearly Everything” he writes about “The American Museum of Natural History Hall of Human Biology and Evolution in New York that has an absorbing diorama that depicts life-sized creations of a male and female walking side by side across the ancient African plain. The tableau is presented with such conviction that it is easy to overlook the consideration that virtually everything above the footprints is imaginary.”
   
   He asked the curator of the museum and paleoanthropologist, Ian Tattersall, if “he was troubled about the amount of artistic license that was taken in reconstructing the figures,? Tattersall replied, “It’s always a problem in making recreations. You wouldn’t believe how much discussion can go into deciding details like whether Neanderthals had eyebrows or not…We simply can”t know the details of what they looked like… If I had to do it again, I think I might have made them slightly more apelike and less human.?
   
   In 2004 National Geographic tested four paleoartists by giving them the same fossil bones at different times without telling them other paleoartist would be creating drawings from the fossils. The results were that not one of the drawings looked like the others and none of them had any body hair on them!
   
   This whole field has proven again and again that many of these researchers have lied and continue to lie. The most brazen and unfounded theories are proclaimed only to find the research was faked or non-existent.
   
   This is chicanery not science.
   This is imagination run wild not science.
   This is absolute fraud.
   
   Talk about honesty in the "sciences."
   

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