The religions of the world (including Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Taoism, Jainism, Confucianism, Shintoism, Scientology and many others) have many very diverse forms, and only some of them require or are centered around a belief in a deity or deities. You can read my posts here and here and here for a discussion of the many similarities between today's professors of biology and the clergy, and the many similarities between the social structures of university science departments and organized religions. There are many reasons for suspecting that Darwinist materialism is a kind of stealth religion, a kind of religion-in-all-but-name. The sacred legends of Darwinism (mainly the legend that Darwin explained the wonders of biology) are passed on by biology professors performing a dogma indoctrination role similar to the dogma indoctrination role of priests, nuns and ministers.
This type of Darwinist indoctrination in a dogmatic creed is massively successful, largely because the indoctrination is sold as "science education" rather than ideology evangelization.
Certain physically impressive buildings such as natural history museums seem like cathedrals of Darwinism. One of the shameful practices long going on at natural history museums has been to display misleading fossil exhibits that are largely or entirely fake. An article tells us about some of the fakery going on in natural history museums:
" 'Back in the day — and when I say that, I mean as far back as the 1800s — museums originally used plaster of paris,' Storrs says. 'It was about 40 years ago that resins came into wider use.' For smaller bones and casts for exhibits within the museum — plants or fish, for example — museum staff use urethane foams to cast and sculpt the replicas themselves, says Dave Might, exhibits coordinator/artist at the Cincinnati Museum Center...Alternatively, some entire skeletons can be purchased 'off-the-shelf' from RCI. 'For example, take Tyrannosaurus rexes,' Fair says. 'There are only about 29 or so skeletons in the world, and that’s not nearly enough for all of the museums and theme parks that want one. So we produce 100% composite T. rexes.' ”
Here the "100% composite" means "100% fake." We read in the same article about "a fiberglass/polyester Allosaurus on display at the American Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C." That's a fake. On a page of the American Museum of Natural History we read "Eighty-five percent of specimens are actual fossils, as opposed to casts or reproductions." That means at least 15% of the fossils displayed are fake. We can reasonably suspect that much more than 15% of the fossils can be called fake or semi-fake. The semi-fake fossils would be those consisting of mixtures of bones and artificial material such as plaster of Paris, fiberglass, resin or a mixture of baking soda and superglue. A page of the American Museum of Natural History tells us its displayed T. Rex fossil "is about 45 percent real fossils." The page makes this confession hard to discover. To get to this confession, you have to click on all of the little + icons next to a picture of the T. Rex. I would imagine that 99% of the visitors to the museum never learn that most of its T. Rex exhibit is fake.
It is very rare for scientists to discover a complete fossil skeleton or skull. What they most often find are fragments. Then, very frequently, bone fragments are mixed with artificial filler material that might be made by mixing superglue and baking soda. The results are passed off as a single fossil, although this can be extremely misleading. We don't know whether an organism ever actually had bone material corresponding to the filler material. And very often we also don't know whether the fragments came from a single organism, or were fragments from multiple organisms living in different times, possibly organisms from different species. We often don't know whether the resulting fossil display corresponds to the skeleton or skull of some organism that ever lived. This kind of funny business is a very big deal whenever the concocted "composite" displays are used to try to back up claims of evolutionary progressions that have never been well-established. Fakes and partial fakes should not be part of the evidence cited or displayed to back up such claims.
A long recent article at www.undark.org ("Fossils Are Shaped by People. Does That Matter?" by Asher Elbein) is a great piece of "pull back the Wizard's curtain" journalism, a shocking expose of the shenanigans going on with the fossil exhibits of natural history museums. The subtitle tells us "Preparing a fossil is often more of an art than a science." We read about some of the fraud and fakery that is going on, although the language is generously chosen so that such words are not directly used. We read this about what started to go on in the late nineteenth century:
"The culture of scientific achievement soon merged with one of showmanship and display — goals that coexisted uneasily. The solution, Rieppel said, was to mount genuine bones liberally (but increasingly quietly) reconstructed with plaster, creating 'awe inspiring, eye-catching sculptures that pretended not to be sculptures at all.' "
That makes it sounds like plaster was secretly being used, to fool people into thinking full fossils from a single organism had been discovered. Later we read about all the guesswork and gluing that is going on when someone called a "fossil preparator" gets some bones-in-a-rock or box of bones, and hopes to produce a compelling fossil exhibit:
"Fossils sometimes arrive in a broken or jumbled state, often with hidden facets waiting to be discovered. Uncovering them requires painstakingly isolating fossil from stone, using fine tools such as dental picks and pneumatic chisels, and alternating applications of solvent and adhesives. At every step, preparators must make choices. Some are basic: How much rock should be removed? Others are trickier: If the preparator decides one piece of bone belongs with another, do they attach it, and if so, with what glue? Should incomplete bones be rebuilt with a best guess?"
We are told that most of these fossil exhibit preparators are not scientists, and that a "wide range of people do this work, including volunteers, professional freelancers, institutional employees, and commercial contractors." No doubt, a large fraction of the fossil exhibits involve wild guesses by people who are not scientists, but were mainly hoping to make a compelling exhibit. Did such people usually follow a rule of "do not glue bones together unless you think they probably came from the same species, or the same organism?" Very probably not. We are told, "By the early 20th century, for example, preparators — often under the direction of a principal investigator — physically manipulated bone surfaces and added speculative plaster to fill out the suspected shapes of incomplete limbs and skulls, which influenced interpretations of dinosaurs like Dilophosaurus."
We are told, "Very occasionally, independent commercial preparators have intentionally created fake or exaggerated remains to sell." Actually, the faking of fossils seems to be a kind of cottage industry in certain foreign lands, so that "very occasionally" might reasonably be replaced with "quite often." A Scientific American article in entitled "How Fake Fossils Pervert Paleontology." The subtitle is "A nebulous trade in forged and illegal fossils is an ever-growing headache for paleontologists." We hear about poor people in distant lands who first heard that you can get lots of cash by finding a good fossil, and who then started to make fake fossils in hopes of getting lots of money
We can imagine here what typically goes on. Bone fragments may be dug up from various spots at a location, perhaps with some fragments gathered from 30 meters or 50 meters away from others. The fragments are then boxed up and sent to a fossil preparator, along with a drawing of the desired output. The problem is that the fragments may be from different organisms, so the end result fossil exhibit may profoundly mislead us, creating a skeleton or skull unlike any that ever existed. The famous "Lucy" image (of bones arranged as if they belonged to one organism) is one of paleontology's most famous images. There is a large chance the bones consist of bones from multiple species, for reasons discussed here.
We read this about fossil exhibits:
"Many of these are prepared by commercial contractors like Triebold Paleontology. They’re often casts that contain no real bone. They represent a specific interpretation of incomplete fossils, available for a price: Triebold has provided reconstructed casts of Appalachiosaurus montgomeriensis— an east-coast relative of Tyrannosaurus rex — to two separate southeastern museums, with arms of varying sizes based on different scientists’ interpretation of the original limited material."
It seems natural history museums are paying huge sums for these shady exhibits, and turning a blind eye to all the fakery and guesswork. We read this:
"Such prices are largely based on the notion that the lucky winner is receiving a mostly real skeleton, Brown noted, and although that’s sometimes true, other times they’re really receiving something akin to a reproduction of the Mona Lisa with a few scraps of the original painting stitched in. A person might think they’re buying a dinosaur for millions, he said, 'but mostly what you bought is plastic.' ”
We are told that these fossil preparators that make the fossil exhibits for museums "tend to have broader backgrounds, with no standard license, training, or methods." So why are we putting their gluing plaster-in-the-gaps guesswork inside buildings called science museums?
US taxpayer funds are still being used to support the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, one guilty of displaying fossil exhibits produced by the unreliable practices describes above. The David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins in that museum is filled with speculative artistic representations of previous species, containing heads and shoulders looking like wax museum creations. A kind of "glorious path to whiteness" is depicted. We do not know that any of the organisms displayed by such artwork actually looked how they are depicted. These artworks were created by artist John Gurche, who is not a scientist. A web page on the site of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History has a page calling these "Reconstructions of Early Humans." The art works depict organisms that are mostly not humans. The hallmark characteristic of humans is the use of speech and the use of symbols. The word "human" should never be used to describe some species that has never been shown to have used speech or symbols. The use of "human" or "early human" to refer to species that probably did not use speech or symbols (and were therefore not actually human) is one of the most misleading tactics of Darwinist propaganda. Web pages of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History contain other examples of the most misleading claims of Darwinist propaganda, but I will have to leave a discussion of that for a separate post.
I don't know why US taxpayer dollars are being used to support a museum such as the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, involved in or relying on the kind of shady practices described above, and involved in ideological propaganda sounding like attempts to indoctrinate us in what is arguably a religion-in-all-but-name (Darwinist materialism), contrary to the First Amendment saying there shall be no establishment of a state religion. It would be a good idea to reorganize the museum building, along lines such as these:
- Rename the museum as a Museum of Biology or a Museum of Science.
- Remove all the fossil exhibits that are fake or partially fake, or that were produced using guesswork, gluing and plaster, leaving only fossil exhibits consisting 100% of authentic bones found in the same very small area such as five meters wide, very likely to be from a single organism, or single-piece rocks capturing the shape of some organism that died when the rock formed. Whenever there is any doubt about whether the bones all came from a single organism, have a sign clearly alerting visitors that the displayed skeleton is a speculative exhibit that may consist of fragments glued together from different organism of a single species, or perhaps fragments from different species.
- Use some of the freed-up space in the museum to show exhibits far more important than exhibits about extinct species, such as exhibits educating people about the enormous complexities of the human body, exhibits about climate change and other important facts of biology and science.
- Get rid of the speculation and guesswork and ideological propaganda, and concentrate on exhibits telling us about undisputed facts.
I can imagine a great exhibit for such a museum. Suspended from the ceiling, there would be a huge translucent glass or plastic object about 25 meters wide that was a realistic model of a cell like that in the human body. Looking inside the object you would be able to see countless thousands of little parts, each of which would represent one of the organelles of the cell. There might be some deal where visitors could press any of a series of buttons. So by pressing a "ribosome" button you could cause all of the many thousands of parts of the display representing ribosomes to light up (along with an explanation of how each of the tiny ribosomes is a kind of protein factory); and by pressing a "mitochondria" button you could see all of the thousands of parts of the display representing mitochondria to light up (along with an explanation of how each of these is like a little power factory). By visiting such a display, visitors might understand how misleading are 99% of cell diagrams ever published, diagrams that make cells look thousands of times simpler than they are.
But I don't think we will ever see an exhibit like that in one of the museums of the Smithsonian Institute. Such an exhibit would too clearly help to show the enormous organization and functional complexity of the human body, something that Darwinism enthusiasts like to hide by reductionist speech. The reason is that the credibility of any claim of an unguided origins of humans is inversely proportional to the discovered amount of hierarchical organization and component interdependence and information-rich functional complexity of the human body and the discovered richness of observed capabilities of the human mind, with the first decreasing as the second increases.
During the Middle Ages for centuries there was a great enthusiasm for collecting the bones and teeth of saints, or anything that could be called that. For centuries people would dig up bones or teeth (often just little bits of bone), and claim that they had magnificent healing powers on the grounds that they belonged to a canonized Catholic saint. Such relics would be displayed in churches, and people would make pilgrimages to see them. There was no doubt a great deal of faking or wishful thinking going on. Probably bones that were not the bones of saints were labeled in churches as the bones of a saint, and probably in many cases bones from different people were joined together to make a "saint skeleton." There was a huge financial motivation for such shenanigans. When people made pilgrimages to some church or monastery or cathedral, they would end up donating to the institution, so any such institution with a claimed "saint skeleton" or "saint skull" or "saint teeth" or "saint bone" might end up with a financial bonanza. Plus all the claims of miracle cures from the saint bones helped to spread the underlying religion (Roman Catholicism). On pages 743 - 744 of Will Durant's The Age of Faith we read some of the details:
"With so many saints there had to be many relics- their bones, hair, clothing, and any thing that they had used...All relics were credited with supernatural powers, and a hundred thousand tales were told of their miracles. Men and women eagerly sought even the slightest relic, or relic of a relic, to wear as a magic talisman—a thread from a saint’s robe, some dust from a reliquary, a drop of oil from a sanctuary lamp in the shrine. Monasteries vied and disputed with one another in gathering relics and exhibiting them to generous worshipers, for the possession of famous relics made the fortune of an abbey or a church...So profitable a business enlisted many practitioners; thousands of spurious relics were sold to churches and individuals; and monasteries were tempted to 'discover' new relics when in need of funds."
The medieval shenanigans involving the bones of saints remind me of the shenanigans that lead to fossil exhibits at natural history museums. In both cases there was "funny business" involving bones, done for financial profit and also to help spread a dogma-laden ideology. The main difference is that the medieval enthusiasm for saint bone collecting actually seemed to do some good, because endless people reported miracle cures after touching or seeing one of the supposed saint bones or saint skulls or saint teeth (possibly largely because of a placebo effect). But the modern day "funny business" involving fossil exhibits does not do any good to ordinary people. It merely helps fool them into believing a denialist ideology under which they are dehumanized and senselessly depicted as accidents or animals, with much of the evidence that humans are so much more than animals being branded as taboo and off-limits, and with the witnesses or analysts of such evidence being shamed, gaslighted and stigmatized.
Postscript: A recent news story about the alleged prehuman species Homo naledi is entitled "Extraordinary Claims About Small-Brained Human Ancestor Overhyped, Say Experts." It's a story insinuating paleontologist pareidolia, where scientists with vivid imaginations seem to see what they want to see. A visual gives us an example of one of the dubious main tactics of paleontologists: arranging bones into a skeleton shape, giving us the impression they all came from the same organism (although we have no way of knowing that they came from either the same organism or the same species). Contrary to the headline, we do not know that Homo naledi is an ancestor of humans.
The word you must always remember when pondering fossil exhibits is the rarely used word "provenance," a word art collectors use to mean "a record of ownership of a work of art or an antique, used as a guide to authenticity or quality." A proper paleontological provenance of a fossil exhibit would include things such as:
(1) An exact account of how and when and where the bones were gathered, and over what area of space they were gathered, and who gathered them.
(2) An exact account of how the fossil exhibit was prepared, how much gluing or plaster work was done, who made the exhibit, what qualifications they had, and how much guesswork they were doing.
A fossil exhibit is pretty worthless as evidence without proper provenance documentation. But rarely do we get such provenance documentation.
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