Visual Fakery Is a Pillar of Darwinist Propaganda

 Misleading and deceptive imagery has long been a staple of Darwinist propaganda. In my Google science news feed on the day that I am writing this post auto-scheduled for later publication, I see a prominent example. We have a story in the Google science news feed, with a headline of "Ancient fossil discovery in Ethiopia rewrites human origins." When we click on the story, we get a press release that looks like this at the top:

Wow, looks like an impressive fossil find, does it not? But what is going on here is fakery. No one discovered any such fossil as the fossil shown. When we scroll down, we read in the fine print that all that was discovered were some teeth. 

So where did the image come from? Not one in five readers will realize the answer to that question.  The image came from a site called Shutterstock, which is a commercial site that sells stock images. The images at Shutterstock are a combination of real photos and artwork. Using the reverse image search at www.tineye.com, I was able to find how the image originated. As you can see using the link here, it is an image uploaded to Shutterstock in 2010 by Derek R. Audette. Derek is an artist, and he has uploaded 600+ images to the the stock image site Shutterstock. The images seem to be his own artistic creations. The Shutterstock site lists Derek as a ""Photographer, Illustrator / Vector Artist." Using 3D modeling programs like the one depicted below, a vector artist can create realistic-looking images of things that never actually existed.

Derek committed no fakery or fraud by uploading his artistic depiction of a fossil in 2010, having no idea how it would be used. But it seems someone at ScienceDaily.com is guilty of visual deceit by adorning this press release with an image that looks like an actual fossil but is not an actual fossil, being purely an artistic creation. 

Scrolling down further in the Science Daily press release, we get the truth. Nothing like a fossil skull was discovered. All that was discovered were some teeth. A look at the visuals in the corresponding scientific paper show the meager results, nothing better than what is shown below:

The paper's attempts to suggest that such teeth shed any light on human evolution is laughable. A few teeth don't tell us anything about human origins.  You cannot reliably identify some pre-human species from remains that are mere teeth. And for reasons I will discuss later in this post, the paper's attempts to date the teeth are not even reliable.

We have various degrees of misleading language and/or misrepresentation occurring here:

(1) A scientific paper has in its abstract referred to a discovery of "fossils" rather than stating that all that were discovered were teeth, as if it was trying to create the impression something much larger than mere teeth was discovered. 

(2) An Arizona State University press release has an extremely misleading title "ASU scientists uncover new fossils — and a new species of ancient human ancestor." All that is mentioned is the discovery of a few teeth, something that certainly does not entitle anyone to claim the discovery of "a new species of ancient human ancestor."  And it is misleading to be referring to mere teeth as "fossils" rather than using the term "teeth." An honest title for the press release would have been "ASU scientists uncover some old teeth, and speculate they are from a new species of ancient human ancestor."

(3) A Science Daily press release has repeated word-for-word the Arizona State University press release, but has gone further down the path of deceit by including a single image with the press release, an image that is an old artistic depiction from 2010, an image looking like a real skull, one that will give 90% of the casual readers of the press release the false idea that a full skull was discovered. This is visual fakery. All that was discovered were a few teeth. No one ever discovered a skull like the skull that is depicted in the Science Daily press release image. 

Fake images of fossils are easy to create using 3D modeling software. First you create or upload what is called a wireframe model, which consists of a connected set of points in three-dimensional space, each with its own X, Y and Z coordinate. The interface of the software may allow you to drag and drop particular three-dimensional points that are part of the model. You can then apply what are called textures to particular surfaces on the model, which gives them a color or look. You can then choose to perform what is called rendering, to produce a realistic looking image like the one shown below. Creating an image of a fossil that never existed is even easier than creating an image of a type of car that never existed. 

Nowadays it is even easier to create fake images of fossils, by using AI image generators such as the ImageFX product of Google. Just type in a text prompt such as "fossil of pre-human skull" and you will get output in seconds. 

At the page here we have another example of a "science news" story using visual fakery. We have a story about some fossil find, and the story has an impressive-looking visual that shows something that looks maybe like something halfway between a man and an ape. It looks like a photograph of a complete skull. But the image does not correspond to anything ever discovered. A reverse image search shows that the image is another example of photorealistic artwork uploaded to Shutterstock, some artwork created by user Busker909. The user's profile picture is a picture of a cat. It seems that nowadays stories about human evolution are often using not actual photos of fossils ever discovered, but mere photorealistic artwork got from the Shutterstock site, or maybe artwork created by AI image generators. 

At the page here, we have another example of a "science news" story using visual fakery. It is a story that includes a large image identified as "the most complete skull of an Homo heidelbergensis ever found."  There is a watermark in the image identifying the source as WH_Pics. A reverse image search shows that the image is the one here, an image from the Shutterstock site. The image was uploaded by the anonymous source WH_Pics.  This anonymous source gave the image a tag claiming that it is "the most complete skull of an Homo heidelbergensis ever found."  But since this anonymous source has no credibility, we should very much doubt that the image is a photograph of any such thing. In all likelihood it a photorealistic piece of artwork, which has been give a tag designed to increase royalties from its use.  A Smithsonian Institute page on fossils of Homo heidelbergensis shows no fossil matching this Shutterstock image. 

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. 

Then there is the practice of creating misleading "replicas" of fossils, recreations that are not exactly the same as the original. The claimed "replica" may have features that are exaggerated to help sell some evolutionary story. I will give an example. At left of the photo pair below we see a photo of what is called the Kabwe 1 fossil, also called the Broken Hill fossil, because it was found at a Broken Hill mine in Northern Rhodesia. It is one of the earliest photos of the fossil, from the front page of the November 19, 1921 edition of the London Illustrated News, an edition you can read here.  At right of the photo pair below is a visual that is found at the wikipedia.org article on this fossil. It is a claimed "replica" of the fossil shown at left, a "replica" found at a German natural history museum. But as you can see, it is not a very close match. Certain features have been exaggerated, such as the eyebrow ridges, which look much bigger in the claimed "replica." And also the forehead in the claimed "replica" looks much more sloped than in the original fossil. 

This is fakery. Creating something you call a "replica" which looks very different from the original is deception.

In the Reuters story here, we have a photo of a professor holding something that is identified in the caption as the Broken Hill skull. But what we see looks to me more like the distorted "replica" seen above at right, not like what we see in the original 1921 photo at left, marked "original fossil" in the photo above. The same Reuters story tells us that although scientists long asserted the skull was 500,000 years old, scientists have changed their estimate to be about 300,000 years old, and that "this indicates the species represented by the skull was unlikely to have been a direct ancestor of Homo sapiens as some had thought."

Visual fakery occurs not just in natural history museums, but abundantly in the books, web pages and magazines advancing Darwinist propaganda. This can occur in hundreds of different ways. An example involves the famous so-called skeleton of Lucy. Bone fragments were gathered up over a rather large area not specified in the scientific paper reporting the find. The bone fragments of the so-called Lucy skeleton have been arranged as if they were part of a single skeleton. But the fragments were not found in an area the size of a single skeleton. The paper fails to specify how large the gathering area was. A Google AI search says that one source says the gathering area was about 160 square feet, but that claim is not made in the paper, and I would imagine it is a severe underestimation of the gathering area. We do not know whether the fragments were all found at the same depth. A book describing the find says the fragments were the gathering of three weeks by a team of people (pages 17-18), which implies that they were scattered across a rather wide area, at different depths. 

Below is the image from the paper:

The image above in the scientific paper is a very misleading one, because the fragments were not gathered from any positions corresponding to the positions shown in the visual. The only honest and scientific way to visually present information on these fragments is to have a photo of a gathering area, and to have indications of which fragments were found in which parts of such an area, and at what depths the fragments were found. It is deceptive to gather up fragments found over an area of 160 square feet or larger, at different soil depths, and to place such fragments in a flat area of only 3 square feet, suggesting they were all found closely together. We do not know whether the fragments shown above all belonged to the same individual. They may be fragments from different individuals and different species. 

In reference to the press release discussed at the top of this post, I may note that the Arizona State University press release describes a chain of reasoning that is extremely dubious. We read this:

"How do scientists know these fossil teeth are millions of years old?

Volcanoes.

The Afar region is still an active rifting environment. There were a lot of volcanoes and tectonic activity, and when these volcanoes erupted ash, the ash contained crystals called feldspars that allow the scientists to date them, explained Christopher Campisano, a geologist at ASU. 

'We can date the eruptions that were happening on the landscape when they're deposited,'  said Campisano, a research scientist at the Institute of Human Origins and associate professor at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change.

“And we know that these fossils are interbed between those eruptions, so we can date units above and below the fossils. We are dating the volcanic ash of the eruptions that were happening while they were on the landscape."

The chain of reasoning here is extremely dubious. No reliable method is discussed. Trying to estimate when volcanic ash was deposited is guesswork. The technique described is an example of what is called biostratigraphy, which is much less reliable as a dating method than radiometric dating. "The volcanoes told us" is not a very reliable sounding answer to the question "How do you know how old these teeth are."  And if you were to reliably date some old teeth, that would not allow you to infer that you had discovered some new species. 

It is interesting that Darwinism is based on an idea that undermines the credibility of most attempts to infer the ancestry of species from fossils. Darwinism is based on the idea that there occur dramatic random variations in some member of a species, in some members of the population of a species. So, for example, under Darwinist accounts member # 233,023 of a population of 500,000 members of a species might be born looking much different from the average member of that species. But let us imagine you find something like a tooth that looks a little different from known teeth, or a skull forehead that looks a little different from the foreheads of known species. Under the Darwinist assumption that there can occur dramatic random variations in some members of the population of a species, it seems that you would  never be entitled to assume that some oddball fossil was evidence of a transitional species.  Instead, under Darwinist assumptions such a fossil might be merely evidence of a dramatic random variation in some member of the population of a species.  

You can't have it both ways. Either:

(1) The members of a species all look almost exactly the same, as if they all arose following some blueprint for that species, or 

(2) There can be born in some species oddball members looking much different from the average appearance of members of such species. 

Idea (2) is useful for the person trying to explain the idea of so-called natural selection. But if idea (2) is true, then a fossil that looks like a fossil of Species X but significantly different can never be cited as evidence of a transition from Species X to some other species. For under Idea (2) a simpler explanation would simply be a random variation of a member of Species X, an oddball outlier in Species X.  So, for example, if you had a fossil with a sloping forehead halfway between the slope of an ape's forehead and the slope of a man's forehead, that would be best explained as an oddball outlier in the population of an ape or an oddball outlier in the population of humans, not as some transitional species between an ape and a human species. 

A neglected issue is the issue of pressure distortions of fossils. Fossils are often found at deep depths where the bones may have been subjected to great physical pressure over many thousands of years. We have no idea of what distortions in bones such physical pressure may produce over a span of many thousands of years. But such a factor is typically ignored, and an assumption is typically made that some species existed with a skull matching the appearance of the found fragments. Something looking like a fragment of a sloped forehead may be a clue that  some species with a sloped forehead existed. Or maybe that species had no such sloped forehead, and the slope appearance in the bone came from the thousands of years of pressure distortion. 

The photo below (from the scientific paper here) shows an example of the type of highly speculative business that paleontologists often engage in. We see some image that looks like a skull. The authors have done a "reconstruction" which is mostly speculative. Particular bone fragments have been fitted to a rather arbitrarily chosen skull shape (plastic or computer-generated), to try and suggest they are fragments of a skull with the shown shape.  But we can have little confidence that such fragments ever belonged to a skull with such a shape. The fragments could be from  different skeletons of different species. We have no idea whether the bone fragments belonged to any species with a forehead like the forehead shown or eyes like the eyes shown. 

I can state some principles you should follow when analyzing claims about fossils:

• Treat with suspicion all objects described as "replicas" of some other fossil, as such objects may not match the original, and may be distorted to help serve some narrative end or ideological purpose. 
• Treat with great suspicion all objects or visuals described as "reconstructions," as such objects or visuals may be mostly speculative guesswork, such as the "reconstruction" in the photo directly above. 
• Recognize that most "looking like a fossil" objects identified as coming from stock photo sources such as Shutterstock are probably 3D vector artwork not actually matching any fossil ever found.
• Disregard any "looking like a fossil" image that fails to list a source and fails to correspond to a reputable-sounding account of how such a fossil was found. 
• Do not trust the authenticity of an object merely because some natural history museum is listed as it source, given how much fakery and misleading "reconstruction" work (involving plaster, fiberglass, putty and superglue) has been going on at such museums. 
• If a reputable-sounding account of how such a fossil seems to be found, do not yet trust the account unless it is or can be traced back to an original and credible account given by the fossil discoverer, explaining exactly how the fossil was found. 
• Treat with great suspicion all accounts in which fragments are gathered up from an area larger than the claimed original organism, with your suspicion being proportional to the size of the gathering area (because in such cases we do not know the fragments are all from the same individual or even the same species). 
• Do not assume that some claimed skull corresponds to a typical skull shape of some species that existed long ago, because the skull could have been greatly distorted by thousands of years of geological pressure, and because the individual might have been one of those random variations that Darwinists so often appeal to, rather than a typical member of his own species. 
• Treat with great suspicion most estimates of the age of some fossil, as such estimates are often guesswork as unreliable as the volcano reasoning discussed above, and estimates that may be overthrown by later analysis (as in the case of Broken Hill fossil discussed above, where the dating changed from 500,000 years old to about 300,000 years old). 
• Realize that very many of the objects displayed in natural history museums are purely artificial constructions made by someone guessing about what a fossil of some imagined species would have looked like. 
• Recognize that advances in photorealistic 3D modeling and artificial intelligence image generation tools (such as Photoshop and ImageFX) make it particularly easy these days to create fake images of fossils, and that many press releases and "science news" articles are using such fake images (often bought from stock image houses such as Shutterstock). 
• Recognize that the faking of fossils is a lucrative "cottage industry" in some parts of the world, which casts doubt on the credibility of accounts of fossil finds in distant lands given by persons of unknown trustworthiness. 
• Realize that paleontologists are typically not objective unbiased scientists, but are members of a belief community passionately devoted to pushing particular narratives about the origin of species, rather like some person who analyzes crime scene bones while having an intense interest in proving some particular narrative, such as a claim of murder. 
• Realize also that paleontologists are often motivated by career advancement interests and desire for fame and self-glorification, factors that can severely affect their objectivity when analyzing hard-to-interpret and hard-to-age bone fragments, leading them to favor the most interesting-sounding claims and speculations about such bone fragments rather than the most well-justified claims.