I thought you had backed off on that, claiming you were just joking...

BTW, the bones weren't destroyed, just damaged.

Speak of the credulous and they appear...

And who might the anonymous conspiracy nut be?

Orrin, since you insist on this conspiracy idea, perhaps you could answer these questions this time around:

What do you think the fossils were supposed to prove, if they were indeed a fraud?

Is there any evidence or indication that the fossils were faked?

Faked - probably not. Altered - yes.

creeper:

You're too good to be true. People will think I made you up.

Way to be evasive.

What do you think the fossils were supposed to prove, if they were indeed a fraud?

Orrin, you embarrass yourself by continuing to believe in Hooper's peppered moth hoax. The latest issue of Skeptical Inquirer exposes it.

Nothing. Fossils can't prove anything. But if you read the original stories it's hilarious what you lot claimed for them.

If they weren't supposed to prove anything, then why would anyone go to the trouble to create the fraud?

If someone did create these bones as a fraud (which is pure wingnut speculation on your part, it should be noted), then what motivation would they have had?

Make "wingnut" "tinfoil hat".

"Faked - probably not. Altered - yes."

Well yes - they were damaged.

Here's the first hit that comes up for the original stories on "hobbit bones"--it's claims are ludicrous:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3948165.stm

The hoaxes are perpetrated so that such claims can be made and bought by the ignorant and the fanatical.

Where in the bible are pygmy negritos mentioned?

Harry:

What does Hooper have to do with it?

These frauds are all supposed to prove something. Indeed, Darwinism would be a dead letter were it not for earlier hoaxes like Piltdown Man and peppered moths. That they'd prove nothing even if real just demonstrates how badly evolution is misunderstood.

"The hoaxes are perpetrated so that such claims can be made and bought by the ignorant and the fanatical."

The so-called 'hobbit man' is hardly a slam-dunk to either prove or disprove evolution - hence no clear motivation for anyone to create a fraud.

Never mind the fact that there is no indication whatsoever that they are frauds.

"Indeed, Darwinism would be a dead letter were it not for earlier hoaxes like Piltdown Man and peppered moths."

The modern theory of evolution rests on a wide body of research, not peppered moths and Piltdown Man.

"These frauds are all supposed to prove something."

And yet you said above that these fossils prove nothing.

I dunno about fraud, but the best you can say for this whole sordid case at this point is it appears to be a breathtaking example of scientific incompetence and overreach. The careers of any non-tenured anthropologist involved in this would seem to be over.

creeper: If there are pygmies (i.e., small homo sapiens) living in this area, then the "hobbit" fossils are most likely NOT evidence for enviromentally driven speciation.

Anonymous (not Orrin, apparently)

Scientific incompetence and overreach - heck yeah, in abundance. Fraud? Doesn't add up. No indication that it's fraud, nor is there a motivation that makes sense. Even Orrin can't present a case along these lines; he just hopes that by repeating it, some sucker will eventually believe it.

"If there are pygmies (i.e., small homo sapiens) living in this area, then the "hobbit" fossils are most likely NOT evidence for enviromentally driven speciation."

I'm not exactly sure where these fossils will eventually fit in. They may well be pygmies, AFAIK.

creeper:

The motiovation is obvious enough in the initial stories and in your fight to save the hoax.

I'll claim the previous anonymous quote as my own. As I've said before, there's a reason for the 'preview' button...

It's a funny thing about fraud. It often doesn't make any sense, and is driven by a strange combination of desperation and arrogance. Scientific fraud is amazingly common, and often goes undetected for long periods even when it is incompetent (see the recent Bell Labs fiasco). We'll just have to see how this thing plays out. I suspect that through a desire for short term personal glory the anthropologists involved have handed anti-Darwinist and anti-evolution (not the same thing) types ammo that they'll be able to use for decades to come.

"The motiovation is obvious enough in the initial stories and in your fight to save the hoax."

You're the one fighting to save the notion that this is a hoax.

Confusion, incompetence etc. - but this refrain of fraud is something you're still not able to substantiate. Have fun wearing the tinfoil hat, Orrin.

Hooper staged the hoax about peppered moths you fell for.

I don't know her motivation. From her point of view, it may not have been a hoax. It could have been some kind of fraud.

Harry:

No, it was a hoax from the start. Kettlewell's experiment was so badly flawed it couldn't show what he hoped to from the beginning. That he then cheated to try and get certain results is commonly acknowledge now. Ms Hooper came late to the game and summarized the history well, but she--like you--didn't even grasp the core flaw.

creeper:

Of course it can't be substantiated--they destroyed the evidence. No one uses a shredder to prove their innocence.

"they destroyed the evidence"

Think carefully about the "they" in this case - alhough thinking in such hazy terms without thinking the matter through is standard tinfoil hat procedure.

Catholics have a term for your attitude, Orrin: It's called invincible ignorance. They hold that it excuses apparent sin. (It's a great concept; allows anything.)

You got hoaxed, but you like the hoax, so you're incapable to examining the evidence.

It's there, nevertheless, and I won't argue with you over it, just direct anyone who might be interested to the analysis. Let them make up their own minds.

Harry:

You don't even understand why the experiment was flawed from the start, do you?

OJ:

A flawed experiment is incapable of proving or disproving the hypothesis.

The peppered moth experiments were, at worst, examples of the kind of unwitting self-deception to which all humans are prey.

Calling them a hoax, though, is just baseless ad hominem attack.

Jeff:

Never mind whether the experiment was fixed. What was the experiment and what was it trying to prove.

OJ:

You called it a hoax, a term, if used truthfully, has some distinguishing characteristics.

None of which are present wrt the Peppered Moth.

Jeff,

Amen to that; the same goes for calling the 'hobbit' bones a fraud.

What was the experiment and what was it trying to prove.

AFAIK, the experiment consisted of releasing moths in certain ratios of light to dark moths on a daily basis and recapturing them (also on a daily basis) to see how the ratio had changed. It was intended to test the Bird Predation Theory.

Yes, the experiment was flawed, but calling it a hoax presumes certain motives on the part of the people involved in the experiment.

The methods they used prove the hoax--gluing them to trees and what not. But note that the experiment says nothing at all about melanism? In order to demonstrate anything significant you'd have to show that the predation pressures lked to changes in the colors of successive generations of the moth. This was not even attempted but Darwinists pretended it was what the experiment showed.

From what I understood, the gluing or pinning to trees of the moths was to take illustrative pictures, not to have them stuck there for the birds to pick them off.

OJ:

The experiment was flawed because, as it turns out, it was incapable of distinguishing the proposed hypothesis from the null hypothesis.

That doesn't mean the proposed hypothesis was wrong, BTW, it just means the experiment wasn't capable of answering the question.

But because the apparent results corresponded to the observed changes in the population, it was a very short step to conclude the experiments apparent findings were the explanation.

That makes the experiment flawed, not a hoax.

The two are very different, unless you are working on gutting yet another word of all meaning.

Also, as a matter of honor, it is generally wise to distinguish mistakes from crimes.

"Yes and it's on the basis of his fradulent experiment that it is simply assumed that melanism occurred, a particularly sharply drawn instance of how Darwinism reasons backwards--unlike a science--and relies on hoaxes."

The phenomenon of industrial melanism had been observed for a hundred years previous to Kettlewell, a fact that stands on its own irrespective of Kettlewell's experiments and would have been an observed phenomenon even if Kettlewell had never lived.

Kettlewell merely proposed and tested a theory that would explain it - the Bird Predation Theory. You need to distinguish between industrial melanism - an observed phenomenon that is not in dispute - and the Bird Prediation Theory, which is an attempt to explain industrial melanism.

By the way, on what do you base your claim that Kettlewell's numbers were phony, that there was a dishonest discrepancy between how many moths he captured and how many he recorded on paper? The fact that the number fluctuated in the course of the experiment has been analyzed and found to be entirely plausible without Kettlewell having to cheat in what he recorded.

As Jeff said, observation isn't science. no scientific experimen t has ever shown industrial melanism. The one cited is kettlewell's fraud which tried to show how predation would work, not that melanism had occurred.

"no scientific experimen t has ever shown industrial melanism."

Industrial melanism was observed in the environment without the need for a scientific experiment.

Would you choose not to believe that rain was an observed phenomenon if you observed it but it had not been shown in a scientific experiment?

Neither Kettlewell nor anyone else tried to show that industrial melanism had occurred because that was already an acknowledged and observed phenomenon. Kettlewell's experiment was in relation to figuring out what caused industrial melanism.

creeper:

No, it wasn't observed. What was observed was that it was easier to see some of one color than of another. No one ever did any study to see if the population distribution had cchanged one iota. The entire idea is a hoax and Kettlewell's fraud is all that even mildly props it up.