When considering the Piltdown Man and the Cardiff giant, I think of them both as monumental figures in the realm of pseudoscience. They were from two different time periods, but the motives seem to intertwine to a degree for the perpetuation of both hoaxes. In the case of the Piltdown Man, the people of England felt insecure that the other nations that were round-about them were making lots of archaeological discoveries and they were among the only European nations that hadn’t found any ancient humanoid fossils. To cater to the “need” of the people of England to feel included, in 1908 a man by the names of Charles Dawson concocted the Piltdown Man, and convinced people that the skull fragment that he found was legitimate. One of the main goals was to promote nationalism and put England on the map and show the other nations, that they too had fossils related to the evolution of humankind in their country. It was relatively successful initially because at the time, scientists believed that the large modern brain preceded the modern omnivorous diet. The Piltdown man was constructed in a way that would support the brain-centered paradigm that scientists believed in. Later, however, it was in fact found that the discoveries did not line up with the brain-centered perspective of human evolution. As we learned in class this past Tuesday, it brought a great deal of fame to Charles Dawson and Woodward and I imagine that with the fame came fortune, like the Cardiff Giant. The Cardiff Giant was discovered in 1869 in Cardiff, New York and was hoax depicting an ancient, petrified man being 10 feet tall and is known to be one of America’s greatest hoaxes. The person responsible for this hoax was a man by the name of George Hull (a distant relative of Stub Newell) admitted to orchestrating the whole event. Hull was an atheist who believed that the bible was filled with tall tales that only people who were gullible would believe. Motivated to prove a point about how people would believe anything that the bible said, he concocted the fraud. Another motivation was that the Cardiff Giant had the potential to generate millions of dollars by today’s standard’s and it was so successful that two other replicas were made of an already fake Giant.

In the case of the Piltdown man, the people of England wanted to believe the Piltdown Man hoax because they desired to not be the only European nation to have made no humanoid archaeological discoveries. In the case of the Cardiff Giant, people wanted to believe it because it confirmed in their mind what the bible stated regarding there being giants in the past.

These two hoaxes from their inception increased skepticism for “new” discoveries in the world of science and have helped people to understand that sometimes there are ulterior motives for people making certain “discoveries” and that scientific findings should be reviewed more carefully.

I agree with the first implication that scientists cannot be trusted to apply a skeptical eye to data when those data fulfill their expectations in desires because they’ve been compromised once they allow their desires to influence them. They start to want to put more credibility into the narrative than the facts, which is very dangerous. Eventually, it will lead scientists into omitting the facts and coming to more biased conclusions.