is archaeopteryx the only old, cracked fossil?

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Page 1: Is Archaeopteryx the only old, cracked fossil?

Opinion

Is Archaeopteyx the only A n y o n e who has been following the Fred Hoyle versus British Museum (Natural History) controversy over Archaeopteryx may by now be thinking that the 160-million-year-old reptildbird is not the only old fossil that is cracked. It is now over three years since the cat was put among the pigeons with a brief article from Professors Hoyle, Wickramasinghe and others in the British Jouml of Phorogr~phy casting doubts on Archaeopteryx’s authenticity, and in that time things have not been going too well for poor old Sir Fred as his arguments are demolished and the evidence against him builds up.

The latest round in this bout of scientific blood- letting commenced in August 1987 with the opening in the museum of an exhibition in which the main claims and counter-claims were presented to the public, who were left to make up their own minds. Predictably, Hoyle denounced it as one-sided. Pre- sumably his book on the debate, Archaeopteryx, the Primordial Bird: A Case of Fossil Forgery, was not!

The exhibition, now closed, consisted of a video of a Channel Four news item giving the background to the controversy, photos of all six fossil remains, and the 1861 specimen itself. The actual fossil was well mounted under a bright light and was accompanied by a large folder of colour photographs in which the main arguments of Hoyle and his colleagues were presented together with the museum’s counter- arguments. The arguments are well known and only a brief summary is needed here.

Hoyle and his colleagues claim that the feather impressions were made by pressing modern feathers into a layer of paste smeared around a genuine fossil of the small dinosaur Compsognathus. The paste was made from powdered rock mixed with some binder. The museum authorities point out that dendritic growths of manganese oxide cover the feather impressions and match on slab and counter slab. These are natural growths which cannot be faked. Any layer of paste would have covered them. Hoyle and company say they do not match; the museum simply restates that they do and that any mismatch is just the result of some dendrites having been scraped off.

More damning are the fine Linear features that criss- cross the feathered regions and even some of the bones. The proponents of the forgery theory origin- ally interpreted these as ‘boundaries of thin layers of some agent, possibly varnish or latex rubber which has been used to stick down peeling areas of cement’. In fact, they are cracks in the rock and match up perfectly on each slab. This is not what one would expect if they had been covered over with paste. The initial response of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe in the preface to their book was feeble to say the least. Their ‘refutation’ was to point out that one of these Linea- ments lay in an area that had been excavated by the museum. They argued that ‘to base claims on what one has altered oneself is in our scheme of things a

old, cracked fossil? -

dubious procedure . . .’, without apparently realizing that the fact that the feature was still there after excavation proved that it could only be a crack running deep into the slab. An edge or boundary would have been obliterated by excavation.

Hoyle and Wickramasinghe seem to have accepted that these are cracks, but now they claim that they are simply showing through the paste in much the same way as cracks in a wall show through plaster. However, the cracks are stuffed to the brim with calcite crystals, a fact which lays to rest this latest Hoylian fantasy.

Another of the claims of these two would-be palaeontologists is that the feathered material contains traces of foreign substances such as silicon, chlorine and lead. They were terribly excited when they dis- covered this and promptly wrote to The Daily Telegraph that the analyses ‘would appear to have resolved the issue beyond any doubt in our favour’. The analyses are not so favourable when one considers that during its residence at the museum the fossil has been treated with silicone rubber and fluid, resins, solvents and lead-bearing gelatine moulding materials.

Other damning facts that Hoyle and Wickrama- singhe toil to overcome are the presence of feathers on the Maxburg specimen (quite unmistakable, contrary to what Hoyle says) found in 1955, the presence of a wishbone (unique to birds) in the museum’s specimen and also the Maxburg specimen, possible fragments of one in the .I877 specimen, and that the forelimbs of Archaeopteryx were twice the length of those of Compsognarhus.

GEOLOGY TODAY MapJune 1988183

Page 2: Is Archaeopteryx the only old, cracked fossil?

To explain why anyone should want to fake Archaeopteryx, Hoyle and Wickramasinge concoct an elaborate plot in which Karl Haberlein, the man who sold the fossil to the museum last century, was in it for the money (of which there was lots). Richard Owen, who bought it for the museum, was in it to try and discredit Darwin. The idea is that Owen, a fierce creationist opponent of Darwin, would fool the Dar- winists with a transitional fossil superbly tailored to their needs. Once they were hooked, the forgery would be exposed; and so the Darwinists would be ridiculed and unable to survive the embarrassment.

Unfortunately for Owen they did not take the bait and so the forgery could not be revealed. And unfor- tunately for Hoyle and Wickramasinghe it was not like this at all. As Stephen Jay Gould revealed in an excellent article in Natural Hisrory, Owen was an evo- lutionist! True, he loathed Darwin’s theory of natural selection with an inextinguishable loathing and never missed an opportunity to attack him, but he believed in evolution nevertheless. He had his own ideas about how it occurred and it is clear from his own writings that he regarded Archaeopteryx as evidence for his views, not Darwin’s. Besides, the British Museum, to which Owen was devoted, was going through a crucial period with the prospect of a new building in South Kensington in sight. Owen would hardly have risked damaging the museum’s (and his) reputation by blow- ing a fortune on a fake fossil. What Hoyle is doing is, as Gould put it, ‘ripping off cardboard history for his own purposes’. It is interesting to note what Hoyle himself thinks about distorting history. In Evolution born Space he writes: ‘Disrespect for accuracy in mat- ters of scientific history is common in the current practice of science. A happy-go-lucky attitude to his- tory is only too likely to go hand in hand with a happy-go-lucky attitude to facts that are of relevance at the frontiers of science’. Quite.

As palaeontologists have remarked, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe seem to have no conception of what fossils are like nor any understanding of the subject they attack. When one reads that the bottom part of the specimen bearing the tip of the tail was cemented on, one can laugh; but when one sees all the howlers they make, one is left wondering whether to laugh or cry. What is one to think when one reads that the tail is a single feather (even their own photographs show a long string of vertebrae), when they say that the Men- dips are Jurassic (they are Carboniferous), or when they claim that mammals did not appear until the CretaceoudTertiary boundary (by which time they had been around for well over a hundred million years)?

Why should two eminent astronomers sink to such unmitigated silliness? It’s really quite simple. These two publicity-seekers, who seem to be more concerned with sensationalism than with science, attacked Archaeopteryx not on the basis of evidence but because it was an embarrassment to their own idiosyncratic views on evolution. They are famous (or notorious) for their revival of the old panspennia theory in which they invent problems about evolution and then displace them to outer space. This is described particularly well in Hoyle’s The

Intelligent Universe. Basically, the whole universe is filed with bacteria and viruses. These. constantly

shower down on the Earth, sometimes causing dis- eases and occasionally becoming incorporated into the chromosomes of terrestrial organisms, providing the lucky ones with new genetic material with which to make, all of a sudden, eyes and other complex struc- tures. The idea is taken even further in his book on Archaeopteryx, in which we learn that mammals and birds ‘originated in a major genetic s t o m at the Cre- taceous-Tertiary boundary’. Genes from space turned some unknown reptiles into mammals and birds. Obviously Archaeopteryx does not fit, for it was around millions of years too early for Hoyle’s liking.

It does seem rather odd that viruses from outer space should just happen to contain genes for making eyes or for turning reptiles into mammals and birds. Hoyle thinks they were manufactured by some extra- terrestrial intelligence (though how that intelligence evolved is anybody’s guess). Fortunately, he uses comets, meteorites and dust as the means of transport of these viruses rather than seeding from flying saucers.

Why on Earth does he believe all this?, you may ask. Simple. He does not believe in natural selection or that life could have arisen on Earth. Fair enough; but his reasons for rejecting these are groundless. As regards natural selection, Hoyle defines it thus: ‘If among a number of species one is best fitted to survive in the environment as it happens to be, then it is the variety that is best fitted to survive that will best survive’. If that is what Hoyle thinks natural selection is, then it is little wonder he does not believe in it. Elsewhere in The Intelligent Universe he calls natural selection ‘a completely random process’ and seems to think that it operates by parting ‘groups of organisms with slight differences’ into sub-groups and then dis- tinct species in the same way that mixtures like oil and water separate.

Since Hoyle does not know what natural selection is, how it operates or what modern evolutionists actually believe, his comments on these subjects are worthless. Much the same is true of his more recent fantasies about Archaeopteryx. His ignorance outside of astronomy, the distortions of history and the falla- cies he puts into the mouths of evolutionists are mis- leading to the general public and only serve to irritate and annoy scientists. His attack on Archaeopteryx will delight creationists and dupe some laypeople, but among scientists it will only serve to reduce still further whatever credibility he has left. The Reverend Lord Soper, who knew him at university, once remarked that Hoyle ‘changes his mind every other week’. It is time he changed his mind about A rchaeopte y x .

STEPHEN MORETON Freelance writer, Edinburgh

WIGEOLOGY TODAY Map3une 1988