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http://www.mnh.si.edu/anthro/humanorigins/ha/pilt.htmlThe Piltdown Hoax
Possibly one of the most famous scandals in all of science, the Piltdown Hoax illustrates the dangerous effects a preconceived notion of what "should" be true can have on the scientific pursuit of the truth.
By the early twentieth century, Darwin's theory of inheritance of favored traits via competition and natural selection had been accepted by the scientific mainstream. Differing from how we view evolution today, the scientific thought of the time was of "directed evolution", or evolution leading to perfection of form. Under this ideology, organisms evolved, toward the perfect natural form (which, incidentally, was human). Many scientists and thinkers of the day took this notion a step further, proposing that man, too, had evolved through various stages toward a perfect human form, which just so happened to be western European (see our FAQ on the concept of race in paleoanthropology).
As such, it was thought that in this quest for perfection, early human ancestors would have evolved their large brains first to separate humanity from brute animals, and this would allow the cognition necessary for all other advances to take place. There is nothing wrong with this (the part about large brains developing first, that is). In the absence of evidence, this is a hypothesis that can be checked for truth by comparing it to evidence found later.
The scandal[continued]