have certain specimens that Dawson 
had given to the British Museum. He 
swore vengeance on both Dawson and 
Smith Woodward. According to this 
version, Butterfield planted the bones 
in an area in which Dawson was col- 
lecting, and he thus duped Dawson 
as well as the “experts” of the British 
Museum. 
Gould summarizes his case against 
Teilhard inversely as follows: “First, 
perhaps Piltdown has simply deluded 
another gullible victim, this time my- 
self. Maybe I have just encountered 
an incredible string of coincidences. 
Could all of the slips in the letters 
have been innocent errors of an aging 
man; the comme par expres merely 
a literary device; the failure to use 
his best argument a simple oversight; 
his conspicuous silence beyond a few 
fleeting and unavoidable mentions 
only an aspect of a complex person- 
ality that no one has fathomed; the 
elephant and the hippo Dawson’s prop- 
erty . . . ?” If each clause of that long 
sentence were recast as a positive 
statement, taken together they would 
constitute a good summary of the case 
against Teilhard. Let us therefore use 
the sentence as the basis for a brief 
rebuttal. 
“Could all of the slips in the letters 
have been innocent errors of an aging 
man?” Yes, easily and probably. I am 
ten years younger than Teilhard was 
when those letters were written. I am 
still sufficiently alert to keep a jump 
or two ahead of my students. None- 
theless, I sometimes find myself un- 
certain of the sequence of events much 
more recent than those of which Teil- 
hard was writing. When an error is 
called to my attention, I sometimes 
have to reconsider and mentally recast 
the sequence of events several times 
before I am confident that I have it 
right. One of Teilhard’s favorite words 
was tatonnemenl (“groping”). It de- 
scribes well the process seen in his let- 
ters, a mental process that is common 
to many of us. Gould’s writing has a 
ring of great self-assurance, and per- 
haps the need for tatonnement is not 
apparent to him, but I believe that it 
is an adequate explanation for the in- 
consistencies in Teilhard’s letters to 
Kenneth Oakley. Thus, Oakley’s origi- 
nal hypothesis was probably correct. 
In his 1920 article, in which he 
clearly states that the Piltdown fossils 
are a mixture of bones of two different 
animals, Teilhard says, “As if on pur- 
pose [comme par expres ], the condyle 
is missing!” Gould believes that Teil- 
hard was trying, a bit too subtly, to 
tell his colleagues that Piltdown was 
a fraud and that the condyle had been 
deliberately broken off the mandible 
to make a test of articulation impos- 
sible. Gould acknowledges that 
comme par expres may be just a lit- 
erary device. Similarly, physicists and 
engineers, faced with bad results, 
speak of the perversity of inanimate 
nature, while biologists refer bad re- 
sults to the “Harvard law,” that under 
the most precisely controlled condi- 
tions an experimental organism does 
just as it pleases. Teilhard’s writing 
is characterized by literary figures to 
an unusual degree: why not this means 
of expressing his disappointment that 
the defects of the fossils prevent a 
critical test? But there is also a third 
possibility. After his youthful and 
amateur enthusiasm had been damp- 
ened by the critical thinking of Mar- 
cellin Boule’s laboratory, and after his 
paleontological acumen had there been 
raised to a professional level, he may 
have suspected that Piltdown was a 
forgery, and he may have intended 
to suggest by comme par expres that 
possibly the fossils had been delib- 
erately altered to prevent a critical 
test. Suspicion does not require com- 
plicity. 
Teilhard emphasized that evolution 
was ordinarily divergent, with long, 
separated lines often appearing as 
multiple, parallel lines. This is simply 
adaptive radiation. Gould says that 
Piltdown should have been Teilhard’s 
strongest argument for multiple, par- 
allel lines in human evolution, and so 
he believes that Teilhard’s failure to 
use it must have been caused by his 
guilt in the Piltdown conspiracy. But 
was Piltdown Teilhard’s best argu- 
ment, “the only available proof,” as 
Gould says, “of multiple, parallel lin- 
eages within human evolution itself.” 
Neanderthal man had been known 
since 1856, Cro-Magnon since 1868, 
and Galley Hill since 1888; Homo 
erect us had been known from Java 
since 1 89 1 and was discovered in China 
in 1927 (by a team that included Teil- 
hard), long before Teilhard wrote his 
most important works; and Heidelberg 
had been known since 1907. Other 
“parallels” discovered after Piltdown, 
but before Teilhard wrote the works 
upon which his fame rests, include 
Ehringsdorf (1925), Steinheim (1933), 
and Swanscombe (1935). One might 
also mention Australopithecus ( 1 925), 
which has at times been assigned to 
the genus Homo. In the face of this 
array of fossils in the human lineage, 
could Gould cite Piltdown as “the 
only available proof’ for Teilhard’s 
thesis unless he were, in his own words, 
“too blinded by my own attraction 
to the hypothesis of Teilhard’s com- 
plicity.” 
If we agree that Teilhard had abun- 
dant fossil evidence for his theory, 
one must still ask why he did not 
use Piltdown also. The answer is evi- 
dent in his paper of 1920: he dis- 
sociated himself from the usual in- 
terpretation of the Piltdown fossils, 
and he may have suspected forgery. 
At best, therefore, its use was likely 
to lead to confusion; at worst, to totally 
erroneous conclusions. Having once 
stated his opinion on it fully, why not 
move on to more profitable materials? 
Much the same reasoning applies to 
“his conspicuous silence.” 
I believe that Gould’s best argu- 
ment is Teilhard’s “profound embar- 
rassment” when Oakley showed him 
the exhibit on the Piltdown fraud at 
the British Museum, and on other oc- 
casions when Piltdown was discussed. 
Nonetheless, it is understandable on 
grounds other than complicity. Teil- 
hard’s acquaintance with Dawson and 
Smith Woodward came in the days 
when he was an enthusiastic amateur 
with little hope of achieving profes- 
sional status in paleontology. It may 
have been partly their influence that 
directed him toward a career in pa- 
leontology. He was characteristically 
intensely loyal to his friends and very 
slow to believe evil report about any- 
one. Thus the idea that his much ad- 
mired friend Dawson, and perhaps 
others of the early Piltdown investi- 
gators, had deliberately defrauded the 
scientific community was distasteful 
in the extreme. He reacted with an 
embarrassed avoidance of the repug- 
nant subject. 
Because of Teilhard’s experience at 
Cairo and his connections with the 
network of amateur collectors, Gould 
believes that he was likely to have 
obtained the elephant and hippo bones 
that were planted at Piltdown. Per- 
haps, but it should be added that Sol- 
las, Smith, and Butterfield also had 
excellent access to networks of col- 
lectors, both professional and amateur. 
Before summarizing, let me discuss 
a few minor points in Gould’s article. 
At the outset, he refers to Teilhard 
as “one of the world’s most famous 
theologians.” On the contrary, he was 
not a theologian at all. Of course, he 
had studied theology as a seminarian. 
18 
