Resumo

GUZZO, Guilherme Brambatti  e  LIMA, Valderez Marina do Rosário. Piltdown man and organized skepticism in science. Conjectura: filos. e Educ. [online]. 2020, vol.25, e020038. ISSN 2178-4612.  https://doi.org/10.18226/21784612.v25.e020038.

In 1912, a set of fragments of a skull, a mandible, and teeth was presented in England as parts of an ancestor species of Homo sapiens. The new species, named Eoanthropus dawsoni – the “Piltdown Man” –, was regarded as one of the most extraordinary discoveries in anthropology so far: a hominid had been finally found on English soil, and its status was even greater because it was a species from which our own species supposedly originates. Four decades later, however, the hoax was exposed: the rests of the Piltdown Man had been assembled with the use of a human skull with mandible and teeth from orangutans. The reasons for the rapid acceptance of the species by English scientists were probably their expectations and desire in having their own country as the cradle of humanity, and also the fact that the Piltdown specimen corroborated ideas about human evolution that were accepted at that time. In spite of that, how do we know now that the Piltdown Man is a hoax? We argue that the answer relies on the concept of organized skepticism. Organized skepticism is a component of the scientific ethos proposed by sociologist Robert Merton, an institutional aspect of science that involves procedures of evaluation and revision of scientific practices and ideas made by a community of inquiry. In the present paper, we examine how the work of a community of inquiry was essential for the debunking of the Piltdown Man hoax, and later we discuss what the idea of organized skepticism may teach us about the nature of science and our own daily reasoning processes.

Palavras-chave : Organized skepticism; Nature of Science; Scientific hoax.

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