---
title: "Pierre Teilhard de Chardin"
chunk: 9/14
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Teilhard_de_Chardin"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:34:12.127004+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Stephen Jay Gould ===
In an essay published in the magazine Natural History (and later compiled as the 16th essay in his book Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes), American biologist Stephen Jay Gould made a case for Teilhard's guilt in the Piltdown Hoax, arguing that Teilhard has made several compromising slips of the tongue in his correspondence with paleontologist Kenneth Oakley, in addition to what Gould termed to be his "suspicious silence" about Piltdown despite having been, at that moment in time, an important milestone in his career. In a later book, Gould claims that Steven Rose wrote that "Teilhard is revered as a mystic of genius by some, but among most biologists is seen as little more than a charlatan."
Numerous scientists and Teilhard experts have refuted Gould’s theories about Teilhard’s guilt in the hoax, saying they are based on inaccuracies. In an article in New Scientist in September, 1981, Peter Costello said claims that Teilhard had been silent were factually wrong: “Much else of what is said about Teilhard is also wrong. …. After the exposure of the hoax, he did not refuse to make a statement; he gave a statement to the press on 26 November 1953, which was published in New York and London the next day. .... If questions needed to be asked about Teilhard's role in the Piltdown affair, they could have been asked when he was in London during the summer of 1953. They were not asked. But enough is now known to prove Teilhard innocent of all involvement in the hoax.” Teilhard also wrote multiple letters about the hoax at the request of and in reply to Oakley, one of the 3 scientists who uncovered it, in an effort to help them get to the bottom of what occurred 40 years earlier.
Another of the three scientists, S.J. Weiner said he spoke to Teilhard extensively about Piltdown and "He (Teilhard) discussed all the points that I put to him perfectly frankly and openly." Weiner spent years investigating who was responsible for the hoax and concluded that Charles Dawson was the sole culprit. He also said: "Gould would have you accept that Oakley was the same mind (as himself); but it is not so. When Gould's article came out Oakley dissociated himself from it. ...I have seen Oakley recently and he has no reservations... about his belief that Teilhard had nothing to do with the planting of this material and manufacture of the fraud."
In November, 1981, Oakley himself published a letter in New Scientist saying: "There is no proved factual evidence known to me that supports the premise that Father Teilhard de Chardin gave Charles Dawson a piece of fossil elephant molar tooth as a souvenir of his time spent in North Africa. This faulty thread runs throughout the reconstruction ... After spending a year thinking about this accusation, I have at last become convinced that it is erroneous." Oakley also pointed out that after Teilhard got his degree in paleontology and gained experience in the field, he published scientific articles that show he found the scientific claims of the two Piltdown leaders to be incongruous, and that Teilhard did not agree they had discovered an ape-man that was a missing link between apes and humans.
In a comprehensive rebuttal of Gould in America magazine, Mary Lukas said his claims about Teilhard were "patently ridiculous” and “wilder flights of fancy” that were easily disprovable and weak. For example, she notes Teilhard was only briefly and minimally involved in the Piltdown project for four reasons: 1) He was only a student in his early days of studying paleontology. 2) His college was in France and he was at the Piltdown site in Britain for a total of just 5 days over a short period of three months out of the 7-year project. 3) He was simply a volunteer assistant, helping with basic digging. 4) This limited involvement ended prior to the most important claimed discovery, due to his being conscripted to serve in the French army. She added: "Further, according to his letters, both published and unpublished, to friends, Teilhard's relationship to Dawson was anything but close."
Lukas said Gould made the claims for selfish reasons: “The charge gained Mr. Gould two weeks of useful publicity and prepared reviewers to give a friendly reception to the collection of essays” that he was about to publish. She said Teilhard was “beyond doubt the most famous of” all the people who were involved in the excavations” and “the one who could gather headlines most easily…. The shock value of the suggestion that the philosopher-hero was also a criminal was stunning.” Two years later, Lukas published a more detailed article in the British scholarly journal Antiquity in which she further refuted Gould, including an extensive timeline of events.
Winifred McCulloch wrote a very detailed rebuttal of Gould, calling his claim “highly subjective,” “very idiosyncratic,” filled with clear “weaknesses” and “shown to be impossible.” She said Weiner had criticized Gould's accusations in a talk at Georgetown University in 1981.  She also noted that Oakley wrote in a letter to Lukas in 1981 that her article in America constituted "a total refutation of Gould's interpretation of Teilhard's letters to me in 1953-1954. . . . You have . . . unearthed evidence that will seriously undermine Gould's confidence in having any evidence against Teilhard in regard to what he (Teilhard) said in his letters to me." She wrote: "Gould's method of presenting his main argument might be called inferred intent - projecting onto Teilhard ways of thinking and acting that have no evidential base and are completely foreign to all we know of Teilhard. With Gould it seems that the guilty verdict came first, then he created a persona to fit the crime.”