Word: teilhard
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...apprenticeship at Wright's Taliesin West. Yet for all the frailty of Arcosanti's finances, Soleri has been able to maintain out side interest in his project for a decade. The mystique of his eclectic, quasi-religious creed, cribbed from sages as different as Matthew Arnold and Teilhard de Chardin (whose name will be on a huge cloister planned for Arcosanti), draws hundreds of visitors from around the world to the site each year. Many of them come to try out as children of the Arcosanti dream...
...Teilhard and Piltdown...
Since his death in 1955, the Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was also an accomplished paleontologist, has become something of a cult figure. Millions of readers have been fascinated by his writings, which often put him at odds with ecclesiastical authorities. Particularly controversial were his views on evolution, which, he held, moves in an upward direction with increasing domination of spirit over matter. Now the saintly Teilhard stands accused of a little playful tampering with evolution. Last week he was implicated as a conspirator in one of the most famous scientific hoaxes: the notorious Piltdown caper...
...masterminded the hoax? Dawson was suspected, but some scholars doubt that he had the skills or materials to carry it out. In Natural History, Harvard Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould writes that the young Teilhard, then a student in England and Dawson's friend, could easily have supplied some bones. One bit of evidence: a Teilhard letter written years later to the British scholar Kenneth Oakley, in which the priest commits what Gould calls a "fatal error." Teilhard says that Dawson personally brought him to the site where the second skull was found. "This cannot be," says Gould, because Dawson...
Gould's theory stirred an instant uproar. Says American Paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, a friend of Teilhard's: "I don't think it was in his character." J.S. Werner, who with Oakley helped expose the forgery, doubts that Teilhard would have risked his burgeoning scientific career with such a ruse. Gould remains convinced it was a youthful joke that succeeded so well it made a confession difficult. Says he: "The burden of proof must now rest with those who would hold Father Teilhard blameless...