The short story of this tooth's fame goes a little like this. Man finds tooth (1917), man gives tooth to paleontologist (1922), paleontologist gets excited because it looks like the tooth could belong to a human-like ancestor. The paleontologist quickly publishes a paper on the find, a popular magazine hears about the find and an illustrator draws a picture for the magazine. Once the find was reviewed by the scientific community the tooth was found to belong to an extinct pig-like animal, the end.

Quick note: In all fairness a pig's tooth does look very similar to an ape's tooth and the specimen was worn making identification rather difficult.


Scientists made up an entire new species based on just a tooth

This claim is in reference to the illustration for the popular British magazine which wrote a story about the paper published by paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn. The image (shown here) is an illustration of a fully constructed human-like ancestor but it is not a scientific reconstruction and was never intended, or claimed, to be accurate or scientific. Even in the main article and in the text under the illustration was a quote clarifying that the sketch was simply "to convey some idea of the possibilities suggested by this discovery. As we know nothing of the creature's form, his [the illustrator] reconstruction is merely the expression of an artist's brilliant imaginative genius."

Nebraska Man was even given a scientific name

True, the name "Hesperopithecus Haroldcookii" was reserved for the possible new species by the man who first identified the tooth in 1922, Henry Fairfield Osborn. Regardless, thinking up a scientific sounding name does not mean the find was accepted as an official new species by the scientific community as creations suggest. It was simply a name that Henry Fairfield Osborn thought of to give credit to its founder, Harold Cook, incase the find did result in the discovery of a new human-like ancestor.

Nebraska Man was/is used by scientists as evidence for evolution

This was never the case. Before anything is ever accepted as scientific evidence it must go through the scientific process. Once the find was looked into and more research was done it was quickly discarded as a pig-like tooth. The skepticism of the tooth by scientists is made clear in the two-volume book Human Origins (1924) where George MacCurdy writes, "In 1920 [sic], Osborn described two molars from the Pliocene of Nebraska; he attributed these to an anthropoid primate to which he has given the name Hesperopithecus. The teeth are not well preserved, so that the validity of Osborn's determination has not yet been generally accepted."

Gregory confirmed this again in his article which correctly identified the tooth: "The scientific world, however, was far from accepting without further evidence the validity of Professor Osborn's conclusion that the fossil tooth from Nebraska represented either a human or an anthropoid tooth." (Gregory MacCurdy 1927)

Nebraska Man was even taught as evidence for evolution in school text books.

Um, that is just a false made up claim.

For more in depth information please visit: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/a_nebraska.html

Evolution does not need to explain where life came from to be valid because evolution has absolutely nothing to do with the origin of life nor the origin of existence. It is really quite simple, evolution is the explanation of how life evolved, hence the name "evolution." Just as the theory of gravity explains how a falling object gets from point A to point B the theory of evolution explains how life gets from point A to point B. Just because the theory of gravity cannot explain where the falling object came from does not mean that gravity is false.

Contrary to a widespread public impression, biological evolution is not random, even though the biological changes that provide the raw material for evolution are not directed toward predetermined, specific goals. When DNA is being copied, mistakes in the copying process generate novel DNA sequences. These new sequences act as evolutionary "experiments." Most mutations do not change traits or fitness. But some mutations give organisms traits that enhance their ability to survive and reproduce, while other mutations reduce the reproductive fitness of an organism.

The process by which organisms with advantageous variations have greater reproductive success than other organisms within a population is known as "natural selection." Over multiple generations, some populations of organisms subjected to natural selection may change in ways that make them better able to survive and reproduce in a given environment. Others may be unable to adapt to a changing environment and will become extinct.

The goal of science education is to expose students to the best possible scholarship in each field of science. The science curriculum is thus the product of centuries of scientific investigation. Ideas need to become part of the base of accepted scientific knowledge before they are appropriately taught in schools. For example, the idea of continental drift to explain the movements and shapes of the continents was studied and debated for many years without becoming part of the basic science curriculum. As data accumulated, it became clearer that the surface of the Earth is composed of a series of massive plates, which are not bounded by the continents, that continually move in relation to each other. The theory of plate tectonics (which was proposed in the mid-1960s) grew from these data and offered a more complete explanation for the movement of continents. The new theory also predicted important phenomena, such as where earthquakes and volcanoes are likely to occur. When enough evidence had accumulated for the concept of plate tectonics to be accepted by the scientific community as fact, it became part of the earth sciences curriculum.

Scientists and science educators have concluded that evolution should be taught in science classes because it is the only tested, comprehensive scientific explanation for the nature of the biological world today that is supported by overwhelming evidence and widely accepted by the scientific community. The ideas supported by creationists, in contrast, are not supported by evidence and are not accepted by the scientific community.

Different religions hold very different views and teachings about the origins and diversity of life on Earth. Because creationism is based on specific sets of religious convictions, teaching it in science classes would mean imposing a particular religious view on students and thus is unconstitutional, according to several major rulings in federal district courts and the Supreme Court of the United States.

A tactic that bigger creationist organizations like to use is to make it look like scientists don't support evolution and turn to creationism instead. Typically they will do one of two things, make a very short list of scientists who support creationism (and ignore those who don't) or scrounge together a few select quotes from just a couple scientist. These quotes are almost always out of context and are still left out of context even after the scientists that were misquoted publicly correct the false accusations against their support for evolution. Regardless, quotes in favor or against evolution do not affect the fact that all of the evidence overwhelmingly supports evolution.

So the answer is NO. You really can't be a biologist or geologist without accepting evolution which is why the mass majority of scientists around the world agree that evolution is a fact. A 1991 Gallup poll of Americans found that about 5% of scientists identified themselves as creationists. However, this number includes those working in fields not related to life origins (such as computer scientists, mechanical engineers, etc.). Taking into account only those working in the relevant fields of earth and life sciences, there are about 480,000 scientists, but only about 700 believe in creationism or consider it a valid theory (Robinson 1995). This means that less than 0.15 percent of relevant scientists believe in creationism. And that is just in the United States, which has more creationists than any other industrialized country. In other countries, the number of relevant scientists who accept creationism drops to less than one tenth of 1 percent.

When one looks at such statistics or quotes they need to examine not how many scientists and professors believe something, but what their conviction is based upon. Most of those who reject evolution do so because of personal religious conviction, not because of evidence. The evidence supports evolution. And the evidence, not personal authority, is what objective conclusions should be based on.

Consider the Republican presidential candidates who said they didn't "believe in evolution" at the GOP debate. What they said actually was a good point - but not because of what they meant by it. In truth, no scientists or people well educated on the subject "believe in evolution." They don't have to because we know evolution to be factually true. As a natural phenomenon based on scientific evidence, evolution is not a matter of belief or faith, any more than gravity or genetics, and to ask whether someone believes in it is a nonsensical question, much like asking if someone believes in subatomic particles. Nothing in science requires faith or is a matter of belief, if it did then it would not be science.

No one saw the evolution of one-toed horses from three-toed horses, but that does not mean that we cannot be confident that horses evolved. Science is practiced in many ways besides direct observation and experimentation. Much scientific discovery is done through indirect experimentation and observation in which inferences are made, and hypotheses generated from those inferences are tested.

For instance, particle physicists cannot directly observe subatomic particles because the particles are too small. They make inferences about the weight, speed, and other properties of the particles based on other observations. A logical hypothesis might be something like this: If the weight of this particle is Y, when I bombard it, X will happen. If X does not happen, then the hypothesis is disproved. Thus, we can learn about the natural world even if we cannot directly observe a phenomenon-and that is true about the past, too.

In historical sciences like astronomy, geology, evolutionary biology, and archaeology, logical inferences are made and then tested against data. Sometimes the test cannot be made until new data are available, but a great deal has been done to help us understand the past. For example, scorpionflies (Mecoptera) and true flies (Diptera) have enough similarities that entomologists consider them to be closely related. Scorpionflies have four wings of about the same size, and true flies have a large front pair of wings but the back pair is replaced by small club-shaped structures. If two-winged flies evolved from scorpionfly-like ancestors, as comparative anatomy suggests, then an intermediate true fly with four wings should have existed-and in 1976 fossils of such a fly were discovered. Furthermore, geneticists have found that the number of wings in flies can be changed through mutations in a single gene.

Something that happened in the past is thus not "off limits" for scientific study. Hypotheses can be made about such phenomena, and these hypotheses can be tested and can lead to solid conclusions. Furthermore, many key mechanisms of evolution occur over relatively short periods and can be observed directly-such as the evolution of bacteria resistant to antibiotics.

Evolution is a well-supported theory drawn from a variety of sources of data, including observations about the fossil record, genetic information, the distribution of plants and animals, and the similarities across species of anatomy and development. Scientists have inferred that descent with modification offers the best scientific explanation for these observations.

Text is from "Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences", Second Edition (1999)
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=6024&page=28

Humans did not evolve from modem apes, but humans and modem apes shared a common ancestor, a species that no longer exists. Because we share a recent common ancestor with chimpanzees and gorillas, we have many anatomical, genetic, biochemical, and even behavioral similarities with these African great apes. We are less similar to the Asian apes—orangutans and gibbons—and even less similar to monkeys, because we share common ancestors with these groups in the more distant past.

Evolution is a branching or splitting process in which populations split off from one another and gradually become different. As the two groups become isolated from each other, they stop sharing genes, and eventually genetic differences increase until members of the groups can no longer interbreed. At this point, they have become separate species. Through time, these two species might give rise to new species, and so on through millennia.

Text is from "Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences", Second Edition (1999)
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=6024&page=29

Nothing is wrong with teaching critical thinking. Students need to learn how to reexamine their ideas in light of observations and accepted scientific concepts. Scientific knowledge itself is the result of the critical thinking applied by generations of scientists to questions about the natural world. Scientific knowledge must be subjected to continued reexamination and skepticism for human knowledge to continue to advance.

But critical thinking does not mean that all criticisms are equally valid. Critical thinking has to be based on rules of reason and evidence. Discussion of critical thinking or controversies does not mean giving equal weight to ideas that lack essential supporting evidence. The ideas offered by intelligent design creationists are not the products of scientific reasoning. Discussing these ideas in science classes would not be appropriate given their lack of scientific support.

Recent calls to introduce "critical analysis" into science classes disguise a broader agenda. Other attempts to introduce creationist ideas into science employ such phrases as "teach the controversy" or "present arguments for and against evolution." Many such calls are directed specifically at attacking the teaching of evolution or other topics that some people consider as controversial. In this way, they are intended to introduce creationist ideas into science classes, even though scientists have thoroughly refuted these ideas. Indeed, the application of critical thinking to the science curriculum would argue against including these ideas in science classes because they do not meet scientific standards.

There is no scientific controversy about the basic facts of evolution. In this sense the intelligent design movement's call to "teach the controversy" is unwarranted. Of course, there remain many interesting questions about evolution, such as the evolutionary origin of sex or different mechanisms of speciation, and discussion of these questions is fully warranted in science classes. However, arguments that attempt to confuse students by suggesting that there are fundamental weaknesses in the science of evolution are unwarranted based on the overwhelming evidence that supports the theory. Creationist ideas lie outside of the realm of science, and introducing them in science courses has been ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court and other federal courts.

This is an important question because evolution of the wide variety of organisms currently existing on Earth required a very long period of time. Several independent dating techniques indicate that the Earth is billions of years old. Measurements of the radioactive elements in materials from the Earth, the Moon, and meteorites provide ages for the Earth and the solar system. These measurements are consistent with each other and with the physical processes of radioactivity. Additional evidence for the ages of the solar system and the galaxy includes the record of crater formation on the planets and their moons, the ages of the oldest stars in the Milky Way, and the rate of expansion of the universe. Measurements of the radiation left over from the Big Bang also support the universe’s great age.

Many religious apologists blame "darwinism" and the teachings of evolution for Hitler and the holocaust. They do this in hopes of making parents afraid of letting their children learn a field of science that discredits ancient myths contained in their "sacred" religious texts. Whether or not the knowledge of evolution inspired the actions of Hitler does not by any means change the fact that evolution is true. Regardless, lets still take a look at this claim for the sakes of exposing yet again the dishonest agenda of leading apologists.

The teachings of Darwin and the knowledge of evolution did not inspire Hitler. In fact, Hitler's beliefs were opposite to Darwin's. Darwin made popular the knowledge that nature undergoes a selection process this is NOT goal-oriented and that evolution FAVORS diversity. Hitler's actions were closely related to eugenics which was made popular by not Darwin, but Herbert Spencer. It is from this, not Darwin, that we get the phrase "survival of the fittest." Darwin did not equate evolution with upwardly-mobile progress. Eugenics is based on Lamarckism which is the discredited idea (replaced by Darwin's ideas) that an organism can pass on characteristics that it acquired during its lifetime to its offsprings. Unlike what Darwin helped teach us about evolution, Lamarckism is progressive and goal-oriented.

Learn about Hitler's religious views