In a 1999, an article of National Geographic, a world renowned scientific journal, presented the article "Feathers for T-Rex?"
It's when you say things like this that I realize that, outside of the sciences, people really don't understand what is meant by the term "scientific journal." A scientific journal is a publication where scientists publish the results of experimentation and observation in a form that explains, technically, the materials and methods employed in their research, the results, discussion of the results, and generally some remarks that place the research in a wider context. The articles almost always have joint authorship and an extensive bibliography that cites other articles, and the articles are reviewed by an anonymous jury of scientists in that field whom the magazine selects based (often) on their familiarity with the general idea of the research in question.
We call these journals "primary" (as in a "primary source"), because they're the closest you can typically get to a scientist's raw data and observations in his own words short of seeing his research paperwork or being out there in the field with him. The articles usually have a certain "look" to them, kind of like this:
JSTOR: Access Check
National Geographic, while a respected publication, is not a
scientific journal in any sense of the word. It's articles, as a rule, are
not primary research, they're usually a journalist's interpretation of research or of interviews with researchers. As a result we call these "secondary sources", because the scientific information that can be gleaned from them is second-hand, and therefore unsuitable for citation in a primary source.
National Geographic does not peer-review any articles, and researchers do not submit primary research to National Geographic, any more than my wife is going to send a copy of her thesis to the Lincoln Journal-Star. They're not primary sources; they're not scientific journals. To the extent that National Geographic is largely marketed to interested laypeople as opposed to
professionals in the field of geography, we might sometimes refer to NatGeo as being part of the "popular press", which includes science-for-laypeople magazines written by journalists like Omni, Discover, and Popular Science.
Yet you say nothing about "memes," a completely fictitious, unsupported assertion by Dawkins.
Nobody, to my knowledge, is suing to get Dawkin's ideas on memes taught as "official science" in the nation's high schools. If they were, I'm sure you and I would agree that it would be a pretty stupid idea - since there's no scientific evidence. Dawkins doesn't even offer it as a scientific conjecture - more of a philosophical idea.
But it's really a spurious objection. I'm sure we could list about a hundred things that you've failed to mention in every single post and then try to pretend that that's evidence of some kind of hypocrisy on your part. I think you've been getting too many debate tips from right-wing websites.
An unknown motive? Its pretty obvious what the motive was-- to further the fledgling theory.
It wouldn't have done a very good job. It was actually through evolution - and the Piltdown fossil's inconsistency with it - that the fraud was discovered. Had Piltdown been a legitimate find - an actual hominid fossil - it would have
destroyed evolution as we know it.