Is the Piltdown Man real? If not, why do people believe in evolution? (warning: loaded question)?

It is, for a given value of the word "real". There existed - I don't know if it still does, but I imagine so - a real skull claimed to be from an ancestor to humans, "discovered" in Piltdown, East Sussex in the UK. In that sense, that it is a real object, it is real.

However, it was treated with scepticism even at the time of its discovery, since it didn't look quite like other skulls we'd been finding in Europe up to then, and was sort of in the wrong place and wrong layer in the Earth. It was just all wrong. So scientists sort of quietly put it on the back burner until we had the technology to definitively say "this is a fabrication cleverly fashioned out of human and orang utan parts". The motivations for the hoax were fame and recognition, obviously, but also a sort of sense that Britain had been kinda left out of the primitive skull race. Everyone else had one - look at the Neanderthal Man, from the Neander valley in Germany, for example. So why not England? Well, because hominids hadn't migrated there yet, obviously. Which is why it was weird and suspicious in the first place.

Until a few years ago, the Piltdown Man was also a real pub in Piltdown, but in a travesty of stupidity the new owners changed the name to The Lamb, because why have something unique and location specific when you can be just like everyone else? :(

Why do people believe in evolution in spite of the revelation that Piltdown Man was a hoax? Well, because of all the other evidence which is not a hoax and which does point to evolution happening, and because even when Piltdown Man was discovered it did not meet the predictions made by the theory of evolution. In fact, if it were real it would have shown the theory of evolution to need some tweaking, much more so than its falsity showed.

No, the Piltdown Man is not real. It turned out to be a fraudulent claim... discovered and corrected BY SCIENTISTS.

It doesn't impact evolution because it was never a foundational piece of evidence of the theory. After it was uncovered, it was basically expunged from the pool of evidence for evolution, and what little research was actually based on it was re-evaluated and likewise tossed out.

Oh, the Piltdown Man is real, my friend. He's in the face of every child and the smile of every baby.

The upper portion of the skull was real and was from a man, if that's what you're asking.

You know the answer. When it was "discovered", there was a lot of debate because it did NOT fit into the evolutionary sequence of humans. Finally, some scientists decided to look at it in detail, and discovered the fraud. People don't "believe" in science, they accept the evidence, and that evidence is such that it can be falsified... unlike religion which is a belief. So Piltdown man shows science in action.

Evolution doesn't rely on a single piece of evidence, or a single field of knowledge.

Assuming you think that such hoaxes, which by the way are prevalent among Creationists in their attempt to discredit evolution, invalidates evolution... consider this....

Let's talk about evolution but on my terms. A person poses a rhetorical question on Y!, usually with no knowledge of evolutionary principles, the nature of science, or the evidence for change over time. S/he may provide unreferenced quotes, misquotes, made up quotes, misstatements, YouTube videos, or Creationist websites. S/he usually doesn't know that evolution has NOTHING to do with the origin of life, which is the science of abiogenesis. And the person's only alternative, whether stated or not, is a supernatural origin (Creationism) for the species diversity we see today.

So.... thanks for the opportunity to present references to readers that might never have seen Creationism exposed as a non-science, and evolution shown as very much a falsifiable set of predictions and mechanisms to explain the diversity of life on this planet. In 150 years of research in the fields of biology, biogeography, geology, molecular biology, anthropology, paleontology, population genetics, and others, the theory of evolution has been modified (see below for the definition of a theory), but never falsified.

If I were to suggest only one thing for you to read, it would be the 2005 court case where Creationists pushing Intelligent Design wanted it taught in the science curriculum of public schools as science. The conservative judge, after hearing evidence in a court of law, including testimony from the leading Creationists, ruled that Creationism was a religious approach and not scientific. Creationism/Intelligent Design did not use the methods of science and had no evidence to support it. Here is the full judge's decision which prohibited the teaching of ID in the science curriculum:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/kitzmiller_v...

and http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/evolution/intelligent...

and a quote from his conclusion: "In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents."

Also you should see the position of the National Academy of Sciences. If you haven't heard of them: http://www.nasonline.org/about-nas/mission/ "The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a private, non-profit society of distinguished scholars. Established by an Act of Congress, signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, the NAS is charged with providing independent, objective advice to the nation on matters related to science and technology. Scientists are elected by their peers to membership in the NAS for outstanding contributions to research. The NAS is committed to furthering science in America, and its members are active contributors to the international scientific community. Nearly 500 members of the NAS have won Nobel Prizes, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, founded in 1914, is today one of the premier international journals publishing the results of original research."

This is part of a statement by them about evolutionary theory.... http://www.nas.edu/evolution/TheoryOrFact.html "The formal scientific definition of theory is quite different from the everyday meaning of the word. It refers to a comprehensive explanation of some aspect of nature that is supported by a vast body of evidence.

Many scientific theories are so well-established that no new evidence is likely to alter them substantially. For example, no new evidence will demonstrate that the Earth does not orbit around the sun (heliocentric theory), or that living things are not made of cells (cell theory), that matter is not composed of atoms, or that the surface of the Earth is not divided into solid plates that have moved over geological timescales (the theory of plate tectonics). Like these other foundational scientific theories, the theory of evolution is supported by so many observations and confirming experiments that scientists are confident that the basic components of the theory will not be overturned by new evidence. However, like all scientific theories, the theory of evolution is subject to continuing refinement as new areas of science emerge or as new technologies enable observations and experiments that were not possible previously"

The only alternative is special creation.

I don't care if you disprove evolution tomorrow, that still won't mean "goddidit".