Dinomania by Boria Sax

Author:Boria Sax
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

A scene from the cartoon The Flintstones. Dinosaurs here take the place of machines, in an idealized depiction of the affluent suburbs of the United States during the 1950s. In many ways, these creatures anticipate the ‘smart’ devices of today.

But this optimism barely concealed an intense undercurrent of terror, frustration and rebellion. The country was engaged in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, which created an atmosphere of constant fear and tension. Intellectuals in America and Europe often found the post-Second World War decades to be stagnant, as well as culturally empty and stifling. The civil rights movement challenged not only segregation but, indirectly, American claims to moral superiority. The United States appeared moribund in many ways, yet perhaps poised for a dramatic transformation.

The growing restlessness and frustration were reflected in Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962, which had an enormous influence on nearly every aspect of intellectual life. Prior to that book, most people had assumed that the progress of science was strictly linear. Researchers thought that today knowledge was accumulated in increments, and bold ideas were usually dismissed a bit scornfully as ‘speculative’. According to Kuhn, scientific investigation took place within what he called a ‘paradigm’. This was a comprehensive analytical framework, which determined the nature and direction of research. Once a dominant paradigm was established, research could proceed according to a routine, through the gradual collection of facts. But every paradigm would entail ‘anomalies’, or phenomena that did not quite seem to fit within the established framework. When these became too bothersome to ignore, there might be a scientific revolution or ‘paradigm shift’, such as transition to the heliocentric cosmos, Newtonian physics, evolution, quantum mechanics or relativity. Since paradigms were fundamentally incommensurable, the change from one to another could not be decided simply by empirical evidence, but required a drastic change in perspective.1

The idea offered an opportunity to ambitious scientists who wished to be remembered as more than collectors of data. The most celebrated thinkers were those like Copernicus or Darwin, who had not simply increased knowledge but inaugurated a new paradigm. People often contrasted the revolutionary scientists of the past (at least as they were described in popular textbooks), who would boldly defy Church and state, with their thoroughly institutionalized counterparts in contemporary universities.

But the major scientific innovators from the Renaissance to the start of the modern world had not proclaimed their discoveries as revolutions in science. Robert Bakker, Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould, by contrast, very consciously set about to create a revolution, a paradigm shift, in scientific thinking. Palaeontology had appeared stagnant to many researchers, a sort of glorified ‘stamp collecting’, and many felt the time had come for a major change. For well over a century, most of the energy in the field had been devoted to finding, identifying and assembling old bones, and far less to theoretical questions. The close ties of scientists to corporations and government, with their potential for corruption, was something that people in other fields generally tried to conceal, but in palaeontology that was out in the open.

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