Greenhouse of the Dinosaurs by Donald R. Prothero

Author:Donald R. Prothero
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SCI054000, Science/Paleontology, SCI019000, Science/Earth Sciences/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2009-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 5.4 The location of the major late Eocene impact sites and their debris fields. DSDP = Deep-Sea Drilling Project; ODP = Oceanic Drilling Program. (After Poag 1999)

In my scientific career, I’ve seen the profession go from puzzlement about mass extinctions before 1980 to the erection and dismantlement of the impact bandwagon from 1980 to 2003, and now new ideas are coming along that may or may not better explain mass extinctions. The impact bandwagon beautifully demonstrates a salient fact about science: scientists are human and subject to social pressures and lured by attractive new ideas. But science is not like politics or philosophy, where one school of thought or idea can persist even after it has outlived its usefulness or in spite of much negative evidence. In science, we must measure our ideas against an external reality. Fads may come and go, and scientists may favor certain ideas for irrational reasons, but scientific hypotheses must stand the test of time and be corroborated by studies that may take years to finish. Our cherished ideas may ultimately turn out to be illusions, but as scientists, we cannot hang on to them and must move on. As Thomas Henry Huxley put it, this is “the great tragedy of Science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.” Or as H. L. Mencken said, “For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”

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