Kevin Vranes has a phud in Physical Ocean- ography and Cli- matology. He now studies sci- ence policy and politics at the Perusing the NY Times science section online, a headline caught my eye: "Subway Sleuth Clears Dinosaur of Cannibalism."
Despite originally being a geologist (or because of it?), dinosaurs never really interested me much. And the cannibalism hook doesn't interest me either — it's one of those things we are morbidly fascinated with as a culture for reasons beyond me. These lurid, made-for-cable-TV acts (OJ, Jon Benet, Laci Peterson, etc.) just don't rile the bees in my bonnet.
But it was something in the combination of dino and cannibal that caught my eye. And not the fact that a dino might be a cannibal, but the fact that the NY Times would care so much that a dino might be a cannibal that they would write, publish and promote an entire story on the subject.
Opening the article I was already wondering, "why would it be scientifically interesting if dinosaurs were cannibals?" I can understand why it might be culturally interesting. We are so morbidly fascinated with human cannibalism that we allow our fascination to spill over to our observations of the faunal world. We allow our horror of cannibalism to translate to animals, perhaps seeing in them a proxy of ourselves. We want to know if other animals eat their own, and it seems to me that we want to know beyond all proportion to the fact of the question's scientific intrigue.
Beyond just a desire to describe the natural world, why would science particularly care about cannibalism in long-extinct species? Or, to restate that: I don't question why science would be interested from a descriptive sense, putting the question of cannibalism on the same level of priority as describing any other question of dinosaur behavior. I do question why science, that calm, objective, reasoning, staid enterprise, would consider cannibalism an aspect of dino behavior worth getting worked up about.
Is it not an example of science done in a cultural context, responding to the perceptions and values of the culture it works amid? Would a paleontologist from a cannibalistic culture, and let's say a culture that knew nothing but cannibalism and had no knowledge that other human societies did not practice similarly, find it at all interesting that a dino might be a cannibal? For reasons other than we are conditioned to be abhorred by the practice, do we really care that dinosaurs might have been cannibals?
I write all this not because I think science should be more objective and less responsive to culture. Rather, I write this because it illustrates a place where science is done in a cultural context. That is, in this case what scientists found to be interesting about a long-dead animal is shaped by our culture's intuitive response to a human behavior. Many scientists disagree, but I am of the opinion that all science is done in context, and all scientific results need to be framed in a broader context.
Comments
# 1 | Steve Bloom | September 27, 2006 2:28 PM
I think the local subway angle had a whole lot more to do with this story than dino-cannibalism (other than that the substance of what was discovered needed to be of non-zero interest to laypeople). Put another way, absent the local angle there would have been no story.
# 2 | John Fleck | September 27, 2006 2:44 PM
Methinks there may be a bit of a tangle in your thinking here between science and science journalism. The scientific question is what did the dinosaur eat? Our intrepid grad student would be pursuing that regardless of the cannibal angle, methinks. The journalistic question - eek! cannibalism! - is what gets the result in the New York Times.
# 3 | dogscratcher | September 27, 2006 4:31 PM
JF:
"Methinks there may be a bit of a tangle in your thinking here between science and science journalism."
Ditto: the media may find the lack of cannibalism interesting because of the cultural absorbtion with eating one's own species (it will sell papers) but I imagine the scientists themselves only found this to be incidentally interesting.
# 4 | kevin v | September 27, 2006 7:02 PM
i generally agree with you guys, but I detected a note of ... well, sort of sciency weight (?) coming from the scientist who was quoted, which led the original impetus to post, but I may have been reading into it...
# 5 | dogscratcher | September 27, 2006 8:47 PM
KV:
"i generally agree with you guys, but I detected a note of ... well, sort of sciency weight (?) coming from the scientist who was quoted, which led the original impetus to post, but I may have been reading into it..."
Maybe, but you may also only be detecting the bias of the reporter who contexualized the quote.
# 6 | SkookumPlanet | September 27, 2006 11:26 PM
Last night [Tuesday] I read that article to my 9-year-old niece, a budding paleontologist, at a hamburger joint while she and her father ate burgers and fries and her dad read the NYTimes. So that she absorbed some nuance about science and the life of a scientist, I explicated a few things as I read it and also referenced material she already knew but may have forgotten. An example of the latter was the star here, Coelophysis, which is the first dino to appear in the BBC's Walking with Dinosaurs. Once I reminded her of the connection between species name and what she's seen, probably a dozen times, I had to ask her if in Walking Coelophysis had eaten young Coelophysis. "Yes," she said, "but only if they were already dead."
Be careful about equating cannibalism with negative values too strongly, interesting story line might be the real attraction. "Walking with Dinosaurs" has had few equals in recent years in the area of creating positive images of and interest in science in the young. And, just a general note that "scientific importance" as an important test for mass media articles is a terrible. I'm going to have to agree with some of other commenters above, but there are several more elements that make this a compelling story, some not emphasized in it, but still are only there because the writer added enough details. These are sort of implied parts of the story.
Here are some that I pointed out and explained last night --
* A grad student, not by digging but by reanalyzing existing, old museum specimens, discovered something overlooked/accepted for a long time by many very good scientists in his field. Just by being alert all the time and knowing his stuff. An accidental, eureka reanalysis.
* His discovery was published in a scientific journal. A graduate student gets lead authorship, over the Head of the museum's paleontology department and one of the most important paleontologists in the world. I read Norell's new book on the Chinese feathered dinos a couple months ago, we've looked through the photos in it a couple times, and I've explained a bit about Norell's job and history to her. I also explained it must be very rare for a grad student to be listed ahead of important scientists. [Letting her know anything is possible in science.]
* And, the grad student's paper is published by one of the best known, most important, and one of the earliest scientific groups in the world. And their journal has probably been published over 100 years, and maybe 200 years.
* The New Mexico mention even has links. A friend of mine as a vacation cabin I've stayed at for months on several occasions near Ghost Range. Close by Ghost Ranch is a site that has, I'm not certain but scores, even over one hundred of Coelophysis embedded in it, on display in a state park or site. I haven't seen it, but I painted a bit of a theoretical image.
* Science can also be art. A mold of the fossils was made and a simple metal cast, which looked pretty cool in black and white, was put up in the subway station. Imagine, I said to her, if you could see dino fossils every day on your way to work.
So, there are a number of elements that contribute to making this a reasonable story. I'll add one that makes it more so. Any accurate, interesting story about science in the science-starved mass media is important these days. This counts as one. My niece left the burger joint parking lot with the torn-out article folded up in her school backpack.
# 7 | James | September 28, 2006 7:13 PM
Cannibalism is scientifically interesting in that it has hooks to certain sorts of disease vectors. Prions, after all, were suspected as being transmitted by cannibalism long before they were identified.
That said, you're entirely correst about context. I once had occasion to do a literature survey on the photokinetics of chlorine gas. Going back, there were a bunch of studies beginning in the 1960s, when chlorine began to be used as a radical source in kinetic experiments. Before that, there was a big gap. But there were a slew of papers immediately after WWI. Not one of them referenced the use of the gas on the battlefield, but none of them would have been written without those battlefield events.