When I was 7 almost every smooth, oval stone was a dinosaur egg. I would spent hours in my grandparent's backyard hacking away at the dirt knowing that there just had to be a Triceratops or a Tyrannosaurus just beneath the surface. (I even got in trouble once for trying to clear out some of the tiny maple seedlings with a hatchet that I found in the shed.) I never found anything, but the hunt for fossils was a helluva lot of fun. My interest in paleontology waned a little as I got older, but I thankfully have rediscovered that interest and aspire to be the "dinosaur hunter" I felt like as I put holes in the lawn.
Not everyone holds paleontologists in high regard, though, especially people who don't see the practical use of the science. Indeed, on the scientific-appreciation scale it seems to fall below physics, chemistry, and even some aspects of biology, paleontologists sometimes being seen as people with nothing better to do but dig in the dirt. Paleontology carries with it the mystique of adventure and involves the restoration of ancient beasts, but beyond that it sometimes seems like paleontology doesn't get a lot of respect.
What is your opinion on how paleontologists are seen by the public and by scientists in other disciplines? David Hone already has some answers from professionals, but I'd like to open this matter of opinion up to a wider audience here.
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Tough question. I don't think paleo offers much in the way of practical "we're making the world a better place" use (like cancer research), but there's a great deal of scientific knowledge to be gained from paleo. Paleontology makes us smarter, and it provides an enormous opportunity to educate. Fossils also tell us about who WE are, and how we fit into the bigger picture, which is both fascinating and humbling.
I think palaeontologists are viewed as similar to archaeologists, with a lot of people unable to distinguish them from each other. The image provided by Indiana Jones/Jurassic Park movies are what most people think of.
Many biologists, in my experience, and in particular systematists, do not particularly think much of paleontology. They view it as little more than, as you put it, playing with bits of bone and dirt. In systematics, morphology is very much denigrated today and prominent systematists in prominent papers in Systematic Biology, among other places, have seriously asserted that morphology is worthless for reconstructing evolutionary history. Since paleontology is, of course, limited to nothing but morphological data, it can be more or less dismissed as an unimportant discipline.
Personally, I object to all of this. I find it illogical, unsound, and consider it to be poor science. Although I must admit personal bias, for I have always loved paleontology, I think there are very solid arguments to be made for the pivotal contribution of paleontology to our understanding of evolution itself, to say nothing of the history of life on this planet, which we should hardly understand at all were it not for the information furnished by digging in the dirt and scrutinizing bones. Moreover, and I have no hesitation in saying this, contrary to Naish and others who share this view, it does seem to me that paleontology plays an essential role in establishing evolutionary theory. It has provided a fertile field of potentially disconfirming observations, any one of which would be enough to call evolutionary theory into jeopardy. In that such disconfirming observations have yet to materialize in the fossil record, the paleontological data can be said, on that basis alone, to have played a decisive role in the corroboration of evolutionary theory.
Most people I know - but then most of them are middle class Germans, and might be not representative for the rest of the world - seem to have a scientific appreciation scale based on a strangely manichaean concept of "purity". The more empirical and less abstract a science is, the lower it scores on this scale. The same holds true for practical application: The more practical application, the lower the score. Hence most consider astrophysics the highest form of science, while medicine is usually not considered science at all, but rather a form of engineering. Sadly, palaeontology doesn't score very high on this scale; it is very empirical, and while there is little practical application of vertebrate palaeontology (with the exeption of conodonts), at least some sections of invertebrate palaeolontology smell like money, worse still, like oil money. Of course, this system of ranking science is entirely irrational, but it is so well entrenched that almost everybody takes it for granted - with the remarkable exception of Stephen Jay Gould, who has strongly criticised the system of ranking science in Wonderful Life, probably reacting to the (in)famous Alvarez quote that palaeontologists were mere "stamp collectors".
> I think palaeontologists are viewed as similar to archaeologists,
> with a lot of people unable to distinguish them from each other.
> The image provided by Indiana Jones/Jurassic Park movies are what
> most people think of.
jck,
Indiana Jones is really blurring the borders between archaeology and palaeontology, because the hero of the movies is an archaeologist who is, at least in large parts, modeled after a historical person, Roy Chapman Andrews, who was a palaeontologist in real life (for the anoraks: Andrews' academic degree was in mammalogy, not palaeontology, but who cares?).