What is Man?

On Wednesday Wired magazine published an article about the World Science Festival. The article highlighted an appearance by string theory expert Brian Greene and entertainer Alan Alda. In the interview, Alda said the following:

One of the things I like with science is that it’s based on uncertainty, on never quite knowing, and gaining a little glimmer of understanding every time.

I liked this quote, though I suspect the meaning I see in it might not reflect what the speaker intended.

The reason that I mention this quote is an article on the Science Discovery website that details a paper published this week in the Journal of Morphology. 

From the article:

“It’s really kind of amazing that after centuries of studying birds and flight we still didn’t understand a basic aspect of bird biology," said John Ruben, an OSU professor of zoology. "This discovery probably means that birds evolved on a parallel path alongside dinosaurs, starting that process before most dinosaur species even existed.

"This is fundamental to bird physiology," said Devon Quick, an OSU instructor of zoology who completed this work as part of her doctoral studies. "It’s really strange that no one realized this before. The position of the thigh bone and muscles in birds is critical to their lung function, which in turn is what gives them enough lung capacity for flight." However, every other animal that has walked on land, the scientists said, has a moveable thigh bone that is involved in their motion – including humans, elephants, dogs, lizards and – in the ancient past – dinosaurs.

The implication, the researchers said, is that birds almost certainly did not descend from theropod dinosaurs, such as tyrannosaurus or allosaurus. The findings add to a growing body of evidence in the past two decades that challenge some of the most widely-held beliefs about animal evolution.

“For one thing, birds are found earlier in the fossil record than the dinosaurs they are supposed to have descended from," Ruben said. "That’s a pretty serious problem, and there are other inconsistencies with the bird-from-dinosaur theories."But one of the primary reasons many scientists kept pointing to birds as having descended from dinosaurs was similarities in their lungs," Ruben said. "However, theropod dinosaurs had a moving femur and therefore could not have had a lung that worked like that in birds. Their abdominal air sac, if they had one, would have collapsed. That undercuts a critical piece of supporting evidence for the dinosaur-bird link.

It concludes:

Frankly, there’s a lot of museum politics involved in this, a lot of careers committed to a particular point of view even if new scientific evidence raises questions," Ruben said. In some museum displays, he said, the birds-descended-from-dinosaurs evolutionary theory has been portrayed as a largely accepted fact, with an asterisk pointing out in small type that "some scientists disagree. Our work at OSU used to be pretty much the only asterisk they were talking about," Ruben said. "But now there are more asterisks all the time. That’s part of the process of science."

I highlighted those sentences in the last block quote because of Brian Greene’s statement in the Wired article:

Greene: We try never to preach that science comes from on high and should be taken uncritically. Feel free to mull over every morsel, ask questions, and spit it back out if it doesn’t make sense.

Wired.com: What about those places, such as young earth creationism, where some people just will not accept something for which all the evidence points in one direction?

Greene: However well-intentioned your goals, you’re never going to bring everybody into the fold. And that’s okay. There are people in whom there’s no willingness for rational thought and evidence-based thinking to dictate what they believe to be true.

In other words, it’s ok to take science critically as long as you come to the same conclusion as the rest of “the fold.” That doesn’t sound like science “based on uncertainty, on never quite knowing.” As for the rejection of evidence? According to Ruben, this problem isn’t just limited to “young earth creationism.” It’s also endemic to the very institutions that are tasked with feeding the public with with science information.

I’ll close with this nugget from PBS courtesy of National Geographic, two of the largest shepherds of public science knowledge:

Notice the title, “Path to Birds” and the “timeline.” But the subtext includes the following oxymoronic statement: “This family tree is not a chronological progression.”

Go figure.