misrepresentin', yo
Being the sole paleontologist in my department, I keep conected with other paleontologists via a listserv. The other day, somebody posted a link to Scott Adams's blog. Scott Adams is the creator of Dilbert, which somehow gives him all sorts of knowledge about fossils, kind of like Tom Cruise is a psychiatrist (he's read the papers, Matt!).
The fact that Scott Adams misread an entire article about human evolution and used that to say fossil are bs is, well, stupidity on his part. However, even more frustrating for me is the comments that follow. I go a little more insane everytime I hear someone saying the evolution is "just a theory". Guess what, so is gravity! A theory in science is totally different than the use of "theory" in non-scientific parlance. Of course, there is a lot of misinformation in the comments, such as statements like "no transitional fossils exist". Then there's the uber-crazy statements like "evolution is a tin foil hat that atheists wear to keep God from reading their brain waves". Wow.
The worst though is the misrepresentation of scientists by the blog-commenters that obviously have no idea what science is about. They talk about how scientists work and what scientists are like in a way that is completely wrong and insulting. Not that scientists are much better about describing those people either, but jeez.
I'm about to be late in meeting an aspiring paleontologist that I'm going to be mentoring, but I leave this entry with another link to a blog that sums up how scientists are feeling about the aftermath of Scott Adams's blog: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/03/scott_adams_reads_newsweek_uho.php
The fact that Scott Adams misread an entire article about human evolution and used that to say fossil are bs is, well, stupidity on his part. However, even more frustrating for me is the comments that follow. I go a little more insane everytime I hear someone saying the evolution is "just a theory". Guess what, so is gravity! A theory in science is totally different than the use of "theory" in non-scientific parlance. Of course, there is a lot of misinformation in the comments, such as statements like "no transitional fossils exist". Then there's the uber-crazy statements like "evolution is a tin foil hat that atheists wear to keep God from reading their brain waves". Wow.
The worst though is the misrepresentation of scientists by the blog-commenters that obviously have no idea what science is about. They talk about how scientists work and what scientists are like in a way that is completely wrong and insulting. Not that scientists are much better about describing those people either, but jeez.
I'm about to be late in meeting an aspiring paleontologist that I'm going to be mentoring, but I leave this entry with another link to a blog that sums up how scientists are feeling about the aftermath of Scott Adams's blog: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/03/scott_adams_reads_newsweek_uho.php