Bang! Another Paradigm Gone... (and that's a Good Thing©)

From Number 80 I found out about this article by Joe Eaton, archived at the Berkely Daily Planet. It's about grass, and lizards and snakes and venom, and discovery.

It's also about science, and how it works. It starts out like this:

Anyone else remember the Firesign Theater’s record “Everything You Know is Wrong”? You get that feeling if you follow science at all closely. One day the earth is solid and stable; the next, the continents are whizzing around the mantle like bumper cars. You learn that the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, and then it turns out you just had one for Thanksgiving dinner. It’s what the historian of science Thomas Kuhn called the paradigm shift, and it just keeps happening.

Before talking about lizards, the article also goes into some detail about just when grass showed up - and the evidence that it was much earlier than we thought, which impacts our notion of the "evolution of herbivorous mammals. Unspecialized leaf-browsers died out, and lineages that evolved teeth capable of processing the tiny bits of silica in the grass blades—horses, for one—throve." Not so - and how exciting!

Then he moves on to a close look at the discovery that it's not just a couple of lizards that are venomous, but most - though not venomous enough to damage large animals, just the tiny things they eat. A complete and radical re-evaluation of lizard-snake evolution is called for:

Snakes, of course, are just highly specialized lizards, having shared a relatively recent common ancestor with the Komodo dragon and other members of the monitor family. And venom glands are a widely shared, although not universal, trait among snakes. ...

The exceptions to the venom trend are mostly constrictors like the boas and pythons, who squeeze the life out of their victims. Because of anatomical features like vestigial hindlegs, they’re considered to be primitive among snakes. So it made sense to see venom and its delivery system as characteristics that more progressive snakes evolved.

But then "University of Melbourne biologist Bryan Fry, who studies the evolution of snake venom", began actually looking at lizards - and found out they're venomous as well, or many of them, including the Komodos and other monitors. So it looks like we have to rethink our ideas of snake evolution:

So there goes another paradigm. And that’s fine; that’s the way science is supposed to work, what distinguishes science from theology. Any scientific theory is potentially falsifiable. Someone once asked JBS Haldane what he would consider as clenching disproof of evolution. “Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian”, he replied. Fair enough; if those 600 million-year-old rabbits ever turn up, science will have some explaining to do. But no rabbit, fossil or otherwise, is ever going to convince the acolytes of faith-based pseudoscience that their belief in intelligent design is misplaced. [emphasis mine]

Indeed.

And one more thing:

You will note that no 'established' scientists are attacking Fry, or the "botanist named Caroline Stromberg at the Swedish Natural History Museum" who did the work that brought down the conventional wisdom on the Miocene triumph of the grasses. Scientists really are thrilled when they're proved wrong (key word here: proved).

And that's what distinguishes scientists from theologians, to paraphrase Eaton. Science and scientists welcome challenge and accept changes to the received notion - because it was received from other scientists. Theologians won't even hear challenges - vide heresy laws and death sentences for blasphemy.

Of course, if you want to challenge the dominant paradigm in science, you have to have done the work and the results to show. In the words of Robert Park: "Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough that you be persecuted by an unkind establishment, you must also be right."

But scientists will listen to you.

The paradigm will shift.

Learning will advance - and we with it - as long as we choose science, not faith.