My daughter has a new book about baby dinosaurs in which nearly every dinosaur has feathers. It includes a surprising fact about oviraptors.
"In 1923," writes author Lita Judge, "a new species of dinosaur was found lying on top of a nest. At first scientists thought the dinosaur had died while raiding the nest — it had a huge, toothless beak that looked perfect for eating eggs. They named it Oviraptor, which means 'Egg Thief.'"
Sasha knows about Oviraptors. Any book that goes beyond the Triceratops/T-rex/Brachiosaurus triumvirate will include information about the Oviraptor, since it was discovered so long ago, paleontologically speaking. They're one of the more frightening dinosaurs for a girl who so dearly loves babies. They stand in stark contrast to the Maiasaura, whose name means "Good Mother Lizard" and who is noted for actually looking after her babies. (Most dinosaurs, they say, were like turtles: they laid their eggs and then left.)
But lo. When paleontologists studied the embryos inside the eggs beside Oviraptor's fossilized remains, they realized that Oviraptors were not thieves. They were sitting on their own nests.
Says Lita Judge, "Though he couldn't fly, a father Oviraptor might have spread his feathers over his fragile babies to keep them cool in the searing desert sun while mother brought meat for their next meal. He may also have used his feathers to keep his babies warm at night."
I don't particularly like dinosaurs, but I do enjoy the history of dinosaur discoveries. I find it so interesting that dinosaur books for children include caveats, phrases like "scientists used to believe" or "scientists now think..." They are sprinkled with words like "maybe" and "perhaps."
When a child grows up with books like these, how do they affect her worldview? Will she come to believe that knowledge is provisional, that truths are only temporary, that it's her choice to either "believe" or "not believe" what a scientist tells her?
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Ursula Le Guin has said, "History is one way of telling stories, just like myth, fiction, or oral storytelling. But over the last hundred years, history has pre-emptied the other forms of storytelling because of its claim to absolute, objective truth. Trying to be scientists, historians stood outside of history and told the story of how it was. All that has changed radically over the last twenty years. Historians now laugh at the pretence of objective truth. They agree that every age has its own history, and if there is any objective truth, we can't reach it with words. History is not a science, it's an art."**
My daughter's dinosaur books make me think that science is not a science, but an art.
*"Born To Be Giants: How Baby Dinosaurs Grew To Rule the World." Copyright 2010 by Lita Judge. The illustrations in this book are gorgeous.
**I found this quote here, where it was excepted from "Talking on the Water; Conversations About Nature and Creativity", copyright 1994 by Jonathan White.
7 comments:
I hope that my kids will decide that science is unafraid of examination and revision. Maybe they will be a little more humble about their own certainties, and more open to further examination.
Then again, they're very into fart jokes lately. Unless it's the science of flatulence, they're not paying much attention. ;-)
We just saw Sue the t-rex skeleton yesterday. I didn't realize she was found by an amateur fossil hunter - how cool!
See, here's the thing: of course science is open to examination and revision, but the kind of "examination and revision" you point to with the example about dinosaurs is very, very minor. Out of the--what, hundreds?--of species of dinosaurs, they misinterpreted the findings of one species. That actually says that the previous science was exceptionally solid and sound, and because theyr'e humans and had imprefect tools they made an oops.
Something proving that science is a 'belief' in the same way that history is a 'belief' would be if all of a sudden, tomorrow, a paleontologist finds something that casts the whole idea of dinosaurs in doubt. Dinosaurs never existed! Were we ever wrong! They were actually just massive malformed elephants!
But when the underlying body of science remains essentially unchanged (there were large reptiles that were the dominant lifeform for millions of years, who evolved out of x, consisting of y known species, each consisting of a volume of knowledge itself about how large it was, its dietary habits, lineage, when it lived, and so on, etc. etc.) except for minor corrections as time goes by--wow, look, some of them had feathers!--that is actually science being science.
I hope this doesn't sound too critical, but it's something that's often misunderstood about science by non-scientists. Teh actual level of consensus and consistency is very high. True, paradigm-shifting revoluions are rare, and even they build on previous knowledge. Thus of course we continue to learn new things about dinosaurs (and other things) as we go along, but that doesn't meant hat everything we knew before was wrong or that what we know now is equivalent to mere belief. Does that make sense?
Andrea, I do understand what you're saying. It would be truly undermining if this book said that Oviraptor didn't exist at all, instead than saying that it was a rather different type of dino than scientists had imagined.
In thinking about this a little more: What interests me is the way that scientific facts get told to kids as a story and then it turns out that the essence of the story is incorrect. It's not like finding out that dinos never existed; it is instead like finding out that your beloved grandpa was in jail for a decade. T-Rex as Godzilla is really different from T-Rex as this cute, feathery baby that grows up to be a scavenger, for example; and Oviraptor as an egg thief is different from Oviraptor has a protective, equal-opportunity parent.
Maybe this is a lesson about anthropomorphism?
Ooooo. I'm wondering if our perception of dinosaurs changes with the times. Wouldn't that be a great Ph.D. thesis? Post-WW2 there's the Godzilla image of T-Rex, and now (in our kinder gentler times) dinos are "sold" to girls as well as boys and now they're not so scary, in fact they're feathery and cute...
This would not pertain to the actual science behind dinos but to the perception of dinos in popular culture (and children's books).
I could totally see that. All of evolution and evolutionary psychology changed with feminism--why not dinosaurs? Maybe your daughter will write that thesis one day. :)
(by the way, there are photos of trout lilies posted on my blog today.)
Ever heard They Might Be Giants' record, "Here Comes Science?" They have both the old song with "The Sun is a mass of incandescent gas," and a new song with the lyrics "the sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma" that explains how the earlier theory was invalidated by new knowledge.
To me, that's what is riveting about science. It reminds us, constantly, how little we actually know and how much we have left to learn - new discoveries have the capacity to turn our understanding of the universe on its ear.
What could better pique our curiosity and ignite our love of learning than that?
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