Canadian Amber, Fin-Tailed Dinosaurs, and a Despairing Blogger

Science, as a process, promotes an adversarial system. A scientist poses an hypothesis from an observation, then attempts to refute this hypothesis through further observations arrived at from experimentation and testing, and poses a further hypothesis from the results; if it stands, he can make a claim that a thing is, or isn’t. Another scientist comes along and attempts to refute that finding, and so on and so forth. We can presume that scientist A and scientist B are both using the same data or are merely increasing the data used to make observations, and that the same data is included by further authors, thus merely expanding the perspective. But it seems there are adversaries, and there are enemies. Some scientists, against seeming logic, will not even regard the same datasets offered, and use this as refutation of previous datasets or observations. Science, we presume, is not served when workers talk past one another, or make claims that a thing simply is, without any substantiation for why.

Lingham-Soliar’s Review of Chinese Fossil Preservation

…or, an article that can be summed up by the following rhetoric:

“On this 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, perhaps the greatest evolutionary biologist of all time, I ask, has the care and caution that characterized Darwin’s work taken a downward spiral in many of the evolutionary interpretations associated with the fossils from China today? Good fossils or bad science?” — Theagarten Lingham-Soliar, 2009 (J. Ornith) [1]

It is not enough, perhaps, to perform the work, or even make the comparisons, but to also have the framework established on which your theory is based.