How Dinosaurs Can Show the Path Forward
Imagine living in a world before dinosaurs.
Not the primordial world before dinosaurs, where the local fish still had tennis elbow from having recently crawled onto land…
No, the world before dinosaurs that was just about 200 years before present day. A world where there were plenty of humans around, but very few of those humans knew that there ever had been dinosaurs.
It seems crazy to think about nowadays. Because if you’re anything like me, dinosaurs were a big part of your childhood. I could probably name fifty dinosaurs before I knew who George Washington was. I was way more interested in long-dead reptiles than I was in my still-living housecat.
In this obsession, I know I wasn’t alone.
Any trip to any toy store anywhere in the world will deliver undeniable evidence that dinosaurs are freakin’ awesome.
And yet until comparatively recently, nobody even knew they had existed.
The “Easter Egg” Theory of Paleontology
The history of the discovery of dinosaurs is a fascinating mash-up of science and culture.
The problem first appeared as something called “figured stones” — what we now call “fossils.” Every now and then a farmer plowing a field or a pirate digging up treasure (or whatever) would happen upon a rock that was either shaped like or had the distinct impression of some living thing. Like a fern-leaf or a seashell… on a rock?
What was he to make of this? Leaves were not rocks. Plants came from seeds, and they aged either into rotting mulch or smoke and ash. Transmutation into rock was not on their list of options. So what the hell was going on?
The accepted answer at the time — accepted because no one had a better idea — was that the figured stones were like God’s version of “easter eggs” in a video game. Something that’s hidden kind of randomly, in case someone stumbles onto it.
“Five-and-a-half days into Creation, God was a little bored. And so He made rocks that looked like fish and He buried them on mountaintops, in case anyone were ever to doubt that His omnipotent powers included the truly arbitrary.”
This explanation worked well enough for plant and mollusk fossils because (then, as now) both of these seemed pretty boring to non-geeks.
But the dam of theological explanations started cracking when figured stones started being found in shapes that were recognizable as reptile bones — giant ones. That was enough to get people talking.
And enough people talking led to more “Oh yeah, my cousin Ned has one of those too…” conversations. Interest begets interest.
By the early 19th century, Reverend William Buckland, the Dean of Christchurch at Oxford University found himself in possession of a collection of bones and teeth from a reptile of “unimaginable immensity.” He was a biologist as well as a churchman, and although this animal must have seemed like an unfortunate omission from the Bible, here it was in front of him. He named his beast the megalosaurus.*
* He recognized that using Latin would mask the fact that “really big lizard” is a decidedly second-rate name.
Rock of Ages
By Reverend Buckland’s time, the idea had been gaining currency for a while that somehow or another living things were actually turning into rock. The problem with this theory was that European alchemists had had no more luck turning ordinary objects into rock than they’d had turning them into gold.
But while alchemists failed to create gold, the young science of geology made less grandiose claims, and was still proving useful in identifying good spots to pull precious metals out of the ground.
Many geologists were professing the heretical idea that wholly natural processes could — given enough time — transmute living things into rock-like statues. Nothing about this idea was inherently heretical…except for the “given enough time” part.
The natural processes, the geologists said, would be very, very slow.
This didn’t jibe well with the accepted wisdom about the age of the Earth. Biblical calculations conducted by Archbishop James Usher in the 17th century had time-stamped the moment of Creation at 6:00pm on October 22nd, 4004 BC.*
* The time zone was unspecified, but Usher was on GMT. The Almighty’s local time zone remains a matter of some speculation.
Another problem facing the dinosaur-curious in this era was England’s dismal lack of giant reptiles. (This is something British schoolchildren still complain about.)
If one accepted the premise that fossils had once been living things, then where were those creatures’ descendants? The gospels didn’t mention any species that had been summarily smited. And the story of Noah — among the most famous in the Bible — seemed to imply that the continuousness of species was part of the divine order.
But so where were the damned giant lizards?
Making Change
You can only find so many enormous dinosaur skeletons before people start taking note. And paleontology was being born around the same time the Age of Exploration was drawing to a close.
Most of the Earth had been mapped. There weren’t terribly many blank spots on the atlas where herds of apatosaurs might be galumphing, or where jungle-man savages might use stegosaurs instead of guard dogs when they slept at night.
This must have been the ultimate annoying tease for the world’s children. First they find out there are these awesome, scary-ass monsters — and they’re real. Leprechauns, ghosts, fairies — none of these had bones you could go see on display….
But then comes the punch: the sinking realization that dinosaurs were real, but only in a time untold aeons before you or even your grandparents were born. What a let-down.
Scientists were having a rough time of it, too. The static nature of the world since Creation was cooked into everyone’s assumptions about everything. But now this was giving way to the notion that things change — and that little changes we all see every day accumulate into big changes over time.
This new understanding was paradigm-shattering.
Some people couldn’t take it. (And some still can’t.)
But over the course of a generation, the scientific conversation shifted from “does the Earth change?” to “how does the Earth change?”
The debate was increasingly between catastrophism and gradualism. This, by the way, is an argument that continues to present day, with catastrophists arguing that most change comes from massive, singular events. Gradualists take the view that straws less often break camels’ backs and more often lead to camels perfectly honed to carry lots of straw.
Regardless of where a particular scientist’s loyalties lay, they could all agree on one thing: They were living in an era of upheaval in the most basic assumptions of the field.
A static or a changing world? That was the question.
“Talking ‘bout my generation…”
The world is always getting thrown into disarray, if you know where to look.
In scientific circles, you can often see where the action is based on where recently-awarded PhDs congregate to begin their research careers. This should come as no surprise. It’s hard to make a name for yourself — or to win grants or research funding — in fields where the big questions have all seemingly been resolved.
Looking back on present day from many years in the future, this second decade of the 21st century may well be seen as a major inflection point in our understanding of human nutrition.
When mountaineers in the 1700s found seashell fossils at 12,000 feet…something didn’t add up.
Today, we’ve got obese grade school kids on low-fat diets.
Something doesn’t add up.
Decades of nutritional orthodoxy preaching against dietary fat are starting to teeter on their foundations. An all-too-visible public health crisis of exploding waistlines and rampant antidepressant prescriptions are hitting like hammer-blows.
At the same time, there is promising research data on our purported dietary nemesis: fat.
Maybe fat isn’t that bad?
Maybe we aren’t what we eat?
In Episode #147 of Smart Drug Smarts, I speak with Dr. Dominic D’Agostino. D’Agostino works at the forefront of research into ketosis, the name for the body’s alternate metabolic pathway that allows humans to derive energy mostly from fats, not sugars.
The potential benefits to body and brain — both for therapeutic use and for performance enhancement — are immense. But we’re just beginning to learn the dietary do’s and don’ts, to augment the biochemical why’s and how’s.
Listen in to hear Dr. D’Agostino’s current understanding in this ongoing revolution in what we think about what we eat.
