World Dinosaur

John Scopes and textbook cardboard

Posted from Laelaps 196 days ago
Dinosaurs! : Dinosaurs

I've been using the phrase "textbook cardboard" a lot lately. I first picked it up after reading Gould's Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle, but the concept had been made clear to me even before Gould provided me with something to call it. All too often scientific legends are passed down as fact (i.e. Richard Owen was a creationist, Cuvier rejected uniformitarianism, Huxley debated Wilberforce at Oxford), and a recently published paper in PLoS follows this trend in invoking the example of the infamous Scopes "Monkey Trial." The paper (Berkman et al. 2008) produces a picture of John Scop... (original story)