The Reality Fish

We are all familiar with the Jesus fish, Darwin fish, and its many endless forms most beautiful. Two of my favorites can be found heah and neah.

However, none of these anti-Christian variants really capture what I think is the most essential point about the "war" between science and religion: wishful thinking doesn't change reality, no matter how hard you believe, and that isn't science's fault. These various emblems showing Jesus fish being eaten by dinosaurs, fucked by Darwin fish etc... make it seem as though science is out to get religion. It isn't, anymore than the objective of the construction company building an overpass through your neighborhood is to destroy your house. It may happen in the course of things, but that isn't the ultimate goal. You was just in the way when we was a comin' through. Nothing personal.

Consequently, I have made my own contribution to the Jesus fish pantheon, which I feel captures the real essence of the science-religion conflict:

From Paleo Errata

Is it not beautiful? Someone please make it for me and send me one.

Oh yeah, and check this out.

LNJ

Advice For Aspiring Researchers In Vertebrate Paleontology, Part 6: Being A Vertebrate Paleontology Student

I previously did a series of posts where I presumed to offer advice to students looking to pursue a career in vertebrate paleontology (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5).

In a bygone year, a prominent vertebrate paleontologist wrote this letter to his students after returning to campus from sabbatical. It should be required reading for any undergraduate who hopes to pursue a career in VP. Surviving in this field as a research scientist requires enthusiasm and activity; VP isn't really built to sustain tourists. I have X-ed out names and dates since the professor in question is still alive.

"Dear Students,

"Please accept this memorandum as my formal greeting to you on my return from study leave and at the start of the academic year 19XX-XX. This memorandum is intended to serve as well as a reminder of certain realities that may have faded during the past year, while I was away. I hope that you will take the contents of this reminder seriously, because they outline the expectations that I have for each of you during your entire tenure here as graduate students, as well as during the coming year.

"It is a reality, of course, that sometime in the future I will have to evaluate your performance as a young scholar, for a prospective employer, perhaps, or when you apply for a further degree. That is a fact of life and one that I take seriously, especially if you intend continuing in vertebrate paleontology in some capacity. You should known that I value motivation as the most desirable quality in students at your stage of development. I have no patience with unmotivated students. I have lots of patience with highly motivated students.

"The official work week of the University is 35 hours, for full-time employees (technicians, typists, clerks, etc.). That, however, is not the duration I expect for your work week, irrespective of the present status of your program (that is, whether or not you are taking courses and/or teaching and/or working for me and/or working on your own research project). If you are not taking courses and not teaching, then I expect that the time taken for your research will expand into the increased time that you now have at your disposal. Similarly, if your are taking courses and/or teaching, you are not relieved at all of responsibility for maintaining an active research program, in addition to meeting those other academic demands on your time: I suppose it is an old-fashioned idea, but I expect students (especially graduate students) to study, as well; for example, which of you regularly reads Systematic Zoology, Evolution, Paleontology, Journal of Paleontology, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, at a minimum? And which of you regularly scans the remainder of the literature that is relevant to vertebrate paleontology and evolution? Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I strongly suspect that none of you do!

"Let me remind you that your research program does not merely consist of identifying your fossils and writing up your species accounts. You are also supposed to be educating yourselves, on your own initiative, as a simple reflection of the interest you have in your subject. You are past the stage of merely following the directions given you by your instructors in class; that's what being an undergraduate is all about. Now, as a research scientist-in-training, you are supposed to be devoting some significant fraction of your waking time to for doing science: for example, each of you has a vast amount of reading to do (unless you know more than I do, and I strongly suspect that you do not), each of you must be able to identify your fossils, you must understand their phylogenetic and geographic significance, you must be able to interpret them stratigraphically (and to have the relevant stratigraphy under control, which I suspect you do not), you may have preparation of fossils to do, you have to catalogue your collection before you complete your degree, etc., etc. In short, you have to be very busy, but since my return here, I have seen little evidence that you are very busy, at least on your academic work. Quite frankly, I hope that this situation does not continue.

"If you wish your "academic" day to end at 5:00 pm, I suggest that you become a bank clerk, salesperson, auto mechanic or whatever, and that you do so without delay. If you believe that your "academic" week should be confined to the interval between Monday and Friday, you'd best be a genius, because you will not be able to meet my expectations otherwise (and as far as I know, none of us here are geniuses).

"I urge you each to "get with it", to do so immediately, and to continue to do so until the scheduled completion of your program, on a sustained basis. If you do not know what to do, we can talk about it, in continuation of your education. But do not make the error of supposing that I do not mean what I say; if you think not, I suggest that you speak with XXXX XXXX, now of the Department of Entomology. He's a pleasant fellow, but that helped him not at all."

Ouch.

Apparently, we could use a makeover.

On an unrelated note: You may be familiar with Captain Kirk's infamous spoken word renditions of “Rocketman” and “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” which are about as trippy weird and hilarious as it would be to watch the Pope hum and dance a little to “Promiscuous” with a completely straight face for his Sunday congregation.

During my Connecticut visit, Weinbaum played a song(?) called “I Can’t Get Behind That” from a more recent album of Shatner's called “Has Been.” To my surprise, it was actually pretty good, a funny and clever rant against things that Shatner finds annoying, so I downloaded the album the other day. I didn't care for all the numbers, but "Common People", "You'll Have Time", and "I Can't Get Behind That" are well worth checking out. Listening to "Common People" I felt a bit like the kids in the auditorium watching Jon Heder dance. It was so weird (mostly to hear Shatner bemoaning the plight of the working class), hilarious (unlike "Rocketman", the humor in "Has Been" is mostly intentional), and unexpectedly good that I was a little dumbstruck.

Anyway, nice job Kirk.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Hello my pretties.

One or two of you may have been reading the blog, and been really upset when I stopped posting. I apologize. Dry your little eyes. It was suggested that I get out of vertebrate paleontology, and I had to go think about it. All that thinking made me hungry, so then I had some pie. I am happy to announce that I have decided to stay in paleo, at least in an advisory capacity as a more or less competent stratigrapher who can also draw and annoy.

It has been a busy summer. Here is a picture of me and our paleo interns, Rachel and Chuck, at the corner of a street in Holbrook that has one of the best names of any street in the world. Rachel and Chuck were both awesome and really good at finding and digging up bones, although Bill had to beat Chuck unconscious with a piece of chicken one evening at Ghost Ranch. I’m not kidding.

They are gone now and I miss them very much. Fortunately our new preparators Matt Smith and Kenny Bader (who was with us last summer) are still here, after Matt Brown left us to go to Austin, which has more culture and less Jesus and meth (per capita). Here is the whole crew on the day we finally got out the aetosaur skeleton Bill blogged recently on. From left to right are me, Rachel, Chuck, Kenny, Matt, and Bill. Bill looks possessive.

My homeboy Jonathan Weinbaum came out for his first field season at a faculty member at Southern Connecticut State University, and prospected private property to the west of the park. He got a bunch of good stuff, including diagnostic phytosaur, aetosaur, and dinosaur material out of the Sonsela Member, and I am pretty sure I can tie his locality into the Devil’s Playground section. We camped out on one of my days off and I got good and wasted, but not Jonathan because he is a respected faculty member.

In addition to finally getting our first stratigraphy paper on the Chinle Formation in the park submitted, I have also written a book review of John Foster’s Jurassic West for JVP (due out in December). Congrats to Rebecca for bagging herself a guy who can write really well. In case you haven’t read it, it presents a glut of information in a clear an interesting manner, even though the Jurassic was a time when the dinosaurs were too big.

For July 4th, I went to the “RO-DEE-O” in the nearby town of Taylor. This is a traditional western event in which livestock are humiliated and retaliate by fucking up cowboys and clowns (in fact, one of the latter got his leg broken by a bull). One of the events was watching how fast a guy on a horse can jerk a baby cow off its feet with a rope around its neck, slam it on its back, and make it think it is crippled by tying its feet together. Awesome. I realized there can only be one thought running through their cute little heads as they trot past the stands to the gate after being freed:

I am going to fucking kill ALL of you.

We had fun. The sound track for the evening included hip hop and that country-western classic, “YMCA.” These songs represent subcultures with a long history of being respected and treasured in the American West, and I was proud as hell to see the people of Taylor dancing to them.

Take care of each other,

LNJ