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> > I'm sure that this is a heresy, but why should the Tax Payer (who is > already saddled with negative equity, rising education costs, no job > security...) pay for scientists to work on long-extinct groups of > microfossils, or KT boundaries, or even Ammonites? > > Compared to a LOT of people out there, surely we have it pretty good? How > many of us ever take our science to the guy who's paying for it...Joe Q. > Public? > > Yours, > > Neale (Devil's Advocate at Large) Goodness Neale, What does our Devil's advocate mean? I'm sure most palaeontologists can give some reasonable justification for their work. How about global climate modeling? Everyone seems to be fairly concerned with the great "global change" buzzword, yet GCM studies are struggling because they do not have the necessary baseline data on how the earth behaves. Only earth history can provide these data and only a few palaeontologists and other earth historians are trying to provide them. As for taking the science to Joe Public - well if you are not, why not? Palaeontology is one of the best possible means of introducing young (and even old) students to science in general. Kids love dinosaurs and even brachiopods if that's all you have. It is an easy introduction from that innate love to the larger world of science. If you can turn kids on to science soon enough (with palaeo.) they may not waste so much valuable learning time being afraid of it. If palaeontology did nothing else but introduce the public at large (and at an early age) to science it would be reason enough for taxpayers to pay for it. I don't believe it is hard for us to pull our weight - we just don't like to talk about it to some of our snobbish colleagues who still wear calculators on their belts. Cheers, Gregg Gregory E. Webb Department of Geology and Geophysics Texas A&M University webb@geopsun.tamu.edu
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