When Jere Lipps wrote his ironic piece about building a rep in paleontology, he provided a list of the little larcenies done in the name of science and career-building. No one here seems to be prepared to defend any of those larcenies. Why is it then that most of the posts to this thread are eager to defend larceny by professionals against amateurs.
According to these posts, professionals are not larcenous but rather are merely procrastinators, too busy, or too disorganized to return borrowed material. Rationalization.
I am talking about material sought out from the amateur, not about a box of bone scraps or shell fragments dropped off unsolicited at your office door.
There are among the subscribers here those who wouldn't dream of doing anything so low as the things Jere Lipps describes, or anything that I propose to add to Jere's list. There are some who have done most of them. You know who you are, and so will the people you deal with. That is the point of Jere's article, isn't it?
And then there is the candid post (appended) from John Van Couvering of the American Museum of Natural History. John's post suggest another item to add to Jere Lipps' list of ways to build a reputation in paleontology:
>Adopt an attitude that amateurs are at best an inconvenience, and at worst an impediment to the important work of [fill in whatever you are doing at the moment]. You are the custodian of knowledge, and an amateur is not capable of accepting the truth; patronize him. If an amateur is persistent, he probably has a personality problem, he's needy or narcissistic; send him to the library. "Lordy, deliver me from the eager amateur!"<
<><><><><><><><
This is an interesting article from Jere. But Jere forgot another good way to build a rep in paleontology:
>Borrow interesting specimens from naive amateurs - collectors - with the promise to identify or describe the species. Then "misplace" the specimens. It is better that these specimens languish on your dusty shelf, safe from someone else describing them before you get around to it! After a few years, the collector will give up trying to recover them.<
-----------Harry Pristis
<><><><><><><
In a message dated 9/3/02 6:26:25 PM Pacific Daylight Time, paleovision.com@sympatico.ca writes:
An interesting article from Jere! http://palaeo-electronica.org/2002_1/editor/focus.htm humans are so clever, maybe this is why we are a superior species! Mario Cournoyer
<><><><><><><
In a message dated 9/5/02 8:50:58 AM Pacific Daylight Time, vanc@amnh.org (John Van Couvering) writes:
To second Peter Roopnarine's comment, I believe every professional has
found themselves disappointing an amateur collector at some time in their
career, because the importance of a discovery in the mind of the discoverer
is directly -- I would say geometrically -- proportional to the inverse of
the number of discoveries. "Oh, another one of THOSE," says the
pro. "I'll see if I have time to look at it. Next month maybe. Lot of
matrix there, and the [throw in morphological jargon] seems to be
missing. Eh." Even worse, if in a kindly attempt not to extinguish the
happy light in the amateur eye, we bite our tongue and try to find
something nice to say -- "Hmm, well, look at those growth lines
willya. Good eye, good eye" -- then we're setting up the betrayal
scene. The amateur will go away filled with pride and expectation, only to
discover after a while that the pro has, indeed, thrown the specimen on a
shelf to gather dust.
Not all the fault lies with the pro, I must add. All sorts of
personalities can intersect with a loose fossil, and we sometimes come up
against the CEO or the Hustler or the Needy Soul, all agog over their their
Scientific Specimen, and feeling empowered thereby to be on the phone
hourly with their narcissistic schemes. No wonder field seasons are so long.
All in all, maybe the best way to handle the Eager Amateur is to give them
directions to the library, where they can be handled by real professionals
in this sort of thing.
At 12:43 PM 9/4/2002 -0700, Peter Roopnarine wrote:
>-- Workers sometimes are simply too busy and disorganized to pay proper
>attention to what generally amounts to "a favour".
>--
>Dr. Peter D. Roopnarine, Chair, Asst. Curator
>Department of Invertebrate Zoology & Geology
>California Academy of Sciences