I am surprised to hear such talk from
paleontologists! Paleontologists need to cooperate with any
and all sorts, and mostly I'd say they do. Sometimes they actually
go after the discipline themselves, if it enhances their
paleo. At the UCMP, we run a molecular lab just to combine
the data with the fossils, without having to wait for the molecular
types. Molecules give us another historical record that we should
feel very comfortable with. Mostly it gives us other
hypotheses to test. I have yet to see any solutions come from it,
but then that makes for real exciting paleontology!!
I think that in any science (paleontology is not an exception) when
people support only a single hypothesis, they must resort to all kinds of
defenses and attacks on those who don't go along with it. If these
same people worked with multiple working hypotheses, used any data source
to test (NOT PROVE) those hypotheses, and were ready to add hypotheses to
the list of testable ones when additional data suggest that it
would be useful, then we'd have far fewer of these mostly destructive
kinds of interactions.
Molecules usually provide a different set of alternative hypotheses
that paleo alone cannot generate, but paleo commonly can test them.
Paleo provides hypotheses that molecules can't, but they often can help
sort them out. There is no conflict! Only an elimination of
hypotheses. If yours gets eliminated or challenged and you have no
alternative, then I can understand where this bitterness comes
from.
Check the references in
www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/people/jlipps/Science.html
for more about alternative hypotheses development and testing, if you are interested.
Jere