As we begin a new year (2007) it seems appropriate to reflect on human scientific progress in recent decades. In short, progress across most fields of science and technology has been prodigious and breathtaking. The rapid progress can in large measure be attributed to the way scientists have learned to work within a multidisciplinary paradigm with information technology facilitating the rapid sharing of data and research across the globe.
There has been a related movement afoot that resulted in Time Magazine’s coveted “Great Person of the Year Award” for 2006 going to YOU. We quote:
“But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.”
“And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is YOU.” Read on …
Biology, evolution, paleontology, geology, natural history have always been inextricably linked, and have become even more so in recent decades, as the collaborative and community paradigm mentioned above has also manifested in each of these areas of science. In the vast blogosphere, science has moved beyond the classroom and recondite journals to a hyper dimensional realm available to the great unwashed. Many baby-boomers like me recall reading Orwell’s famous book Nineteen Eighty-Four as a school assignment. Indeed, the term "Orwellian" has become common vernacular denoting actions or organizations similar to the totalitarian society depicted in the novel. Orwell depicted a world’s population whose thoughts and actions were controlled with ubiquitous technological surveillance. He did not, however, envision what has now come to pass -- that technology would also enable counterintelligence against political, corporate, and religious elements that work to divide and control people of the planet.
Maintenance of scientific ignorance has been a paramount goal of many religions for as long as there has been science. Many religious and science are fundamentally, mutually exclusive. The centuries-old war between religion and science is being highly contested in the blogosphere, especially in the contentious battlefield of evolution versus creation, and especially in the two top science blogs as reported by Nature Magazine, Pharyngula and The Panda’s thumb.
We are most excited about the prospects for a new scientific website, created by and for the people of the world, palaeos.org. In truth, the site is less new than it is an evolutionary leap from its predecessor, palaeos.com, a site that was almost lost due selective pressure exerted by the burden of the "html" webmaster workload, a problem we are all too familiar with at this museum. The solution for Palaeos: a wiki-based site using the same software as Wikipedia, and thus allowing a regiment of contributors who can be their own webmasters. The new Palaeos wiki is, in short, a multi-authored Encyclopedia on the history of life on Earth:
“As the orientating diagrams of Palaeos, coloured menus will allow the visitor or wiki editor to navigate around the site, tracing the lineages of life, whether present-day organisms or the ultimate common ancestor over millions of years of time, drifiting continents and changing geographical features, and through the ecological interaction of every taxon with other organisms and its environment as a whole. And not just life but everything from inorganic features to the development of intelligence and human civilization (although the evolution of life will be the primary focus)”
Only launched in September, 2006, the site’s design and progress is already remarkable with more than three dozen contributors led by Alan Kazlev, who confesses to an autodidactic obsession with paleontology and paleobiology. An infrastructure grounded in phylogenetics and color coding of geological time will facilitate progress. The contributors, like those of this museum, and including contributors to this museum, are an eclectic bunch from across the earth’s time zones. There are scientists of various ilk, artists, Wikipedians, and writers. In the spirit of Time’s person of the year, it could be YOU among them.
The relentless progress also continued in 2006 at the Virtual Fossil Museum, with many new specimens added. The queue work remains full, however, so please return and watch for new additions. A special goal in 2007 will be adding educational materials such as lesson plans and power point presentations for K-16. To this end, we really teach need some teachers to help.
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