Re: CRANIAL-CAUDAL vs ANTERO-POSTERIOR

["Jerry D. Harris" <dinogami@hotmail.com>]

> I run into brontosaur in print or
> conversation about once a week, but nobody has ever said apatosaur.

  Maybe not adults, but I've heard it from children a-plenty!

> Glad we got over that unpleasantness about the metric system, too.

  Well, this country hasn't officially switched to the metric system, so 
expecting the public to be fluent with it is probably unreasonable.  (As for 
_why_ we haven't switched, I'm not exactly certain, but I suspect it has a 
great deal to do with having to expand all the football fields to have 
"meter lines" instead of "yardlines;" the subsequent increase in actual 
physical work the athlete's would have to then do would cause them to demand 
substantial pay increases, and the economy would then collapse.  ;-D  )  At 
any rate, metric _is_ the standard _within_ science, and although I 
certainly wouldn't consider myself fluent with it, I do use it because it 
enhances communicability with fellow scientists.

> Not onlist because this can sound like a dispute, but please don't assume
> that scientists 'own' science.

  I don't see where that is a tacit assumption in making a paradigm shift 
to a new system -- and certainly, we should never _not_ make such a shift 
simply because it will confuse the non-scientific community!  ...but at any 
rate, that's beside the point: various sciences have certainly undergone any 
number of paradigm shifts, generally from more simplistic to more complex 
yet more descriptive frames (for example, the changes throughout history 
concerning the composition of the atom) because the "new" frame excludes a 
great deal of ambiguity present in former frames and allows new hypotheses 
to be constructed.  Probably because scientists generally communicate 
_first_ with other scientists, such shifts occur within the scientific 
community before it spreads into non-scientific circles (and, I would 
assume, that amateur scientists and teachers have a great deal to do with 
this!) -- thus, there is an inevitable lag time between a change in 
scientific terminology and seeing that same change pervade the public 
resource base.  Restricting the use of "anterior" and "posterior" and 
expanding the use of "cranial," "caudal," "rostral," etc. has been the norm 
in anatomical circles for quite a long time now -- I'm surprised it's taken 
this long to make it into paleontological circles, but I expcet that, in 
several more decades, it'll become the norm in most places.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jerry D. Harris
Dept of Earth & Environmental Science
University of Pennsylvania
240 S 33rd St
Philadelphia PA  19104-6316
Phone: (215) 573-8373
Fax: (215) 898-0964
E-mail: jdharris@sas.upenn.edu
and     dinogami@hotmail.com
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jdharris

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