Re: nomenclature and teaching

[slaz@electriciti.com (Steven S. Lazarus)]

On 4/30/96 Bonnie Blackwell wrote:

>I have been teaching dinosaurs as a non-specialist, 1st year (freshman
>to you yanks) "rocks for jocks" course now for four terms and find that
>what students most want to know is not the names.  the little kids
>(and i have taught them in 3 summer enrichment courses) want to know
>the names, the sizes, and the stuff like that (the "facts" if you will).
>the college types are much less interested in the litany of names and
>sizes (or even the "est"'s -biggest, longest, heaviest, smallest, etc.)
>They really want to know community relationships.  I find that this is
>the hardest information to find.

What people really want to know calls for a great deal of speculation and
extrapolation from speculation.

>So I would strongly urge you dinosaur researchers to find ways to get the
>community information into the popular literature.

No one wants to go out on a limb and be flamed like other popularists.

>Names are great, but adults really want to know about more complex
>relationships!  Let'a try to give it to them, eh?

We can't really know what we want to know. The most learned and educated
among us can give us a "best guess" scenario. These speculations are hotly
debated and often controversial among the experts as we have seen. It is
commonplace for accepted theories to later be refuted in light of new
evidence or more compelling interpretation. Truth is always partial,
fragmented and transitory this field.

In terms of common experience, when it comes to dinosaurs, what do we
really have? We've got paleontologists describing fossils, creating and
debating names, arguing cladistics, classifying obvious behaviourisms (i.e.
carnivore, herbivore)... sometimes speculating more subtle behaviours... up
to Bakker's fantasies... and into popular culture through Jurassic Park
which gives us our most tangible and concrete, yet unreliable images and
experiences.

What we really need is a way to field trip to the Mesozoic. Roger Penrose
(theoretical physicist, popularly associated with Steven Hawking) has an
interesting idea about states of consciousness and the possibility of
incarnating at points in time that are in the past as well as in the
future. Would any of you go if you could?

S.S. Lazarus