WHERE do dinosaurs exist: in fossil beds, among the human-ish cartoon
characters of The Flintstones or in the imaginations of
palaeontologists? As a paid-up cultural relativist, W. J. Thomas Mitchell
explores the second and illuminates the third, while appearing unconcerned with
the first.
The cover of his The Last Dinosaur Book(University of Chicago Press,
$24.50, ISBN 0226532046), comes from a science-fiction story and shows
two cowboys on horseback, aiming their guns at a dinosaur that has mistakenly
wandered into the badlands of the American Wild West. Mitchell鈥檚 reach runs the
gamut of dinosaurian images, from woodcuts of ancient mythical dragons to the
computer-generated dinosaurs of Steven Spielberg鈥檚 Jurassic Park. Pop
culture takes centre stage, with Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes cartoons that
inevitably illustrate the human condition as much as the dinosaurian. That鈥檚
good clean fun.
Then Mitchell turns to Rudolph Zallinger鈥檚 1947 Age of Reptiles
mural at Yale, and sees only the 170 million years of dinosaurs. But
wait鈥攊t shows the first amphibian crawling onto land at the start of the
Devonian, more than 400 million years ago. You begin to understand this
ignorance of the geological time scale when you read: 鈥渀Truth,鈥� `novelty,鈥�
`parsimony,鈥� and other shibboleths of this sort are forces of `cultural
selection鈥� in science鈥檚 account of its own evolution.鈥� Mitchell regards the
鈥渇acts鈥� as a cultural construct. It鈥檚 a strange view of science鈥攂ut has
some justice because some fathers of palaeontology shared the narrow-minded
racism endemic in their times. Victorian scientists considered evolution as a
steady progress of life that ultimately led to biologically superior
organisms鈥� namely, Victorian scientists. It鈥檚 natural they would see
dinosaurs as sluggish and worthy of extinction 鈥攁n image that lingers in
popular culture today.
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