+- Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum (https://www.scivillage.com)
+-- Forum: Science (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-61.html)
+--- Forum: Junk Science (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-88.html)
+--- Thread: How rich countries skew the fossil record (/thread-11578.html)
How rich countries skew the fossil record - C C - Jan 14, 2022
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00034-5
INTRO: Our understanding of the history of life on Earth is biased towards wealthier countries, warns a study of the fossil record. The analysis reveals that a whopping 97% of palaeontological data come from scientists in high- and upper-middle-income countries such as the United States, Germany and China.
“I knew it was going to be high, but I didn’t think it was going to be this high. It was astonishing,” says Nussaïbah Raja, a palaeontologist at the Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen–Nuremberg in Erlangen, Germany, who co-led the study. The bias in the fossil record towards rich countries could skew researchers’ understanding of the history of life, she and her colleagues warn. The paper was published on 30 December 2021 in Nature Ecology & Evolution... (MORE - details) ..... RELATED: (Fossil research affected by significant colonial bias, study finds)
- - - - - -
Inner Cynic: In order for this claim to make sense, you have to assume that [leftist] social justice "theories" are more fundamental than science methodology -- or the ability of the overall enterprise to evaluate, revise, and refine itself to some degree of facthood, regardless of the shortcomings of individual scientists.
This postmodern thought orientation that the science process itself is culturally relativistic incrementally opens the door to every kind of quackery and regional mythology under the sun, in the guise of indigenous science and other things.
But science administrators and policy-makers eat up such SocJus excretion -- their brains fall out, or they stand in awe of its Woke Meister majesty.
Like any other category of professional skills, many scientists become gullible dolts when they step outside their own area of expertise. And in the case of the social sciences, sometimes they're pretty much that even within their respective domains (or perhaps it's better to say that they're prey to its operational issues, easily exploited and manipulated by various special interests and the motivated reasoning of their own ideological predilections).
NOTE: Whereas SocJus is usually short for [leftist] Social Justice, I idiosyncratically assign the SOC part to "Systemic Oppression Conspiracy" (I.e., it gets directly to the cognitive filter or lens that "all" offshoots of that intellectual ancestry interpret everything through.)
RE: How rich countries skew the fossil record - Syne - Jan 14, 2022
My reply to the other thread in this vein holds here too. https://www.scivillage.com/thread-11547-post-48393.html#pid48393