Feb 12, 2018 09:03 PM
https://aeon.co/ideas/what-a-fossil-revo...f-big-data
EXCERPT: . . . But modern palaeobiology succeeded where [...] others failed, for two reasons. First, by the 1970s some biologists [...] had become much more receptive to challenging Darwin’s gradualist evolutionary assumptions. [...] Likewise, the mass extinctions documented by my father and others led to a revision of the Darwinist belief that the diversity of life has been basically stable throughout geological history.
Secondly, and more broadly, culture has changed significantly. Yes, computers have allowed faster and more powerful statistical analysis than what was possible with pen and paper. But even more fundamentally, they have changed how we ‘see’ data. In the earlier 19th century, graphs [...] were relatively novel, and their ubiquity not yet established. Yet in our own time, it’s taken for granted that the best way of understanding large, complex phenomena often involves ‘crunching’ the numbers via computers, and projecting the results as visual summaries.
That’s not a bad thing, but it poses some challenges. In many scientific fields, from genetics to economics to palaeobiology, a kind of implicit trust is placed in the images and the algorithms that produce them. Often viewers have almost no idea how they were constructed. The complexity of computers has made data-analysis a black-box, something it’s hard for humans to peer into. At the same time, computer jockeys such as my dad have achieved a new cultural status – if not quite Indiana Jones, they still have a kind of power and authority most of us can’t access.
Increasingly, with the advances in machine-learning and AI, even those authorities are sometimes mystified by how their algorithms work. Indeed, there are many palaeontologists who are concerned that more traditional methods – developing deep familiarity with past organisms or environments – have been eclipsed by the lure of easy results and quick publication offered by data-crunching. The stakes for this one scientific discipline might seem fairly low, but in an age of molecular genomics and Google analytics, for the rest of us they couldn’t be higher....
MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/what-a-fossil-revo...f-big-data
EXCERPT: . . . But modern palaeobiology succeeded where [...] others failed, for two reasons. First, by the 1970s some biologists [...] had become much more receptive to challenging Darwin’s gradualist evolutionary assumptions. [...] Likewise, the mass extinctions documented by my father and others led to a revision of the Darwinist belief that the diversity of life has been basically stable throughout geological history.
Secondly, and more broadly, culture has changed significantly. Yes, computers have allowed faster and more powerful statistical analysis than what was possible with pen and paper. But even more fundamentally, they have changed how we ‘see’ data. In the earlier 19th century, graphs [...] were relatively novel, and their ubiquity not yet established. Yet in our own time, it’s taken for granted that the best way of understanding large, complex phenomena often involves ‘crunching’ the numbers via computers, and projecting the results as visual summaries.
That’s not a bad thing, but it poses some challenges. In many scientific fields, from genetics to economics to palaeobiology, a kind of implicit trust is placed in the images and the algorithms that produce them. Often viewers have almost no idea how they were constructed. The complexity of computers has made data-analysis a black-box, something it’s hard for humans to peer into. At the same time, computer jockeys such as my dad have achieved a new cultural status – if not quite Indiana Jones, they still have a kind of power and authority most of us can’t access.
Increasingly, with the advances in machine-learning and AI, even those authorities are sometimes mystified by how their algorithms work. Indeed, there are many palaeontologists who are concerned that more traditional methods – developing deep familiarity with past organisms or environments – have been eclipsed by the lure of easy results and quick publication offered by data-crunching. The stakes for this one scientific discipline might seem fairly low, but in an age of molecular genomics and Google analytics, for the rest of us they couldn’t be higher....
MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/what-a-fossil-revo...f-big-data