Fossils of Ohio

by Rodney M. Feldmann (ed)

Amazon

577 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

Reviews

[Erik · Rating 5 out of 5]

People may complain about Ohio being a boring state, but its geology and fossil record are not. There are exposed strata from the Devonian period and before, close to the moment of emergence of land dwelling creatures. I used it to teach evolution in tandem with Shubin's Your Inner Fish. It is a scandal that some students apparently had never been exposed to the theory and its fundamental assumptions in their secondary school education, but this book helped bring a lot of it home. There is no scientific debate about the theory of evolution. It is the best hypothesis so far and has no serious competitors, spontaneous generation and Lamarck having bowed out long ago. They have trained me to say that there is "a debate about the cultural acceptance of the theory and whether people choose to believe it or not." Well, I don't do belief. The religion department is right down the hall. It seems to me it doesn't matter what someone merely 'believes' anyway, since bare beliefs are neither true nor false and do not rest upon evidence but emotion or inclination or acculturation and have no other defense (else they would be more than beliefs). Indeed, why believe anything? If you want to rationally debate facts and arguments or compare competing hypotheses that's another story. But just to get in the game your hypothesis has to pass Ockham's Razor, falsifiability and robustness, just for starters, and that suffices to rule out most junk pseudoscience and most belief systems anyway, even as competititors. There are those who say this is a circular criterion, that heuristics and standards are chosen from within science and therefore only science can pass them. They are not, of course, they are empiricist philosophical meta-heuristics not at the same level as hypotheses themselves. And second: what other heuristics are there really? There are those who compare belief to the acceptance of scientific axioms, but axioms are not accepted as acts of faith but as assumptions of last resort, in a negative way. We continue to isolate axioms, experiment with negating them or leaving them out of a deductive system, and in science exposing them to scrutiny as much as possible by isolating them for test, hoping to prove them wrong. They are never merely believed.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very detailed for the geological and archeological hounds 🤓