Apparently a non-scientific concept, human pride, is to blame. “Part of the problem,” according to John Horner of Science Magazine News, “is that scientists are sometimes too keen on finding and naming new dinosaurs.” Naming a new dinosaur gets you noticed and published. As a result, fossil hunters tend to magnify fossil differences that they imagine instead of the similarities. Then they rush to name a new dinosaur, and are generally rewarded with recognition and additional funding.
Too many supposedly new discoveries are actually duplicates of animals already on the books. Additionally, paleontologists are coming to realize that the bones of an adult dinosaur can be very different from those of a juvenile animal of the same species and can easily mislead scientists into thinking they are two different species.
This is a scientific Ponzi scheme, where will it stop? Scientists will continue giving in to their temptations … It will take a Biblical perspective on human nature to turn Science around to truth.
(Based on from Dinosaur Classification is a Mess, by David Coppedge, Creation-Evolution Headlines, May 2011, also published in Creation Matters, a publication of Creation Research Society, Volume 16, Number 3, May/June 2011, to appear at http://www.creationresearch.org/creation_matters/pdf/2011/CM16%2003%20low%20res.pdf)
(To receive new uMarko posts via a daily email, please click Subscribe)
(On Twitter: FOLLOW uMarko or http://www.twitter.com/uMarko)
