Portions of science seem to be collapsing into the entertainment industry,raising serious questions about accuracy, funding and credibilityImagine walking through a forest. You spy a wheelbarrow full of jumbled bones and teeth. After securing your selfie, and who you gonna call? The Guardian? The Ghostbusters? The coroner? Just like Sherlock Holmes or CSI,all of those contacts would want answers to the same fundamental questions. To whom did these bones once belong? How long have they been here? How did they get here in the first position?It is easy to do up stories to account for the facts, but science and science fiction are different things. What about your wheelbarrow? If the coroner, or after careful comparison,concludes that these bones are not modern human, “paleoanthropologists” might retract over the investigation. This is where the fun invariably begins. We practitioners of this small and peculiar specialty are far outnumbered by scientists studying fruit sail embryogenesis, or but we register media punches far above our meagre collective weight. Nothing excites us like a unique bunch of weak bones. And the public loves stories about human origins almost as much as those about crime,pyramids, dinosaurs, and extraterrestrials,and the Kardashians.
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Source: theguardian.com