Re: [asa] Untestable -- Is it Science?

David Opderbeck wrote:

> I spent a lovely afternoon today with my ten year old son at the
> Museum of Natural History in New York. This display of a
> pachycephalasaurus -- an alien-looking, dome headed dinosaur --
> caught my eye. If you can't see the attached photos, the signage
> says: "we cannot be sure how pachycephalasaurus used their skull
> caps, becuase theories about the behaviors of extinct animals
> cannot be tested." So are theories about extinct animal behaviors
> "science"?

Others have responded to this, and I will just make a couple brief
comments.

I teach a course on dinosaur paleontology at Kansas State and
regularly discuss reconstructions of dinosaur behavior.

As others have stated, the latter half of the statement you quote
above is false, or at least misleading. Proposals about the behavior
of extinct organisms can indeed be tested -- if they predict certain
features of the fossil record that can be observed. Many animal
behaviors have physiological and skeletal features that are
associated with such behaviors. This is part of the inference of
function from form. In the above example, if the skull and axial
skeleton of pachycephalosaurs were not constructed in a manner to
absorb shock when in a ramming posture, then that proposal would have
failed this test against the fossil record. However, both the axial
skeletal structure and the microstructure of the thickened skull are
consistent with this behavioral interpretation. The degree to which
a specific behavioral proposal can be tested against the fossil
record varies widely. Some have multiple independent lines of fossil
observations in support, and others have little or none.

In very rare cases, the fossils provide direct evidence of behavior.
Some examples would be the preservation of an oviraptor sitting in
its nest of eggs (demonstration of brooding behavior and posture), or
the arrangement and spacing of nests in a nesting site (colony
nesting), or large monospecific accummulations of fossils indicating
herding or migration, or direct associations of predators and prey
(including embedded teeth and stomach contents).

In addition to evidence from the skeletal anatomy, are lines of
evidence from trace fossils (footprints), coprolites (fossil feces),
the environmental context of preservation, isotopic signatures of
bones and teeth, biogeography, etc.

One thing that I do in my class is to try to get students to assess
which aspects of dinosaur reconstructions are based on fossil
evidence and which are essentially artistic.

So, to respond to your primary question -- the ability to be tested
(even if only in principle) is a requirement for something to be
considered a scientific proposal. Therefore, some speculations about
dinosaur behavior are indeed amenable to testing, and others are
not. Those that are not, are not scientific proposals. This does
not mean that they are false, just that they are currently beyond
scientific test. They might even enter the realm of the scientific
with future developments in technology or unexpected discoveries.

Keith

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Received on Mon Jun 9 16:48:55 2008