NEW MILLENNIUM PALEONTOLOGY

The start of the New Millennium provoked a lot of writers to opine on what it holds for us. We read of dire troubles approaching, new comings of past gurus, the end of the world, a new world beginning, a crash of the world’s economy, even greater new rewards in the marketplace, and plenty of other sensational and contradictory claims. Now, I cannot stop myself from making predictions either, as passé or tedious as that may strike you. Prediction is always risky business, for most of it will not happen and everyone has a different opinion anyway. Lots of folks therefore find it a bit presumptuous of anyone even to attempt it. But in my business of university education and research, we are always asked to make such forecasts. Probably you’ve had to do this too, so I hope you will forgive me and perhaps even join in the forum that follows this editorial.

Of course, my credibility is already diminished by doing this a year ahead of the real millennium, as some of our colleagues have made sure we know (see also the Royal Observatory Greenwich or the US Naval Observatory). But I’m sorry – 2000 is a beautiful number, 19-anything is not, nor is 2001 and subsequent 2K numbers. They lack the pleasantry of all those zeros. Furthermore, I have been looking forward to 2000 ever since I first figured out decades ago that I would probably be alive when it came. I could hardly wait! So I don’t care about starting the millennium on January 1, 2001. You can write yet another book about that, but I suggest that we just rule that the Gregorian calendar include the year 1 B.C. on our side, so it will all add up properly. Or we can just use the Common Era Calendar, which has it straightened out already.

Like so many others, I did celebrate the New Millennium on January 1, 2000. I went to Volcano House overlooking Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii to dance the 1900s out and to await the New Millennium, apocalypse or no. And what a place to watch the turning! Steam venting across the black frozen lakes of basalt, piles of volcanic bombs and cinders, mini-plates crumpled and standing high, yellowish stains here and there, and sulfurous smells wafting over the edge of the crater, and all resulting from events in the last millennium. Sitting on the edge of the caldera on the first day of 2000 staring at all that, I could see nothing paleontological whatsoever. The spectacular view and absence of paleo distractions allowed me to recall this last century of which today’s paleontology and I were products. I wondered what the next millennium held for our discipline.

I knew the questions I would be asked sooner or later when I returned to the paleo-world. They are predictable indeed: How can our department or museum maintain or improve its rating? What projects can we do that may be significant and attract the attention and envy of our colleagues? How can our students make a name for themselves? How can we get more outstanding students who also will make a name? What of significance can they do for dissertations? How can we get more money for all this? And what shall we tell these students about the future of the discipline they have chosen to devote their lives to? So in spite of the risks, I give you my impressions of the future for paleontology.

Above all, in this New Millennium, we must have a heavy dose of creativity, that driving force of all good science. Although the word is perhaps more commonly associated with musicians or artists, the best scientists are also the most creative ones (see Beyond Reason: Science in the Mass Media and This is Science!). I do not mean that all paleontology or paleontologists must be exceptionally creative to succeed. More of the same is commonly constructive, if not breakthrough, science. But the paleontologists with the greatest impact in the last millennium were also the most creative. The names are well known and begin with every letter of the alphabet. You know most of them.

How then can we be creative? That question plagues all administrators worried about standings and budgets, and perhaps not a few scientists, in academia and elsewhere, I am sure. Creativity cannot be forced. Either people have it or they don’t. It is not temporally consistent either – sometimes they have it and sometimes they don’t. It comes from the gut, and the gut is often a sensitive place. Picasso could not be forced to create, if he didn’t feel like it. Neither can scientists.

Creativity, then, requires certain kinds of people. They are commonly dedicated yet bold, thorough yet daring, careful yet adventuresome, knowledgeable yet mischievous, and practiced yet visionary. All too often, science training quells creativity because we do not allow adventure and risks in our labs or field areas, either for ourselves or for our students. We should be pushing the envelope all the time and bringing our students along with us. They need a certain free hand and encouragement to succeed, just as we do.

Creativity requires tolerance and imagination. These are difficult to come by in science because of its very nature. Science advances by negating hypotheses, so we operate with a great deal of skepticism. But let this down once in a while, listen to other ideas, and rather than tear them to shreds immediately, see if you can improve on them or apply them to your own data. Let your own imagination wander. If another idea seems bad, imagine a better one to take its place. Come up with an outstanding alternative hypothesis – that is an important place for creativity in science.

Creativity requires time, devotion and contemplation. In today’s academic and commercial world, time is our most valued asset, yet few of us seem to be able to find much of it for our chief work – too many committees, too many decisions about self-governance, too much bureaucracy, and just plain too much of everything but actual paleontology. Creativity seldom comes with other distractions. It requires peace. It also requires joy and excitement such that these other diversions are pushed away.

Lastly, creativity requires new ideas. These come from a host of sources that are the real answers to the New Millennium paleontology:

1. New data. While we have spent the last few decades of the last century bleeding the life out of the published record of paleontology, we need more field data. We have seen in the last few years the success of further fieldwork, especially as publicized for dinosaurs and the earliest metazoans. Further fieldwork is essential for any paleontologist in the future. That is where the data come from. You will probably not get famous for this, but it is fun and that is mostly what paleontology is about anyway. New data come from extant collections as well. A re-examination of dusty drawers may well yield inspiration, if seen with new vision. The creativity comes along with the excitement of those new finds and imagination about what they are, how they operated, what they lived with, and mostly how we put it all down on paper or in electron banks.
2. New ideas. Ideas are central to creative paleontology. Good ideas, of course. But how do we get new good ideas? By comparing our projects and data to others, by discussing our projects with other creative people, by looking beyond our own narrow special area to the broader implications of our findings in biology and geology, and by keeping our eyes open at all times to key facts and figures that might stimulate our minds. Good ideas can come anytime – in your office, your lab, the library, the field, or from interactions with your kids, reading the newspaper or magazines, and, yes unfortunately, even from watching television (not too much, please). Ideas can poke up anywhere, and we must be ready to seize and make something of them. How many of us can say "I already thought of that!" upon reading some great paper. Yes, but you didn’t pursue it to its fruitful outcome; you didn’t create; you were not stimulated enough to move ahead; you were too distracted.
3. New interpretations. Reexamine old ideas. Dan Axelrod, the paleobotanist, once said that Darwin had all the good ideas, and if you wanted to be creative and successful, follow up on one of them. While there is a good deal of truth in looking to Darwin, and not just a few examples of the practice, a multitude of other sources offer inspiration as well. It means studying outside our own field, something that is difficult to find time and reward for, yet it could be immensely rewarding. As one example, Eldridge and Gould read Darwin in their way, looked at the fossil record, and came up with punctuated equilibria as an alternative to Darwin’s gradualism. Although Darwin himself was aware of both stasis and punctuations, a reexamination of what Darwin said and a different statement with a catchy name for their own idea caught everyone’s attention. It made for increased examination of the fossil record of everything from vertebrates to protists, and lots of controversy as well. The concept of rapid evolution interspersed between long periods of similarity did not strike some of us in earthquake country as particularly unusual, since we led lives like that, so we were a bit surprised at the turmoil the idea provoked. We were not primed for this. It was, however, a powerful mode of operation for paleontology in general, and we learned a lot more trying to examine the model. So it can be with many ideas. Find a new or different interpretation, communicate it well, and science will advance quickly if not quietly.
4. New techniques. Who knows what might be invented in the next 1000 years? Certainly a lot of useful techniques, but building advice on that kind of prediction is difficult indeed. Instead, we can use examples of existing techniques that have or might reform aspects of paleontology. Molecular biology will continue to rise as a significant contributor to paleontology. It will probably not provide the solid answers we wish for, but with knowledge of how it works, paleontology will have a host of wonderful alternative hypotheses to test, based on another historical record. It has the additional value of a large audience in biology that understand the methods intimately. The generation of new hypotheses by whatever means will remain a creative force in itself. Other techniques are the broadening use of stable isotopes in the analysis of fossils. Microfossil workers have led the way in deciphering a host of geologic, paleoceanographic, and evolutionary problems, and others have joined in as well. This work yields exciting results chiefly for the environmental issues surrounding paleontology, but it has and should, with creative thought, do the same for evolutionary paleobiology.
   To be useful in paleontology, techniques need to be mastered, not in the day-to-day methodology, but in the profound understanding of what the method actually reflects about nature. Many such questions remain in molecular, isotopic and other techniques, but we are mastering them. We need to think creatively about how new techniques might be applied to our own work, even as they are being developed, probably by others outside paleontology. This means careful thought about them, not just a quick application to establish our priority.
5. New hard and soft equipment. The high-tech, electronic frenzy will continue unabated, with many possible applications in paleontology. To capitalize on these, we need to think farther into the future than the inventors of new software and hardware. These people, I think, tinker their way forward, improving step by step on their existing products. While this goes fast enough, they often tell us that they cannot do something we need because the right hardware or software does not exist; yet that industry doubles its knowledge and technical capacity every 18 months or so. Paleontological data, whether new or refurbished, come more slowly than that. Thus, we will be working with outdated and insufficient tools if we use what they have now, because we will not finish our projects for a number of years. We must tell these people what we need in five or ten years, not what they have now. It’s a hard row to hoe, because neither group seems to see that far ahead, yet it is possible. The economic benefit for those people will surely be lacking in paleontology, so our discussions with them must appeal to their intellectual prowess with those tools that don’t yet exist. Since we don’t know what these tools may be ourselves, we should also think hard about what we might anticipate and how it could be applied. We should tell them what we want to do, not exactly what is needed to do it. That is their job. We see inklings of that already, even in this journal, but not enough. Sit down with your high-tech, non-paleo people and don’t let them dominate with what can’t be done but instead let each group imagine the future together. Who knows what will happen?
6. New recognition. Paleontology, although not likely to enrich you financially, will continue to be a lot of fun. It will contribute to ecology, climatology, geology, oceanography, astrobiology, evolutionary biology, and a suite of other disciplines dependent on historical underpinnings. It will be worth doing. Paleontologists and our students should take pride in doing it, too, and in what we provide for others. Examples of such approaches abound – the use of microfossils and their contained isotopes to unravel the history of the oceans, the details of coral skeletal stratigraphy for deciphering El Niño signals in the world’s oceans, and, yes, even those critical yet mundane biostratigraphic studies that we have been maligned for.

The understanding of our world would be quite different if paleontologists never existed. Tell that to your friends and non-paleontological colleagues. It will make a difference.

Issues like these were dealt with in detail at the Paleontology in the 21^st Century meeting held in Frankfurt in 1997. The meeting results suggest how we might tackle many aspects of paleontology this coming century, and much of what I have said depends on the implementation of those ideas. The results of that meeting are being posted to Paleontology in the 21^st Century on PaleoNet for all of us to consider. Those results and the broader issues I discussed here should stimulate comments from the community of paleontologists about our future. Neither the meeting nor my words are anywhere close to covering all possibilities. Your participation will move us closer, however; so send along your own ideas and comments about both the matters above and those Paleo-21 raised to the editors, Norman MacLeod or Tim Patterson for posting in the discussion that follows. In this way, we may together provide some guidance for our future generations of paleontologists and some stimulation for ourselves!