Q: The development of such scientific tools as DNA sequencers has profoundly deepened the study of human evolution. It is inevitable that other tools will arise as your career continues. Do you have a sense of what such tools might tell scientists about evolution?
A: We use many tools, from satellites to mCT scanners, to do our work of discovery and analysis. I wouldn’t have been able to predict the ways that these have helped us understand Ardi, so I won’t hazard a guess. Paleontologists are better at figuring out what happened than they are at predicting what is going to happen!
Q: You’re well known for the lengthy, deliberate pace of your research. Are you ever bothered by the time it takes to go from initial discovery to peer-reviewed publication?
A: If I were bothered by that, I shouldn’t be doing science. The whole point is to get the right answer. For the Ardi analysis, as I’ll demonstrate in my lecture, we had a treasure trove of data from a previously unknown time period. So it took a long time to assemble the data in the field, assemble the team to analyze it, let these scientists do their work, get thorough reviews, and then publish, as the largest special issue of Science since Apollo 11.
I’d be bothered by any scientist who thought that good science came from fast, shoddy, in-deliberate analysis, and I am concerned about increasing pressures in that direction, that have only increased in the decade after I wrote the article on the state of the field.