Don't Believe Everything You Read

What we know about science changes everyday.

via PBS

This past week, Austin, Texas was the host city for the annual AAPA meeting. Thousands of anthropologists and human geneticists travelled from across the country to meet together here in Texas, and as always, it was an insightful experience. My biggest take away:

Don’t believe everything you read.

Personally, I was always taught that academics, museum professionals, and published writers were the most trustworthy people; i.e. we should believe everything they read — in theory. The more I’ve been exposed to academic professionals, the more I begin to understand the dynamics of the field. Each new discovery, and each paper thereafter, presents the opportunity for open discussion.

To paraphrase — the written word does not have to be the gospel truth.

When reading a published paper, one has to keep in mind that the only way to move in fields of discovery, like anthropology and genetics, is forward, and that things proclaimed are not the end-all-be-all. But that’s the most exciting part.

Insitome recently had the privilege of interviewing Professor Lee Berger in person for the Insight. Berger told us about the time he felt that his career was over when he read a paper in 2000 proclaiming, in summary, that the age of paleoanthropological discovery is over. If you’ve watched the news at all in the last nearly 20 years, then you know they were wrong.

Berger would go on to discover, arguably, two of the most important paleoanthropological discoveries two date. If the age of discovery is over, how could that happen?

I’ve always heard that we as humans “know more about the surface of the moon than about the depths of our own oceans”. That’s not necessarily a negative comment on our human understanding; it just shows where our priorities lie, and more importantly, that there exists way more to be discovered than we could ever dream of finding.

Humans are often praised for being the seemingly all-knowing, master beings of the planet. The truth is, we don’t know everything, and there is no way we ever will — but that is what keeps life interesting. So what’s the take away? Keep on moving forward, keep exploring, never stop searching, and don’t believe everything you read.

Originally posted on Medium