Padian, can you tell us a little bit about the history of paleontology and its importance to evolution?
A. Sure. Paleontology, the idea that you’re finding rocks that have the remains of ancient life in it, has been around actually in some form or another since the 1500s and 1600s when people first started to understand that these were actually the remains of organisms that were dead and not simply sports of nature or some kind of sculptural-looking accident. The understanding of fossils really began to mature in the late 1700s when people realized that these were the remains of dead creatures that were not coming back, they were extinct. And the upshot of this meant that ideas about the philosophy of nature began to change as the enlightenment developed. By 1800, you had people in both England and France developing systems of looking at the order of the rocks through time, moving up through a section, that could be correlated from one area to another. The same sequences of rocks were appearing. These were used in England, for example, by civil engineers to dig canals and to show them wh
