The Mass Extinction Debates: A Science Communication Odyssey

hey so does anyone remember what killed the dinosaurs well as we all know it was of course hey so does anyone remember [Music] wait what okay I now I've always interacted my own intros because of extremely contrived mistakes but I didn't even have the chance to make a mistake there all I did was ask a question what killed the dinosaurs you see very simple question granted maybe there's a complicated answer but the question is fine right there's nothing wrong with that millions of years ago there were dinosaurs and then there weren't something must have killed them because they're all dead every single one gone perished expired wiped out pushing up daisies dead as a dodo hmm hey so does anyone remember England 1842 foreign Sir Richard Owen was studying giant fossils of long extinct reptiles he noticed that three specimens Megalosaurus Iguanodon and highlyosaurus shared several distinctive traits he proposed that species with these traits be grouped into a new scientific classification Dinosauria Greek for terrible lizards and everything was fine and dandy and everyone was having a great time defining dinosaurs by physical qualities until some guy called Charles Darwin turned up and said hey species do be originating and then once they realize things evolved the naturalists throughout their old textbooks and invented this new thing called phylogenetic classification in phylogenetic classification we imagine a big family tree of all species ever somewhere here we'll find say Megalosaurus and Iguanodon and we Define dinosaurs to be all animals descended from their last common ancestor what does this mean well if we climb up the tree far enough from each of these species we'll find a species that's an ancestor 2 both of them we take the latest possible such ancestor to be the first dinosaur with Dinosaurs as a whole comprising everything that animal ultimately gave rise to that's great right a definition of dinosaurs based on their very evolution but somewhere along the line scientists discovered that birds share many traits with certain groups of dinosaurs and therefore must have evolved from them in other words the entire bird family tree fits here and according to phylogenetic classification we have an inescapable conclusion not only do birds descend from dinosaurs they are dinosaurs or rather they were until scientists decided birds are from something else and they took the whole bird family tree out again but then they put it back and to make sure they never made the same mistake again they redefined dinosaurs to be all animals descended from the last common ancestor of their triceratops and a sparrow yes the very definition of terrible lizard now depends on the sparrow if you want to talk about dinosaurs except Birds the scientific term is non-avian dinosaurs and these are indeed extinct so the question should actually have been what killed the non-avian dinosaurs rights that was an awfully long detour just to explain a clarification everybody probably assumed anyway despite being severely simplified it was confusing and entirely unconducive to say an engaging video intro but isn't that kind of interesting [Music] given you've just clicked on a video about dinosaurs I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest you might be someone who likes science but how much have you really thought about how that science is communicated is it really as simple as scientists do the science and the public hears about it and no I'm not just talking about the existence of a crooked journalist in between turns out the whole thing is a fair bit more but wibbly wobbly timey wimey than that we've already seen how public and scientific views of dinosaurs can end up in wildly different terrain and no case study exemplifies this quite like the mass extinction that spells their Doom behind this question a question your mind most likely had a Snappy answer for the moment I asked it lies one of the longest and most vicious feuds in all of Science and one inseparably tied to its own perception in popular media inspired by a book that illuminated the debate as it happened I've embarked on a mission to understand the dinosaur's Extinction and its place in society what happened how do they know how do you know and what does it all mean for science as a whole so if that counts as an engaging video intro please join me for this excessively Deep dive into the mass extinction debates a science communication Odyssey part one the end [Music] [Music] [Music] asteroid impact well Google the ultimate barometer of civilization has clearly made its mind up and never once missed a chance to copy Google so has Bing your mind too probably sprang straight for a big Space Rock no matter whether you actually believe that's what killed the dinosaurs I'm willing to bet it's the first thought you had Google's confident verdicts comes from the website for London's Natural History Museum which covers the basics pretty succinctly 66 million years ago over a relatively short time dinosaurs disappeared completely except for Birds evidence suggests an asteroid impact was the main culprit obviously not all dinosaurs disappeared at once most lived and died naturally and there were plenty of smaller extinctions during their time on Earth but this Extinction marks the eradication of all non-avian dinosaurs the boundary between the age of reptiles and the age of mammals the periods of geological history at this divide are called the Cretaceous and paleogene other sources might use Cretaceous tertiary instead of Cretaceous paleogene tertiary being a now outdated term for the Post Dinosaur World so using the German word for Cretaceous it's complicated we call this event the kpg or KT Extinction you might be more familiar with 65 million years ago as the kpg extinction dates this used to be the consensus but modern rotating technology has fine-tuned our estimates a little further back I for one have a distinct memory of most dinosaur media suddenly and when that explanation shifting from 65 to 66 and my brain's logical assumption at the time was that we'd somehow ticked over as if we knew the anniversary to the exact year even in deciding between two consecutive numbers we've uncovered another divide between dinosaurs and public perception of dinosaurs one number is Iconic Inseparable from the extinct reptile's very notion the other is what the science actually suggests so not only do public consensus and scientific consensus disagree on what was killed they can't get the when straight either what chance then is there for the Hal foreign since Google has crowned the Natural History Museum the Arbiter of kpg Extinction truth I thought I might as well pay to visit I had to survive flooded Railways redirected trains and consequently Swindon but I did in fact make it as this highly incriminating footage shows for nearly 150 years the Natural History Museum has stood as a shining dinosaurian Beacon the British Public's first Port of Call for learning about Giants of the past given its natural science pedigree which we'll return to later how does it present the dinosaur's Extinction zooming in on these displays I was too timid to ask people to move we find the dinosaur exhibit gives two primary theories behind the kpg event asteroid impacts and intense volcanism indeed the full answer on the Museum's website goes into more depth evidence suggests an asteroid impact was the main culprit volcanic eruptions that caused large-scale climate change may also have been involved together with more gradual changes to the Earth's climates that happened over millions of years beyond the Museum's summaries what do these two theories actually say in detail everything so far has given asteroid First Billing so let's start there what is the impact hypothesis in the Deep reaches of the solar system there are asteroids I mean comets or meteorites okay asteroids are small astronomical bodies made of rock comets are made of ice and dust and often have bright Tails meteoroids are small pieces of either which become meteors upon entering the Earth's atmosphere and meteorites upon hitting the ground for the sake of brevity I'm just going to say asteroid to cover all of these from now on you know what we've already had the non-avian Thing paleogene versus tertiary 65 versus 66 and now this I'm just going to start a counter the impact hypothesis posits that 66 million years ago an asteroid hit the Earth it was around 10 kilometers in diameter roughly the size of Mount Everest and traveled fast enough to slice through the atmosphere in seconds imagine a mountain traveling a hundred times the speed of sound and imagine the sheer amount of energy its Collision would release all that energy was taken out on what would become the Yucatan Peninsula in southern Mexico perhaps near the future sites of a town called has become so synonymous with the kpg impactor that Googling chicksulub causes this to happen we bush I'm easily amused everything nearby was instantly vaporized this might well have been the largest momentary energy release on Earth for billions of years and nothing within hundreds perhaps thousands of kilometers were surviving that and that's just stage one stage two is the shock wave as the fireball faded immense Distortion of the Earth's crust caught up and pushed the radius of Destruction further still earthquakes thousands of times stronger than any inhuman memory shook the whole continent meanwhile the impact ejector everything thrown up by the fireball aren't its way out and back into the atmosphere even for those not in the path of the largest chunks of Airborne Mexico the number and velocity of the small chunks superheated the atmosphere stifling heat and forest fires spread across the hemisphere and as half the world went up in smoke the final stage of immediate death arrived as a tsunami driving churned seafloor and chant debris Inland around the Gulf of Mexico but contrary to popular belief this alone wasn't enough to end the age of dinosaurs say you're a dinosaur in New Zealand you've experienced at most a slight Rumble and everything's pretty peachy you shrug and go back to normal dinosaur things for a while and then you notice it's getting dark you look down at your dinosaur watch and it's only like 3 P.M and then you look up and you realize a shroud of Ash is slowly encircling the entire planet the real killer in the impact scenario is not the quick merciful Apocalypse in North America it is the slow chilling grip of worldwide starvation impact ejecta infests the upper atmosphere blocking sunlight for perhaps decades temperatures plummet photosynthesis shuts down at first the carnivores are in heaven on Earth the herbivores have all starved and lie strewn across a Barren landscape easy pickings but without sunlights to fuel the food chain this bounty is an illusion the carnivores 2 will soon perish and even after so Much Death the ordeal still had one last hurray once the ash had fallen to Earth other atmospheric poisons took over carbon dioxide shoveled upwards in vast quantities from the shattered Limestone of the gulf seafloor sent temperatures careering in the other direction via the greenhouse effect by the intermediate value theorem there was a brief moment of pleasant temperatures somewhere in there you know Silver Linings this heating was the final pulse as the CO2 filtered out of the atmosphere at last the survivors found themselves in a new and very different era in Earth's history all told somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of all animal species on Earth went extinct but this number obscures the true Devastation because it only considers species that were 100 eradicated in terms of individual lives the figure is much higher the popular view of Hardy mammals crawling free of their dinosaur oppressors is inaccurate because mammals also suffered heavy losses the difference is at least a few did survive all non-avian dinosaurs all pterosaurs all marine reptiles all ammonites and a whole load of other stuff did go extinct the survivors were mostly small with efficient metabolisms generalist diets or safe hiding places even then plenty of species with these traits died off too so maybe a lot of it came down to luck land plants made it through thanks to their secret weapon seeds and amazingly a few species of oceanic photosynthesizers scraped through the darkness just enough to rebuild food chains in the world to come only then were the effects of Earth's chance encounter with a big Space Rock so many years earlier forgotten the impact hypothesis paints a high resolution picture of an intense descent into hell spurred by a single day a single catastrophic event that so easily could have never happened the volcanism hypothesis is less sudden but no less hellish unlike asteroids volcanoes have been a known entity throughout history awesome destructive potential fueled by upwellings of molten rock pressure building in underground cavities until the top explodes with sufficient power to level cities yet kpg volcanism relies not on these abrupt eruptions but a different type entirely a slower subtler foe with the power to choke a planet according to the volcanism hypothesis a million years or so before the kpg boundary the Earth's interior underwent a dramatic shift below the future Indian subcontinent India at this time was an island speeding its way across the ocean destined one day to crash into the rest of Asia and form the Himalayas underneath this island a mantle plume was forming an enormous current of rock bringing heat from the planet's core closer to the surface than usual a similar thing is currently happening in Hawaii the isolated island chain is believed to be fueled by a thankfully much smaller mantle plume volcanoes resulting from a mental plume don't tend to be the explodey kind they're more the constantly spewing out hot liquid like a salivating Dragon kind and on the scale of the kpg plume this was bad news for the dinosaurs for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years India became an ocean of lava a million cubic miles of the stuff seeped inexorably through the crust the solidified remnants of this flood Basalt eruption are known as the Deckard traps they're up to two miles deep and cover an area the size of France yeah but matches in the impact scenario this localized destruction was far from the true apocalypse once again it was atmospheric contamination that proved fatal two gases sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide seeped from the fishes unyieldingly hundreds of thousands of years of an encroaching Unstoppable specter during the largest outpourings sulfur Dark Side would have overwhelmed the atmosphere calling the planet and heralding acid rain that poisoned food sources and acidified the oceans and once the sulfur dioxide had filtered out carbon dioxide took over again driving climate change in the other direction until the next massive eruption spewed out yet more sulfur each pulse in isolation had geophysical checks to counter it but so many for so long proved too much for the Earth this cycle of constant environmental chaos ringing and strangling stressed ecosystems to Breaking points one by one food chains collapsed species went extinct and we end up with a total Extinction profile that matches that of the impact hypothesis only the fortunate Retreat of the mantle plume ended the event after one last massive Encore of fire and toxins at the kpg boundary the volcanoes subsided and just as in that alternate history of asteroid induced Extinction the dinosaurs were gone and the small Hardy lucky survivors were left to repopulate a desolate planet as we'll see later these are far from the only theories behind the extinction of the dinosaurs although they are the most significant to Modern paleontology but here's a tricky question which if any is correct and by tricky I mean requires most of the rest of this absolutely long video to answer like seriously things will be mentioned in geological time at this rate The Cliff Notes though are as follows there are three evidence supported facts which all experts in relevant fields in 2023 agree on the non-avian dinosaurs and many other species went extinct around 66 billion years ago a large asteroid hit chikchalub around 66 million years ago the Deccan traps erupted around 66 million years ago to say anything beyond that anything about the exact chains of events how they're related or any other factors strongly depends on who you ask and what counts as consensus but if you ask me to make a judgment based on my own research again big rabbit hole there will return to later scientific consensus comes down on the side of the asteroid death from space it is so if that's what the science thinks how does that translate to what you think what society as a whole thinks counter-intuitively given our other issues with this question it appears asteroid wins out here too agreements incredible science communication works [Music] it's not hard to speculate that the impact hypothesis has become ingrained in our Collective understanding of dinosaurs think dinosaurs think asteroid the idea has become rhetorical shorthand for a dominant Paradigm suddenly and without warning displaced by a dramatic event but don't worry I won't sink to that cliche anywhere in this video look at Cinema for instance films with zero connection to asteroids or dinosaurs presents the event as fact or employ it as heavy-handed metaphor a relic of a Dying age dinosaur and the meteor can't believe I forgot the worst line of that film in my review but are a few movie lines and unsubstantiated claims about public opinion really the best evidence no I needed data while there's no shortage of reviews of expert opinion I found data lacking when it came to the Public's beliefs about dinosaur extinction luckily I happen to have my own segments of the public to exploit for research purposes I put out a survey for my subscribers to see if that could gauge public consensus five simple questions what killed the dinosaurs please answer off the top of your head what killed the dinosaurs please research before answering how old are you which country are you from and how interested and knowledgeable are you when it comes to dinosaurs and paleontology it's important first to note the likely sampling bias here given YouTube's demographics and my Channel's past output I expected a bias towards respondents who are young and from English-speaking countries with above average interest in stem fields and despite attempts to hide these subjects of my survey whenever posting it I expected a fair degree of self-selection bias both in terms of interest in answering random surveys and interest in dinosaurs and while we're on the topic of doing research properly I should note I made several hypotheses before conducting the survey off-the-cuff answers strongly favor asteroid as the single cause researched answers favor asteroid but to a lesser extent preference for asteroid is present across all countries preference for asteroid is present across all age groups with a stronger effect in younger groups preference for asteroid is present across all interest levels with a stronger effect in those less interested essentially I thought asteroid impact would be favored as the single cause in any group but that older groups those with more expertise and those who are done research would show more recognition of the Nuance I hope that by the end of this video you'll understand why I singled out those parameters classifying answers proved a bit of a nightmare giving people the freedom to write anything while necessary led to a lot of headaches but I did come up with a system which I'll quickly run through for transparency obviously the whole asteroid Comet meteor debacle got crushed into one answer and the same for some other things if someone gave two or more factors with a clear causal link between them I classified their answer according to its root cause so asteroid begets Ash begets starvation became asteroid if I couldn't establish a causal link I combined the listed factors using and or note this didn't distinguish and from awe and it didn't Express how prominent each factor was in their answer answers which mused on a few things before settling on a conclusion became that conclusion and I specifically omitted mentions of evolving into Birds except where that was the only Factor given because I wanted to focus on the extinction and not the well actually aspects of the question I also didn't filter out joke answers a because it was often hard to tell the difference and B because I wanted my proportions to reflect the entire sampled group still not sure if that was the best idea that covers the methodology so let's get to the exciting bit the results I received 1130 responses of these 867 or 77 gave asteroid as their off-the-cuff source of Dino Doom that's a strong majority right I was expecting higher in all honesty and I was surprised at the number of answers that mentioned neither asteroids nor volcanoes it seems like many scientists I had overestimated the Public's knowledge of my subject area unlike many scientists I had underestimated The public's memory of the 1997 film Batman and Robin second two asteroid was asteroid and or volcanoes with a pitiful 3.8 percent volcanoes on their own came way down in eighth with 0.9 percent that's 10 people for comparison nine people said dinosaurs were killed by Extinction just Extinction if you're concerned about the first pass the post approach here don't worry I've considered that responses mentioning asteroids as any Factor came to 85 percent compared to 5.8 percent for volcanoes some improvement for volcanoes there but yet more asteroid dominance what though happens if you ask people to look something up before answering well you get some people who put hours into a properly sourced well-written argument and you also get I've already done research bro I'm too busy for this you get 21 people quoting the Natural History Museum verbatim 13 of whom did so without credit and clearly thought I wouldn't recognize it and you get two people asking chat gbt producing answers that only mention asteroids without extra prompting it's almost as if this isn't the best tool for resolving nuanced questions 58 of respondents this time gave answers boiling down to asteroid still the majority but a sizable drop asteroid and or volcanoes remained in second with an increased representation of 14 volcanoes on their own lost support dropping to 0.4 percent though in alternative vote World volcanoes did better asteroid share also increased a quick interpretation of these results suggests research is likely to make people more aware of the volcanism Theory but not more likely to support it they are however much more likely to support multiple or competing factors that include asteroids and volcanoes turning to age now this graph shows proportion of respondents who answered asteroid versus something else in the first question unfortunately due to demographic problems I had very few answers from older individuals so I've excluded them here we can see a slight Trend younger individuals were more likely to say asteroid geographically it was almost an asteroid sweep excluding countries with small sample sizes every country was 50 asteroid or higher with Switzerland and Chile the most asteroid skeptic Ukraine Hungary and Argentina meanwhile were 100 pro asteroid I have no idea what to do with this information and finally interest and expertise I ended up creating groups with low mediocre high and expert levels of the two measures combined according to my own judgment note though I only received responses from five experts as identified by me so take that category with a grain of salt excluding experts the trend is in fact towards asteroid as interest grows again I overestimated familiarity with the idea among low interest groups oh that was some data analysis Prime YouTube content right there of my five hypotheses I think it's fair to say I found strong evidence for two reasonable evidence for two and uncertain evidence for one not bad going I can therefore say with a bit of confidence what I had only speculated before public consensus across many ages many countries and many knowledge levels supports the impact hypothesis whether representing scientists or the average Joe Google is Right an asteroid impact killed the dinosaurs but I wouldn't have made this video if it was that simple every Theory and belief we have covered exists in the present at the end one thin slice of time without context without the Richer understanding of how we got here and why it matters a single layer piled atop countless unknown layers of the past we have but scratched the surface and if paleontology has taught us anything it's that to go back to the beginning to understand the whole story and our place within it we need to dig [Music] part two the record of the rocks Our Story begins with Mammoth cheese for those new to the channel I made a video a while back about Jefferson's Mammoth cheese you could go watch it if you like in short U.S president Thomas Jefferson became obsessed with mammoths after so many of their fossils turned up in his young country some guy gave him a giant cheese wheel people called it the mammoth cheese history was made what's more Jefferson's Mammoth Mania might have made most of America he was convinced mammoths must still exist out west and purchased a large portion of the continent to find them implicit in this goal is Jefferson's rejection of Extinction he fully believed species cannot simply disappear at the time roughly 1800 this was a common view theologically speaking if God had created the Earth in its perfect form from the beginning how could Extinction possibly occur that would imply A Fault In creation itself the one exception was the biblical flood found a fossil that doesn't match any living creature easy flood did it no I just didn't like them indeed this was The View on American mammoths back when they were first Unearthed but these same bones would soon bring Extinction to light as a scientific concept in 1796 French naturalist George cuvier published a paper arguing that mammoths which in many cases he reclassified as mastodons were extinct they looked like elephants but they weren't and they ruled dead this paper is the first formal description of Extinction the first to provide a real deduction from real evidence as Jefferson's continued Pursuit Of Living mammoth's shows not everyone jumped on the extinction bandwagon but the idea was accepted by many naturalists at the moment of its birth Extinction invoked a question that would bubble and seethe for the next 200 years if species do disappear how cuvier's answer was a natural progression from the flood he believed great cataclysms Revolutions in his words regularly blanketed regions and wiped out populations many were Oceanic deluges on a scale Beyond human imagination this philosophy is known as catastrophism the theory that changes to the Earth were caused by sudden violent and unusual events identifying changes to the Earth in the first place though is tricky business so before we understand those sudden violent and unusual events we need to take a step back for me in more ways than one there's an unassuming house I used to walk past during wanderings through the outer reaches of the city of bath where he went to University annoyingly I only realized its significance after I left so I had to make a day of it to get this footage ew that things back on my screen around 1800 this house and yes it was this house and not the one next to it the black is on the wrong house was home to a man named William Smith Smith was a geological surveyor while at this house in tucking Mill he was working on the somerset coal Canal for instance he was therefore a practical man but he nonetheless stumbled upon the insights that made Modern geology intense paleontology possible the basics of geology had been known for a while outside of volcanism rocks generally form via sedimentation where material eroded from elsewhere is deposited grain by grain over time you end up with distinct layers that reveal how conditions changed including contemporary fossils in absence of other factors you have a full timeline getting older the further down you dig sadly there are many other factors any kind of squishing rotating or other Distortion renders the whole sequence useless maybe if the layers are unique enough rock types Clay versus chalk and so on you can piece together some kind of reconstruction but much more likely Rock alone tells you very little if you can't put the rocks in order you can't put the fossils in order simple as that this was the problem Smith was pondering in Somerset and it was in 1796 the same year as cuvier's Extinction proposal that he had one of those epiphanies that really makes you stand back and appreciate the human mind what if we turned it backwards what if we could put the rocks in order by putting the fossils in order take deposits with well-established calm and regular sequences often quite rare find the characteristic fossils of each and use these to correlate against ages in chaotic deposits anywhere in the world if the same fossil appears in two places but nowhere else it's likely these together represent a distinct geological period using the order of correlating fossils in calm sequences you can decipher the order of pretty much any sequence and date new fossils unique to irregular sequences that were until then a mystery the best fossils to use for this correlation are small marine animals since they're much more common than any other fossils it's a question of resolution Smith named this technique the law of formal succession the clear progression of species across time that could help index Rock layers in 1799 Smith produced the world's first fossil supported geological map this humble map of bath is the basis for everything we've learned about prehistory since often earning William Smith the title of father of geology I mean you could say he cracked Rock which is something people named Will Smith keep doing oh wow epic rap battle of history when yet carrying mainly for practical applications Smith didn't much Ponder why different layers contained different groups of species from the modern perspective the answer is obvious some had gone extinct and new forms had evolved to replace them but Smith never made that connection so while we can say he found the evidence for many extinctions he never inferred the extinctions themselves over the next decade Smith extended his work from Bath to the whole country based on correlations from his travels he published the first geological map of England and Wales in 1815. comparing with a modern map we noticed he identified based on different fossil ecosystems what we now know to be a boundary between Cretaceous and paleogene rock that is and I'm going to have to be careful with my words here this house may well be the place that evidence for the kpg mass extinction was first recognized we can though say for sure that by 1825 cuvier 2 had noticed biotic changeover at the boundary unlike Smith he sought an explanation the first real clue was a change in the diversity of bivalves but when combined with knowledge of marine reptiles The Kind Mary Anning had been uncovering cuvier concluded that abrupt's enormous sea level retreat was responsible for a mass extinction of ocean life the first theory for the kpg extinction and catastrophism in full force but cuvier's catastrophes were about to meet their match that match was Charles Lyle a charismatic young Scotsman who was destined to hold geology to ransom for a century and a half Lyle's guiding principle was uniformitarianism to simplify because Lyle's uniformitarianism actually refers to four things this is the belief that processes of the past can be explained in terms of processes of the present there are no strange events everything happens gradually change is uniform across time at first this seems eminently sensible it's kind of the copernican principle right the assumption that human observations are representative of the average view of the universe and in 90 of cases it is sensible prehistoric Earth was about the same as present Earth such a mindset has proven invaluable for those studying it Lyle however wouldn't settle for 90 percent he wanted everything raining down a storm of strongly worded textbooks he painted catastrophists like cuvier as wild and dangerous speculators pseudoscientific idiots and way too French and maybe it was more that last Point than anything else but people believed him which is mad when you hear some of his conclusions he thought for instance that should global temperatures rise to match those of dinosaur times the dinosaurs would just come back how who knows all I know is I love fossil fuels now Lyle's belief in a constant World extended to Extinction in his view Extinction rates never varied across time no Mass dyings only consistent background removal he developed a sort of biological Half-Life taking William Smith's insight and running with it he believed you could tell the exact age of rock simply by calculating the relative decay of fossil ecosystems as an idea this is rather neat but unlike radioactive decay Extinction is not a physical constant so can't be a reliable dating mechanism this had bizarre effects on the interpretation of the kpg boundary the evidence available in Lyle's time already suggested the boundary layer was thin one ecosystem profile on one side then a sliver of rock then an entirely different one today we'd say the boundary most likely represents a short period of high Extinction rate using Lyle's formula we find the boundary took 72 million years to form that's longer than the entire era since in an absolute tour de force of circular reasoning Lyle concluded that since species disappear at constant rates the boundary had to represent a long period of time and therefore was not a mass extinction he instead blamed a poor fossil record whether through its 90 usefulness or just nationalism uniformitarianism nonetheless grabbed hold of British geology and thanks to regrettable geopolitics Global geology too perhaps I've painted Lyle as something of a villainous Puppet Master while you should all Remember the Time definitely exaggerating this depiction is the only one that conveys the scale of his influence he single-handedly destroyed the notion of mass extinction all of a sudden even suggesting higher rates of Extinction than usual could get you ostracized from the paleontological community before we'd even had time to digest it the kpg mass extinction was pseudoscience Richard Owen on the other hand was definitely a villain unpleasant vindictive discrediting Rivals and claiming their Innovations as his own his Vendetta against Gideon mantel the discoverer of Iguanodon arguably drove the man to take his own life but as you may remember from the intro in 1842 Richard Owen came up with the name dinosaur so he's an essential part of our journey the ban was undeniably an anatomical genius but less recognized and equally important to note in a video about site's communication he also had a knack for public Outreach for his discoveries dinosaur as a term screams star power for a reason if you walk a short distance from Crystal Palace train station in London you'll see what I mean these are the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs the world's first public dinosaur exhibition and in some sense the world's first theme park alongside a host of other prehistoric creatures rendered in clay you'll find two iguanodons a highly asaurus and a Megalosaurus and one day a few months ago you'd have also found me it was a really nice trip until I called covert from it at least it wasn't Swindon created by sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins under Owen's supervision the statues were in instant hit in 1854. they were also some rather sneaky propaganda although it kind of backfired working within the uniformitarian framework Owens saw the dinosaur's Extinction as a fading away due to gradual atmospheric changes in his mind the age of reptiles was a more impressive age than the present and the trend of life on Earth was a negative one modern reptiles were in Owens view pitiful Shadows of their former glory and all other groups would one day suffer the same fate the mammalian stature of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs is intentional Owen wanted to evoke the size and dynamism of modern mammals like bears and rhinos and he wanted to embed that view of a grand lost past within the public sadly verwin only a few years later Megalosaurus was found to be bipedal overnight his Grand spectacle became a bit silly and old-fashioned a status the statues helped confer to dinosaurs themselves dinosaurs were nothing but slow-witted lumbering beasts doomed to be ousted by better forms when Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection became the dominant Paradigm after 1859 it's only bolstered anti-dinosaur and anti-o in sentiment if it's survival of the fittest then the extinct must be unfit Darwin hated Irwin so maybe he took some satisfaction in seeing his theory crushed the man's idea of a lost golden age he also loved Lyle and was enthused to find a theory that fits so well with uniformitarian belief and let's not forget that On the Origin of Species was written for public consumption accessible prose widely distributed Darwin 2 was arguably engaging in some scientific subversion by means of public support a weapon will see many others brandish and refined as we continue soon enough Darwin's supporters got Richard Owen kicked out of high scientific Society on charges of fraud but Owen wasn't going down without a fight and he knew the perfect Battleground the Natural History Museum and perhaps every Science Museum you've ever visited owes a great debt to Owen it was he who opened it to the public and shaped it to be a Cathedral of accessible knowledge science museums had until then been archaic catalogs of specimens restricted to the scholarly Elite but Owen saw a future where the Commodus were front and center where learning institutions catered to us and our views on science it's not the victory he wanted but a victory nonetheless he would however be horrified to learn that since 2009 his statue has been put way up in the rafters where only comprehensive videographers Venture and the statue everyone sees at the head of the main hall is Charles Darwin [Music] fast forward to 1922 when author H.D Wells writes an account of the past entitled a short history of the world this compendium of human knowledge has only this to say on the kpg boundary there comes a break in the record of the rocks that may represent several million years there is a veil here still when it lifts again the age of reptiles is at an end the cold has killed them we find now a new scene a new and hardier Flora and a new and hardier fauna in possession of the world I choose this quote because it demonstrates the glacial pace of kpg understanding over the next 60 years dinosaurs died out slowly they just couldn't handle the Grind All Hail our Lord and savior Charles Lyle uniformitarianism's banishment of mass extinction meant no serious science could ever touch kpg even once new fossil evidence called the slow decline assumption into question stigma turned to the question into a waste basket for random ideas that nobody actually believed or cared about in the words of paleontologist Michael Benton it was as if at the mere mention of dinosaur extinction scientists breathed a sigh of relief and felt freed from the straitjacket of normal scientific hypothesis testing the list of theories proposed at this time in actual scientific papers reads like a game of Cards Against Humanity what killed the dinosaurs caterpillars egg stealing mammals excessive wetness excessive dryness cataracts boredom Suicidal Thoughts The Inevitable heat death of the universe AIDS AIDS oh sorry those last three were actual Cards Against Humanity cards and actual theories for the dinosaur's Extinction what the heck thankfully two developments in the mid-1900s reduced this flow of baseless theories alone they couldn't break the uniformitarian Monopoly but they dented the edifice enough for what came after to prevail first was the invention of radiometric dating by studying the ratios of radioactive elements in ancient Rock geologists had a much more accurate view of deep time one that hooked into physical constants of the universe and while practical difficulties have always hindered our pursuit of 100 accurate dating making many time estimates more variable than you might think the technique reliably points to a short kpg boundary rapid disappearances of dinosaurs and Marine index fossils not a veil of millions of years the second Factor was the dinosaur Renaissance of the 1960s pioneering work on dinonicus by John Ostrom and Bob backer finally overturned the Primitive portrayal embedded in culture a hundred years earlier it took time to filter through to the general public we'll get there in a bit but at last scientists saw dinosaurs not as slow and stupid but Dynamic warm-blooded and bird-like it was around this time that the bird family tree was put back into Dinosauria for instance together this evidence painted a picture of a vibrant well-adapted group killed not by evolutionary obsolescence but something quick and dare I say catastrophic a 1979 summary by paleontologist Dale Russell came to the conclusion that Extinction had to have been abrupt his favorite theory was a supernova but he like everyone else tentatively Reviving catastrophism had no real evidence for their killing method so ineffectually bounced off the dominant paradigm chinks in the armor but still the old Doctrine held could anything displace the outdated uniformitarian dinosaurs from their dominance oh yeah that was the cliche That was supposed to be beneath me well aim for a penny part three a sudden violent and unusual event there are two kpg boundaries 66 million years ago and six six 1980. [Music] this is Botta Johnny Gorge near the Italian town of gubio sadly I couldn't expense a trip to Italy for this video so you'll just have to pretend I'm there this time it may look harmless but In 1980 this Gorge Unleashed an inferno upon earth science even if you think you know how crazy this is about to get you don't Walter Alvarez had made plenty of trips to gubio in the 1970s the young geologists knew this site an ancient seafloor had one of the best kpg boundary layers in the world it was well known for its impressive fossil stock of single-celled organisms called forums four Rams above and below the boundary were significantly different a hint of the severity of the extinction that also claimed the dinosaurs Alvarez was struck by the slenderness of the dividing layer a stark black line dividing One World from the next how long had the biotic switch taken how wrong exactly had Lyle beam radiometric dating had narrowed kpg to at most a million years but no one could do better Alvarez though had access to a resource his predecessors lacked his father Luis Alvarez was a Nobel prize-winning physicist his achievements already included discovering new subatomic particles and x-ray scanning an Egyptian pyramid if anyone could bring the full might of physics to Bear against this problem it was him after a full start with the element beryllium the pair had a brain wave iridium back when the Earth was molten most of its iron sunk to the core and took iridium with it leaving the elements scarce in the crust a persistent sprinkling of space dust has however deposited some iridium as Replacements assuming a constant rate one could simply count iridium atoms across a layer to determine how long it had taken to form and by simply I mean it required months of pain and frustration using new technology few people in the world could operate two of those people were Frank asaro and Helen Michael nuclear chemists who received samples of gubier rock from the Alvarez Duo after months of Silence Louise received a phone call hey Frank how's it going Louis you need to drop everything and get her immediately there's something you have to see urgently and bring water because this is big something is seriously up get here now okay thanks bye huh what osiro showed them became perhaps the most important graph in geological history this is the Iridium Spike iridium density in the sampled sequence jumps to 30 times its background level near the moment of foram Extinction in other words there was an iridium layer at the extinction Horizon if iridium deposition rate was constant this implied a duration far beyond anything they expected was Lyle's ridiculous estimate right after all or were they mistaken in assuming iridium had arrived at a constant rate perhaps and just Pie in the Sky speculation here A whole load more space dust than usual had turned up all at once the team faced a choice would they interpret the data as a victory for uniformitarianism or would they delve deeper and risk upending the status quo [Applause] [Music] on the 6th of June 1980 the journal science LED with a paper twice as long as its usual lead entries Alvarez Alvarez asaro and Michael covered four items an analysis of the Iridium anomaly a rejection of Dale Russell's Supernova as an explanation based on a study of plutonium density a proposal that the true source of the Iridium was a 10 kilometer wide asteroid and a proposal that such an asteroid caused the kpg extinction the dinosaurs among its victims and it was at this moment that everything went haywire [Music] in fact the Alvarez impact hypothesis had been shot around conferences for many months prior as they recruited others to verify data it was already quite the talking point so the paper wasn't the bolt from the blue I've made it out to be reality has failed my metaphor asteroid induced Extinction was not a new idea yet in a uniformitarian field unfounded suggestions of asteroids were always destined for the slush pile the Alvarez paper broke through on two fronts it had evidence and it made testable hypotheses the evidence consisted of the Iridium Spike at gubio plus a matching spike in Denmark further chemical analysis confirms the shock result in both cases the Iridium had been deposited quickly the hypotheses were that more spikes would be found at kpg boundary layers around the world and that there was a hundred kilometer wide crater hiding somewhere the stage was set the players took their places The Showdown was about to commence Dr William Glenn is a geologist and historian of science his specialty is understanding how science Works in times of Crisis he began with a postmortem of the plate tectonics revolution of the 1960s another controversial upheaval in earth science Glenn later published his findings in the road to haramio while he came to some striking conclusions about scientific process he regretted joining the party late and decided his next venture must be an ongoing crisis one he could observe as it developed in 1983 he planted his flag in the building uproar over Alvarez and the mass extinction debates from 1994 is the result two chapters from Glenn focus on his own studies while the rest are articles from debate figureheads and commentators this video wouldn't exist without the book particularly as we'll see later the chapter from political sociologist Elizabeth Clements so I'm greatly indebted to it nothing else has so thoroughly narrated all the chaos and I'm about to condense it into like 20 minutes so wish me luck in the mass extinction debates paleontologist David Ralph recounts his initial reaction to the impact paper Alvarez must be wrong and it should be easy to show that he is wrong after all he is a physicist unfamiliar with the data of geology and paleontology and with the complexities of the extinction phenomenon Ralph's response is indicative of a wider Trend that plagued the Alvarez team upon Splashdown faith in Alvarez depended heavily on a given researcher's field on one extreme you had the astronomers Gene Shoemaker had already convinced astronomers that asteroids have shaped geological history Breaking Free of uniformitarianism ahead of time astronomers thus embraced the impact Extinction Theory instantly they knew enough about asteroids to know impact was likely and too little about the other disciplines involved to know why Extinction might not be physicists and geochemists were also quick to fall behind a theory iridium analysis fell right into their wheelhouse and Luis Alvarez was one of theirs geologists on the other hand were horrified to see catastrophism resurrected Walter Alvarez a geologist himself was at best misguided and at worst a traitor how could someone immersed in 150 years of gradual processes suggests something so heretical Lyle would be spinning in his grave at a slow unwavering speed paleontologists are more difficult to place as a whole they felt kinship with geologists and applaud the idea of mass extinction but differences emerged by subfield paleontologists studying microfossils like forums were more receptive remember small marine animals give the highest resolution of the fossil record and so show the sharpest divisions these scientists could see a mass extinction with their own eyes and even if asteroids were mysterious the premise seemed plausible most anti-impacts of all were the vertebrate paleontologists vertebrates are animals with a backbone and that includes the stars of the show Dinosaurs scarcity of vertebrate fossils hid any notion that they perished instantly from the vertebrate paleontologists perspective everyone else was inventing reasons for something they could clearly see hadn't happened someone even coined the term VP ghetto to refer to a stubborn group perhaps they had a point though paleontologists had a reason to think they were the experts and Alvarez knew nothing of their subjects because the Alvarez paper specified the extinction as the c t boundary rather than KET as would have been correct in paleontological circles at the time you see I put that bit about the K in part one for a reason I wasn't just being anal these positions are a simplification and aren't absolute there were many dissenters within each field but these were the Rough centers of gravity as the debates began it's important to emphasize the significance of the conflicting paradigms in each scientist's assessment what looked obvious to some was insane to others purely due to differences in information exposure and prevailing mindset most of all few outside astronomy were privy to the new developments in a study of asteroids so the idea still seemed mad and foreign to most however Glenn's interviewing of scientists at multiple points during the debates revealed that after the fact they believed they'd known and accepted more than they had they'd re-sculpted their memories after the Paradigm had shifted to insist that they'd always been on the right side of History this wasn't lying it was genuine belief on both occasions an inability to consider themselves against the Zeitgeist since a challenge to the Zeitgeist was a challenge to their own legitimacy many researchers careers hinge on being able to convince others that their area of expertise deserves funding if you back a horse that challenges an established Theory your job is at stake you're incentivized to follow the trends consciously or otherwise remember that as we go forward real people's livelihoods were and still are tied to the debate's outcome the exceptions to Glenn's mental resculpting were those who had published a paper in support of an alternative Extinction mechanism prior to impact's arrival already having their name in print alongside a pet Theory seemingly solidified their position for the rest of the debates but many others soon put their name in print too the Alvarez hypothesis had barely left the station when the tracks became clogged with a flurry of papers on the kpg extinction over two and a half thousand between 1980 and 1994. but as fast as the academic machine was running it could never hope to match the pace of the press dinosaurs space cataclysmic destruction just had some sex and a member of the royal family and the whole world would be paying attention as an actual quote by the way many within Academia saw media debates as contamination a layer above that was all noise and seeped down to the detriment of the science we'll delve into this much more in the next part but that may not be how science Works in modern society with so many disciplines involved that struggle to speak to each other of their own accord mass media became the interface for communication the real scientific Battleground even as scientists suffered to get accurate representation for their own field their perception of their opponents was uncritically shaped by the media's representation of them further a full 30 of Scholars involved in the debate claimed to have heard about it first in the popular press with such entrenched views at stake and with the media's foot on the accelerator a curious thing happened to the debate landscape you might call it political polarization although Glenn is quick to warn of the dangers of drawing parallels between science and politics partisanship became the driving force pro-impact groups teamed up with each other to find evidence for impact Extinction anti-impact groups teamed up to find evidence against it it was a time of vibrant collaboration that broke down scientific barriers Everyone collaborating by party line to reinforce the one barrier that motivated them an arms race had begun those who doubted impact faced an immediate problem asteroids were media Wildfire the deus ex machina Elegance of the theory dominating public opinion opponents needed a weapon more Salient than gradual environmental changes but what could be so potent yet still be shoehorned into uniformitarianism [Applause] their answer was a paper dragged out of the archives from 1972 in which Peter Vogt proposed the mantle food Theory we met in part one fun fact vote was the only example Glenn found of someone fully endorsing one theory in Prince before 1980 and later abandoning it volcanism's Creator switched sides to team impact many latched on to evidence for deck and traps volcanism and shifted gears to search for more was there evidence that it had been rapid and intense enough to cause a mass extinction in doing so these researchers had also jumped shipped from uniformitarianism even if they believed volcanoes were in keeping with present processes the scale and power they had to invoke for the Deccan traps was nothing like humans have ever seen some cringed at the development and maintained mass extinctions were still nonsense but their objections were soon drowned out by the louder voices of the two apocalypses polarization Had coalesced Each Camp into advocates for a single Theory known as impactors and volcanists uniformitarianism was dead and it was now catastrophism versus catastrophism for the spoils [Music] everything only gets Messier from here there's no way I can form a neat and comprehensive chronology in a YouTube video so for lack of a more efficient approach please forgive me top 10 most explosive moments from the impactor versus vulcanist debates number one iridium the volcanist's first challenge was to explain the global iridium anomaly without an asteroid iridium may be rare in the crust but as we saw it's plentiful in the Earth's core could a mantle Bloom have carried it up to the surface a team was dispatched to Hawaii post haste to study a modern mental boom and find out they returned with promising evidence oh what's this we found iridium in volcanic rock how strange it says here the density is a hundred times too little to account for the kpg layer uh click somebody come up with a good response well we also found particles in the air around the volcano with much higher iridium concentration but we'll use that we also found particles in the air around the volcano with much higher iridium concentration but every other study has found no iridium at all in volcanic gases so that was probably some kind of outlier but every other study has found no iridium at all in volcanic gases so that was probably some kind of outlier oh well you tried no no wait I can fix this hey media we found iridium in volcanoes and it's all a bit wishy-washy so we can hide in the uncertainty meh the science checks out number two explosive volcanoes another piece of evidence fell the impact his way with the discovery of shocked quartz in the Iridium layer quartz is a common mineral and shocked quartz a version with distinct linear patterns is evidence of incredible strain in rock up to this point it had only been discovered at nuclear test sites and impact craters clearly it was a marker for explosions without measure Beyond even volcanica power how would the volcanist explain this one okay I have this new Theory called explosive volcanoes I thought mantle plume volcanism was more than push ah yes but there were push ones too on a scale larger than any ever imagined now you're just making stuff up they were making stuff up volcanologists experts on volcanoes and confusingly not the same group as vulcanists unanimously rejected the explosive volcanoes hypothesis the volcanists didn't know what they were talking about and yet reactively inventing a volcanic cause for shocked courts maintains the illusion that it was still an open question number three standards of appraisal both these examples highlight how assessment of evidence depended more on the side one was arguing from than the objective value of the evidence it's scary to think that two equally decorated experts looking at the same data could come away with opposing conclusions Glenn and others believe the impactors were on the whole using conventional standards of appraisal while the volcanists tended to nitpick the minor unknowns for far longer than scientists normally would plus they explained their own gaps with weird and unknown processes flying in the face not only of scientific ideals but also of uniformitarianism now they dug in their heels so deeply against the impact theory on that note Old Guard uniformitarians also ran into issues assessing evidence one of the chapters in mass extinction debates comes from John Briggs a marine zoologist Who argues confidently based on paleontological techniques that the kpg boundary represents not 50 to 80 Extinction rate but one percent one percent the terrifying thing is that I as a layperson can't find fault with the explanation he gives to back it up I must rely on others appraisal of his evidence Glenn also recalls a paleobotanist who violently refuted mass extinction until they were dragged to the field to see the fossils looking at evidence for its own sake outside of others judgments immediately changed their mind everyone's looking at the same data but nobody can agree what it means number four adding insult to injury there's a quote every Source on the debate seems to reference so I guess I'm obligated to put it here too one paleontologist said of the impactors in a 1985 New York Times article the arrogance of these people is simply unbelievable they know next to nothing about how real animals evolve live and become extinct but despite their ignorance the geochemists feel that all you have to do is crank up some fancy machine and you've revolutionized science that paleontologist Bob backer who you may remember as one half of a science revolution of his own two decades earlier physicists and geochemists trespassing on paleontological ground was not taken well as this attack shows in fairness the impactors did little to help their cause Luis Alvarez had some particularly scathing words about his opponents he wheeled out the old Ernest Rutherford line about All Saints being either physics or stamp collecting he claimed as early as 1983 that the debate was over and everyone agreed an asteroid did it as paraphrased by the media he believed objections could be dismissed on grounds of General incompetence and he described one paleontologist who suffered through a markedly vicious Feud with him as a weak sister volcanists claim impactors in general hurled further insults at them for years even during lectures ad hominem attacks repeated in the media became the norm exactly how true these claims are I found difficult to verify I'll stay out of this one number five impact Theory conflation a subtle point in all this is that the impact hypothesis is not a single Theory there are two parts to it first that an asteroid hit second that it caused an Extinction the two are not equivalent it's possible the asteroid hits but the resulting killing mechanisms have been overstated was it but a blip in a true Extinction timeline as you might expect the media often conflated two theories but as you might not expect so did the experts given the wealth of disciplines required to even tease out this difference that's not surprising assumptions over which impact Theory everyone was talking about May well have led to much of the animosity number six smearing vulcanists rejoiced when at some locations the Iridium anomaly appeared to be smeared spread out over a longer period And even suggesting multiple pulses haha how can your sudden blip of an asteroid explain that uh two asteroids now it was the impactor's turn to make things up to keep Pace with new objections spoilers but there's definitely one big crater dated 66 million years ago and any others seem to be a maybe at best stories about new candidates turn up all the time but it seems evidence is too hazy for even impacters to put their full weight behind it yet number seven modeling both sides turned to mathematical models hoping to prove their theories using cold hard numbers things went badly the model's complexity and again enormous disparity in skill sets meant very few actually understood them the choice boiled down to Blind Faith or blind dismissal and if the model disagrees with you which are you going for everyone decided maths wasn't the answer and that may be something more concrete was needed impactors busy themselves throwing rocks at balls of flour while volcanists simulated a mantle plume using corn syrup in a glass tube one reporter heard of this glorified lava lamp and ran a story with the caption the basic theory has been Vindicated by laboratory experiments even the people who performed the experiment were like dude it's just corn syrup volcanoes number eight periodicity in 1984 paleontologists David Ralph and Jack sepkowski had an idea what if you gathered all available data on extinction rates across the Earth's entire history and plotted it on a graph they ended up with this some controversially pointed to a staggering conclusion there appeared to be a peak of Extinction every 26 million years why well the impact has went wild trying to figure it out maybe it's all asteroids there's some periodic process throwing them at the Earth every 26 million years what like a gravitational disturbance yes yes maybe it's the fabled Planet X or maybe our sun has a secret twin star called Nemesis or maybe it's intersection with a galactic plane weirdos statisticians were divided on the idea some acknowledge the supposed Trend others saw nothing reassessment and lack of corroborating evidence since means that nowadays periodicity has been dropped and everyone's pretty embarrassed about the whole episode but you know it was fun what it lasted number nine both throughout this video you might have been screaming a simple question at me if an asteroid impact and volcanism occurred together at the kpg boundary why not both could a combination of the two extremes have driven the dinosaurs beyond their breaking point and hey people in the midst defeated arguments love being told to kiss and make up and come to a compromise oh wait no better impacters refuse to study the possibility as it could have bolstered the volcanists and volcanists refused to study it as it could have bolstered the impactors there was therefore an information void when it came to compromise models Glenn cites only a single academic review which was balanced and comprehensive for the two theories but it still supports the hypothesis that researchers were only fair towards their own Theory because the author believed in both simultaneous independent catastrophes for those asking what if the asteroid caused the volcanoes there's been significant Research into this in recent years the Deccan traps started spewing lava long before the impact but the notion that the asteroids sent them into overdrive is quite popular for those asking what if the volcanoes caused the asteroid you are officially Beyond science number 10 conspiracy the volcanists gazed upon the landscape of the debates they saw ignorance and arrogance they saw fighting and chaos they saw War and they said none of this is science none of this is logical none of this is bringing us closer to the truth the only logical explanation is that the whole thing is a scam accusations of conspiracy are well documented but pinning down who orchestrated it and to what end is a fair bit harder volcanists argued that journals were rejecting papers that discredited the impact Theory some version of this sounds likely the seductiveness of a sudden end is much easier to present for a general audience than the slow March of volcanoes this of course bled into mainstream press even compared to their rival asteroids were just so much sexier as we'll explore shortly and again careers were on the line here impact in the Press meant impactors got all the funding they could ask for while volcanists were neglected it's entirely possible this was a real phenomenon without underhand manipulation but was something more going on General Rumblings point to NASA that staple of conspiratorial belief charges that they were selectively funding dodgy impact research to drive public interest in Asteroid Defense programs meanwhile Carl Sagan took the impact hypothesis to new heights of salience in 1983. enter nuclear winter inspired by the impact winter scenario he asked would nuclear war lead to similar Global darkness and Extinction he believed it would and he circumvented the scientific press to bring the matter to public attention before anyone could argue was this linked to Cold War paranoia another attempt by the impactors to drown out alternatives of the Cold War if this tweet is to be believed it's not I want to be very clear this is a joke I'm not putting words in anyone's mouth this thing goes right to the top Ronald Reagan himself has brainwashed all of us into believing the impact hypothesis because our fear of asteroids will leave us no choice but to fund his space lasers hey you okay man no by hook or by crook impactors were winning hearts and Minds the debate was swinging their way but they still lacked The Knockout Punch where was the crater the answer would come in 1991 following a trail of clues that began with tsunami deposits in Texas continued through 40 year old Mexican oil drilling records and concluded below chickslub a man named Alan Hildebrand found it dated to 66 million years old this submerged gravitational anomaly marks the impact site the evidence has since overwhelmed even the most hardened impact opponents an enormous asteroid struck the Earth at the kpg boundary impactors declared Victory uniformitarianism had been overthrown long live the asteroid his first forays into the forums now a distant memory Walter Alvarez himself wrote a book T-Rex and the crater of Doom joining many in the popular press in framing the whole debate as a search for the crater The Smoking Gun with that hypothesis confirmed what else was there to say but you have to remember 0.5 an asteroid hit sure but did it kill the dinosaurs A lot happened in the 14 years after 1980. paradigms shifted alliances formed rivalries flared one side emerged the apparent Victor changing the face of pre-history forever the debate would continue of course hanging on to the question a crater alone can't answer but the intensity of the 80s has yet to return the mass extinction debates concludes in 1994 with an intriguing interjection of stop press a year prior Gene Shoemaker together with Carolyn Shoemaker and David Levy spotted a comet cluster on a collision course with Jupiter named Shoemaker Levy 9 the cluster offered an ironic opportunity if present processes are the key to past processes what happens when an asteroid impact observed and verified around the world becomes a present process 14 years of trading blows trying to get rid of it and it turns out uniformitarianism had never left Glenn's Coda written a few months before Impact says the effect on Jupiter is expected to be small to be at most a few pixels in the Galileo spacecraft's camera I wonder how that's going to turn out part four professional exterminate all dinosaurs with this one weird trick [Music] [Music] in his book bad science physician and science journalist Ben goldacre characterizes the media's depiction of science as groundless incomprehensible didactic true statements from scientists who themselves are socially powerful arbitrary unelected authority figures everything in science is tenuous contradictory probably going to change soon and most ridiculously hard to understand the focus of guldecker's Ayah is medical journalism which I hope you'll agree is in Far Dire Straits than any other science but do his claims point to systemic issues across science communication do they apply to the media's role in the mass extinction debates even today goldacre points to three types of endemic science news stories has evidence of mass media's harm to public perceptions wacky scare and breakthrough can we find examples of each in KPD reporting and are they still shrouding the question in too much uncertainty let's begin with wacky these are the stories that depict scientists as silly old Coots off in their own fantasy worlds you know buffins it might seem Innocent but this approach risks turning society's view of science into a parody of itself if science is all just a silly Funtime side quest what motivation is there to trust it why listen to a bunch of caricatures who care so much about nonsense oh maybe it's the mathematician in me talking but one example from goal acre irks me way more than any of those that are objectively worse Jessica Alba the film actress has the ultimate sexy struts according to a team of Cambridge mathematicians so said British newspaper The Daily Telegraph in 2007. had Cambridge number Wizards really proven the superiority of Alba's hip movements no a marketing firm had conducted a survey of its own employees to find the celebrity with the most essential walk ignored the results and said Jessica Alba won anyway duped a mathematician into coming up with a formula for sexy strides to masquerade as something scientific and the whole thing was commissioned to promote a brand of hair removal cream this absolute mockery of scientific principles spreaded in news networks as far removed as Fox News and a lesbian lifestyle magazine mathematicians at the University of Cambridge yes Cambridge have determined through careful calculations and tires Timeless hours of growing preset but Jessica Alba has the best wiggle somewhere along the line Britain's favorite toilet paper Brands discovered that backing up shoddy surveys with manipulated scientific claims was a ticket to virality even better when firms wanting to promote stuff can pay you to do it and you may be thinking Oliver this is a video about dinosaurs why the hell are you talking about Jessica Alba well the sum total of my attempts to find existing data on Modern public beliefs about the kpg extinction amounted only to articles like this 2021 piece from The Daily Mirror one in 10 Brits think dinosaurs still exist as buffin says they never truly went extincts that buffing turned out to be Steve brucetti highly respected dinosaur paleontologist and it may be no surprise to learn he was talking about the whole Bird's art dinosaurs thing we went over earlier but you can't wave a tasty morsel like technically dinosaurs still exist in front of a newspaper without it mulching your words into a disfigurement of Science and when the article admitted that this whole survey plus dodgy science stunt was in service of promoting a dinosaur cartoon on Disney Plus I felt an overwhelming surge of deja vu well there's decent science in the article at least in the quotes from brucetti the newspaper knows what it's doing it knows portraying scientists as AirHeads gets clicks no matter the damage if an expert says something as silly as dinosaurs still exist maybe none of them know anything maybe the kpg extinction is fundamentally wacky that however is the least of its problems next on our list scare stories since ancient times meteor showers have sparked fear and discontent demons breaking into the Earthly realm to wreak havoc Omens of dreadful events thanks to this meteorites which fell in 1795 there has since been widespread acceptance of the reality rocks from space their destructive potential has though helped persist the shroud of Primal Cosmic horror that surrounds them the 1908 tunguska event a great explosion in Siberia was immediately attributed to an asteroid for instance and as previously mentioned Jean Shoemaker led a revolution in astronomy over the true impact of impacts in the middle of the century in 1973 Arthur C Clarke wrote rendezvous with Rama the story follows near future Humanity as they discover an alien artifact from Beyond the solar system Humanity finds these cylindrical spacecraft thanks to its space guard program an asteroid tracking initiative set up in the wake of cataclysm from space in perhaps my favorite opening chapter in literature Clark describes how one September morning in 2077 an asteroid from the blue destroyed half a country moving at 50 kilometers a second a thousand tons of rock and metal impacted on the plains of Northern Italy destroying in a few flaming moments the labor of centuries it was as if a great War had been fought and lost in a single morning in light of how large the asteroid threat loomed throughout history it's staggering that the Earth Sciences remained so stubbornly reticent about extinction by impact as late as 1980. again that's largely down to the prevailing view of asteroids and extinctions as Unworthy of real science but the public they were primed and ready to believe as scare stories go nothing can ever hope to match we could all be wiped out by a space monster with no warning and as of 1980 that's coming from actual boffins shoemak 11 9's collision with Jupiter produced a whole lot more than a couple of pixels the scale of the Fireballs produced and the longevity of the scars they left surprised even impact devotees in the words of William Glenn from a 1998 article the momentous event virtually reconfigured the mindset of both science and the public regarding potential impacting of the Earth the impact has now had evidence as simple and memorable as the theory it supported the impact hypothesis soon entered a kind of feedback loop Shoemaker Levy 9 laid the groundwork for films like Deep Impact in Armageddon which put awe-inspiring CGI depictions of death from space in society's brains impactors and NASA could then latch onto these popular representations as common ground maybe even associate with them whether this is simple self-promotion or devious propaganda depends on who you listen to but scientific institutions are always chasing Cinema as a means for drumming up support let's not forget that Jurassic Park was backed by paleontologists and was a major factor in embedding the ideals of the dinosaur Renaissance in our Collective Consciousness finally we all knew dinosaurs were active intelligent and bird-like and we also knew Velociraptors were the wrong size God damn it impact as a Mythic idea has only gone from strength to strength since HD footage of 2013's jelly bitsk meteor is but a YouTube search away or what of um in 2017. in an eerie echo of rendezvous with Rama a cylindrical Space Rock slingshot around the Sun our first glimpse of material from Beyond the solar system although an object that hit Earth in 2014 is now believed to be our first recorded extrasolar visitor data confirming its origin was kept classified because it trips the United States nuclear detonation sensors asteroids are firmly part of the modern experience no one can dispute that their pervasiveness activates a cognitive bias called the availability heuristic ideas strongly linked to powerful imagery are more likely to be factored in when making decisions case in points while reading so heavily about dinosaur extinction for this video I had multiple vivid dreams about asteroids I had none about volcanoes in an asteroid dominated world the media have had a field day with all new scare stories huge asteroid big enough to destroy city to pass between Earth and Moon this weekend will an asteroid hit Earth in December and should you be worried NASA monitors asteroid likely to hit Earth on Valentine's Day 2046 sure if by likely you've been there was a one in 500 chance that's now been significantly reduced with further observation we even have media about the media's relationship with asteroids as a metaphor for bad science communication if that isn't cultural omnipresence I don't know what is each example exploits and reinforces our mental bias towards the terrorizing deus ex machina that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs therefore appears obvious our final type of harmful news is the Breakthrough story despite and arguably because of the view of the kpg extinction as settled these are the most disruptive of all medicine is Awash with breakthrough stories given the volume of Articles announcing new cures for cancer how can we haven't cured cancer quoting again from goldacre if an experimental result is newsworthy it can often be for the same reasons that it is probably wrong it must be a single lone piece of information which contradicts a large amount of pre-existing experimental evidence paradigms exist for a reason especially in modern science every Paradigm has proven itself at least useful if not approximately true yet the entire focus of mass extinction debates is the danger blind Reliance on paradigm's poses let's not forget how many scientific revolutions have played a part in our story even William Smith right back at the beginning faced resistance he was ignored plagiarized and forced into debtors prison before his ideas were accepted you could say we've gone meta and have arrived at the uniformitarianism versus catastrophism debate about science itself does science smolder or explode I like the way paleontologist Darren Nash resolves it in an article about yet another paleontological Paradigm dust up no we don't have time links in the description the total sum of human knowledge Can Be Imagined as a giant sprawling Baroque castle made of Lego bricks those of us who publish scientific results will if we're lucky get to add a few bricks to one of the walls people who get to demolish an existing wool and construct a wholly new one are rare and special indeed just as uniformitarianism explains the majority of the past the majority of scientific progress is gradual incremental aligning with established Theory remarkable upheavals should not be banished the model says however they should be treated with suspicion statistically speaking anyone claiming to have revolutionized science is most likely wrong the few who aren't must as the saying goes support their extraordinary claims with extraordinary evidence spoilers this quote's going to get ironic later resistance to impact was justified to begin with yet many felt The Gauntlet set by its opponents went too far the mass extinction debates is in some sense an examination of paradigms outstaying their welcome by scientific standards because human standards overruled them the real trouble comes from tossing the media into the mix for them everything must be a breakthrough who wants to read about a treatment that's 0.1 percent better after all the result is a portrayal of science as temporary driven by fads to demonstrate just how difficult this makes life for the layperson consider two famous theories both went against plentiful experimental data both caused scientific uproar both were pushed like crazy by the press for their bravery and insights and today all experts consider one roughly correct and the other total nonsense those theories are Albert Einstein's general relativity and Andrew wakefield's MMR vaccine scandal the difference is that the overwhelming evidence since has Vindicated and debunked them respectively in the moment though how could the public tell who was the righteous Maverick the media made them out to be and who wasn't when it comes to kpg the Press had one big bite of the Cherry back when impact was the new big thing and now that that's the entrenched Theory they get to play breakthrough Bingo by Reviving volcanism much of the search for a volcanic Extinction since 1991 has been about two things constraining the time frame of the largest eruption pulses and matching the dates of eruptions to extinctions if one can show that volcanism was more intense than assumed or that it lines up better with mass extinction the impact hypothesis should be called into question some Studies have clamp steps towards these but there's been considerable resistance of the type I'm sure you're used to by now see we can date this eruption precisely because we found your layer of iridium in the Deccan traps we have an exact relative marker of your impact and my eruption and my eruption fits the extinction better ah yeah well you know maybe that iridium came from the volcanoes listen there you little ask the media though and these findings appearing now and then across 30 years or so are all breakthroughs set to challenge a so far unchallenged impact Dogma rarely have I seen a cake so had and eaten nonetheless I can see their logic I admit that I am emotionally attached to the idea of an asteroid killing the dinosaurs it's such a poignant story that I would find news of its collapse a challenge to my own worldview hence morbidly irresistible the media deliciousness of stories about asteroids and stories about anything but asteroids has thus created a frankly unhinged flood of contradictory articles jumping over each other to proclaim the truth about the kpg extinction what really killed the dinosaurs what really killed the dinosaurs what really killed the dinosaurs really killed the dinosaurs really killed the dinosaurs and killed the dinosaurs it's easy to be disheartened at the state of reporting over the kpg extinction but I want to emphasize that I've cherry-picked these examples to be the worst of science communication as Glenn himself notes journalists involved in the debates Heyday had in general a good to excellent grasp of the underlying science their primary foil was inability to cover all the fields involved and hence Reliance on the loudest voices in each camp I'd like now to zoom out for a brief overview of the theory of science communication so far we've been making implicit assumptions that may not hold up to reality is the system always this simple the traditional conception of Public Communication of science is called the deficit model essentially it states that URLs stupid the public is assumed to be ignorant at a knowledge deficit the monolithic blob of raw science is far too complex for them to understand so we need mediators people whose job is to translate the science into something more palatable the deficit model measures the success of the communication by how much accurate sites the public has retained can they recall correct facts with appropriate detail if they can't it must be the mediator's fault they must have translated it wrong possibly due to commercial interests muddying the waters this model legitimizes both scientists and science communicators scientists sit apart from the dirty business of communication free to criticize the media's presentation of their work they are the source of truth but mediators are also necessary to dumb down the science sure playing Chinese Whispers means to get it wrong sometimes but we all need to know science rights democracy as an ideology requires an informed voter base someone has to teach it to us in terms we understand keep in mind for the rest of the video that science mediation is an industry unto itself sometimes the mediators make us forget that they are there at all hiding the true scale of their role in society I'm not saying this is a bad thing but it needs to be remembered more sometimes the deficit model is perfectly adequate science can indeed be a different language most of it Greek but we've already seen examples where this simple linear flow doesn't explain scientific Dynamics a competing construction is the Continuum model perhaps science and science mediators as terms are too vague perhaps information flows in more than one direction perhaps we should rework the deficit model into a full ecosystem with several stages and two-way dialogues at interfaces first disconnected fields are The Cutting Edge of science exchange ideas within themselves and these ideas are ultimately adapted for an inter-specialist stage once better supported these are your interdisciplinary journals science nature so on scientists can then consult such journals to learn about developments outside their area of expertise beyond that the pedagogic level adapts content for education and textbooks and the popular level adapts these for Mass Appeal the whole structure ends up acting like a funnel removing subtleties and adding perceptual certainty the further along you go the ideology of the Continuum model is that this is how good science should work ideas are only solidified in public view once they've passed through layers of scrutiny but this model does acknowledge that exceptions exist first popular science wraps right back round to influence Specialists you know that 30 statistic from earlier another off-cited study found a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine is three times more likely to be referenced in other papers if it's mentioned in the New York Times scientists do rely on the popular press it's also possible for information to skip one or more levels the Continuum model enforces inherent skepticism towards such deviations they fly in the face of how science should be done and so aren't to be trusted because of that link from popular back to specialist deviations can be viewed as scientists attempts to unfairly influence scientific opinion in their favor or if you're so inclined scams the Continuum model is certainly more complex than the deficit model but even this is not always the full picture another alternative Is the participation model the participation model challenges two fundamental assumptions that the public can only be receivers of scientific agenda and that science communication is all just basic knowledge transfer rather than separating scientists from the discourse the participation model holds that the public can and should take an active role in shaping science its goals and its communication methods what do you think killed the dinosaurs leave your answer down below you know that kind of thing museums for instance have transformed in the past few decades less emphasis on static pedagogic displays and more on interactivity asking questions adding ethical context putting the visitors first putting their ethical desires about Science Center Stage putting Richard Owen up in the rafters one side effect of this collapse of the Ivory Tower is that both press and public can call scientific institutions into question in some cases leading to disillusionment and reduced trust in science as a philosophy balancing the need for public involvement against a dunning-kruger driven I know better than the scientists hellscape Is the participation model's greatest challenge while Trends have shifted all three communication models remain popular applicable to many different examples sometimes a deficit approach will do sometimes it really won't humans are not neat models even scientists are biased entities with limited time to assess the full picture the non-linear ecosystem that emerges is contradictory maybe a little Bleak and a hell of a lot more complicated than most of you probably thought anyway can we talk about dinosaurs again ah there we go [Music] riding the coattails of Jurassic Park Walking with Dinosaurs arrived on the scene in 1999 unlike Jurassic Park's overt entertainment slant this was a documentary at the time the most expensive documentary series ever made Walking with Dinosaurs ushered in an era of dinosaur science for everyone its Legacy is the proliferation of dinosaur documentaries that have etched ideas about prehistory in our minds one of them even has a second season coming out last month [Music] I don't even need to tell you at this point that some of the ideas these documentaries Have Made Concrete are sketchy at best Walking with Dinosaurs storyboard artist came from a dramatic film background science and entertainment are both integral to its DNA so too are fact and speculation in the words of its primary paleontological consultant Michael Benton science is about hypothesis testing and making a hypothesis is speculation artists animators and puppeteers all contributed to the science as much as they drew from it bringing prehistory to life in a public-centric context demanded they ask new questions and Inspire new inquiry as one example while operating fake Diplodocus heads puppeteers discovered they needed to move in an unexpected way to strip leaves initiating a new scientific dialogue from the public space watching the final episode back I was surprised to see volcanism so strongly linked to the dinosaur's decline egg stealing mammals also get a look in but it's still the asteroid the deus ex machina that gets all the narrative Fanfare same old story the story generations of documentaries have rendered in CGI action films are one thing but if it's on factual TV there's even more reason to believe it right only last year headlines exploded with the discovery of a fantastically well-preserved leg from a dinosaur that could have died on the very day of impact several lines of evidence suggest it was buried in a tsunami and there's impact ejector nearby with the help of a David Attenborough Helms documentary no the other one the team pulled a sneaky on us and put it in our heads before the peer review process had completed so despite its Grand claims this conclusion is so far provisional the million dollar question then is do these documentaries reflect modern expert consensus outside of the contrarian volcanists continuing struggle for recognition and surprisingly still one or two OG uniformitarians out there the debates over the kpg extinction in specialist levels has moved on the fire of the debates may have abated but the passion of those seeking evidence has not it's not just the mummified leg fossils today are being discovered faster than ever before filling in gaps and narrowing boundaries combined with improved radiometric dating chemical analysis and modern statistical techniques all evidence that's widely supported points the same way these days the question isn't so much did an asteroid Kill the Dinosaurs as would dinosaurs have died soon anyway even without an asteroid were they already in Decline although let's face it if you have a long-term ailment but get hit by a car the coroner is going to put car on the death certificate though they arrived as Mavericks amid a media frenzy Alvarez Alvarez asaro and Michael Mets the challenge the crater silenced all doubts about the physical impact and multiple reviews of recent years based on a wealth of evidence name it as the primary driver of Extinction the media monstrosity might be pulling it in all sorts of directions but International panels of scientists keep arriving at the same conclusion even panels of vertebrate paleontologists those erstwhile impact Skeptics so maybe I should ignore all the noise all the arguments all the media Spin and Trust scientists to do their jobs I should after everything come to the conclusion that was obvious from the very start of the video what killed the dinosaurs an asteroid [Music] hold on hold on hold on just one more thing I read this Popular Science book on paleontology by an esteemed expert and I read this Popular Science book on paleontology by an extinct expert they both saved was an asteroid sure but this one States based on statistical modeling that the dinosaurs were in Decline beforehand and this one States based on statistical modeling that they weren't two highly respected books a year apart both sat at the popular end of things where it's all supposed to be nice and certain and consumable for laypeople like me and the debate's still not over it never will be I can't trust anything are you enjoying this science you sent me down a rabbit hole and I've made a stupidly long video and all it's done is Crush my confidence in any science I ever read ever being accurate there are still people arguing volcanoes why shouldn't I believe them I don't know enough to judge their evidence the media keeps telling me they've got something or maybe there was no Extinction it was just one percent of species maybe it was the space lasers what is truth how could anyone even know anything in this ridiculous system oh I just have to trust this panel how do I know this panel is trustworthy when there are still doubts out there I don't have the time or brain power to understand science is a better to keep shouting asteroid at being a very suspicious Manner and I don't know anymore what really killed the dinosaurs what really killed the dinosaurs thank you [Music] [Music] why am I doing this no seriously why am I doing this part five Confessions of a YouTuber as I read the many sources covering the mass extinction debates something was nagging in the back of my mind a sense that many of them had missed something and then it hit me commentated on the events and denounced the state of science communication as if the whole thing was separate from their current context news articles ridiculing the media's involvement ended up looking naive because very few of them acknowledged their own position pitfalls and potential influence within the science ecosystem they so condemned I've therefore decided it would be journalistically irresponsible of me to ignore my own place in all this why me why this video where does it fit into the whole thing hopefully answering these questions can lead us to some sort of closure I have a master's degree in mathematics no qualifications in geology or paleontology or anything relevant to this video I've always been fascinated by science communication though both doing it and understanding it six years ago for a project at sick form I combined this with my love of maths and music to write a popular science book about the maths of Music four years later in need of a topic for another communication project I took one chapter from this book adapted it into a YouTube video and that YouTube video now has a million views mad right as a video I'm still proud of it most people really like it it's well paced well explained and well animated except for the Gap in the sine wave yes I know it's there I had to leave it in as I didn't have time to fix it please shut up in the comments if only the complaints in the comments were limited to the animation for two years now I've been on the receiving end of a non-trivial amount of vitriol regarding the video's content it's a video about the history of the maths of music and while the maths my special subject is A-Okay the music and history yeah when I maintain there's only one thing I said that's outright factually wrong I didn't do myself any favors with misleading phrasing key emissions and oversimplification there were plenty of reasonable comments pointing us out and a few quite hurtful ones turns out I had approached the video from the mathematical Zeitgeist and relied too heavily on popular representations of the other subjects involved what does that remind you of now I'm not the victim here where my video got too popular why was me no that's not my point my point is that a video made by someone without formal grounding in half the stuff they were talking about is now many people's go-to reference for this topic seriously I've had several people email me asking if they can cite the video in University projects of their own there are doubtless many more who did that without contacting me I did not make this video with the academic Authority that befits something a million people have seen but the internet doesn't care unless you stumble upon a comment from someone who knows better you're probably going to believe every word I said and that scares me it scares me that a single person with mediocre knowledge of a topic can have such outsized influence on media perception of that topic I know I'm not an isolated case it's in the name YouTube you and you're all scientifically proven to be idiots me though I'm admitting I'm an idiot remember I don't have a face you shouldn't be trusting me yet just by saying that I can make you perceive me as more trustworthy sure admission of uncertainty is necessary for good science but it's not sufficient I could have been lying about that just as I've lied about everything else in the video maybe how do you know you're not going to take time out of your busy and multifaceted lives to check all my sources and then tickle bare sources and then collate every academic review to know which of those sources are unfairly biased and then read the entire history of science today where those reviews are being held hosted by a problematic paradigm ah in producing the book all those years ago that would land me in hot Pythagorean water I drew a lot from 2008's Handbook of Public Communication of science and technology which I went back to for this video I squashed its overview of communication Theory into my side last chapter for instance very much recommend is more thorough treatment if it piqued your interest we'll come back to the handbook itself but right now let's talk about this guy Carl Sagan you may remember spearheaded the push for governments to recognize the threat nuclear winter posed to civilization a theory inspired by and arguably instrumental in promoting the Alvarez impact hypothesis his deviation to the popular level succeeded in instilling the fear of nuclear winter in our minds but once scientific inquiry reeled it back in the theory came up short many modern experts doubt full-scale nuclear war would throw up enough aerosols to block out the Sun I know this because I watched a YouTube video Neil halloran's videos are some of the finest things you can watch on the platform and his latest re-examines an earlier claim he made about nuclear winter the video is part of a broader series looking at how much we can and should trust science but even here in a video about a theory we all take for granted and the implications of trusting its extreme claims on communication Dynamics Neil does not once mention the extraordinary journey of uncertainty surrounding the impact and impact winter instead it's the comparison points a solid well-grounded Theory to contrast the one being upturned Neil May well have been aware of the impact debate Quagmire but either way reasonably did not get into it I just found its framing a bit astonishing after well this if accepted beliefs in a video about questioning beliefs may be uncertain how much is there being presented as fact on this site despite intense argument to the contrary not maliciously not intentionally merely out of necessity how much have I mindlessly believed I was further taken aback to discover that when asked about their interests and expertise in paleontology many of my survey respondents said more or less nothing except I binge watch YouTube videos about it okay the sampling bias of Distributing the survey to YouTube users is about as Extreme as you can get here but that's not making me feel any better the participation model has reached a new extreme everyone is a science mediator with the internet's Whirlwind of constant information and the lowering barrier to entry for joining in with a snazzy production professional and amateur science communication are intermixing without oversight only the ethical fortitude of the Creator and the threat of a million well actually is in the comments prevents a video slipping into the dark recesses of misinformation hello stop press time I guess shortly before I finished editing this monstrosity I came across a video by Kyle Hill calling out the influx of trash AI generated 100 misinformation sites content on YouTube wonder if it's infiltrated the kpg extinction space Oh Yeah you know when everyone's a science Communicator no one is kind of stealing Oliver at the end of the video's Thunder here but I happen to believe the context of information delivery is more important than the content if you're annoyed this video has been and will continue to be about me as much as a science that's the point this was always going to be information refracted through my own eyes so why not lean into it and make awareness of that the message why not hold on to the fading crumbs of personality I can muster for this God forsaken website needless to say I don't believe the correct path forward here consists of tools which by their very nature remove all contexts that's even remotely human understandable watch this video don't watch these videos stare blankly into the gaping abyss of your own insignificance have a nice day [Music] is this video misinformation it is first and foremost entertainment there's a bunch of stupid jokes in it for crying out loud I make videos for my own enjoyment I'm an individual spending my free time spinning an interesting yarn for casual internet viewers all my narrative choices are made in this context I simplified and satirized complex issues to save time to make them more memorable and frankly because it's fun is it fun is it I'm fully aware that I've been indulging in the very communication evils I've denounced am I a bad person for doing that even if I've taken every chance to highlight how I have warped things that's for you to decide but in my defense about the immense amount of wacky in particular last time I trivialized a subject this badly I got invited onto an Outreach panel this website makes no sense either way fun shouldn't be an excuse for factual sloppiness I can't prove it you can't verify it but I promise I tried I've put as much effort as my free time allows into meeting an acceptable standard of accuracy that said I am human I've probably made mistakes please let me know if you find any but why this video why the mass extinction debates as a case study on science communication in the first place what point am I even trying to get to anymore well our Story begins with Mammoth cheese I made a video about Mammoth cheese in September it went down well for myself and my subscribers so I thought what other obscure paleontological factoids do I know of that could result in a neat video and I remembered the Pythagoras video and the book it grew from and the book That Grew From and I remembered a single line I'd read in that book six years earlier around one-third of the scholars involved in the debates on the connection between mass extinction of dinosaurs and a meteor collision with the Earth stated that they had heard of the impact hypothesis from the mass media and I thought that's a cool one little known statistic I could make a video about that say something provocative about how media imposes rigidity on science yet scientists are reliant on it had some dinosaurs Bish bash Bosh like a 10 minute video instant hit let's go [Applause] yeah what kind of colossal hypocrite would you have to be to talk about Popular Science Dynamics based on a single line of research so I sought out the source mass extinction debates isn't the ultimate origin of the statistic that honor belongs to this article but it was the item referenced in the handbook and it opened my eyes to the scale and theatrics of a conflict that had raged years before I'd even been born a conflict I assumed my whole life was all but settled the reference LED in particular to Elizabeth Clemens chapter on the debates and Popular Science as noted Clemens is a political sociologist but she's also the daughter of William Clements vertebrate paleontologist and one of the Alvarez team's most consistent opponents she therefore had a unique view of the debate's societal components writing multiple articles on a topic I can only recommend by the time I got around to reading her chapter in Earnest I was already neck deep in other research the more I learned the blurrier science became the more contradictions and arguments I found that I couldn't resolve the less I felt I could ever reach a satisfying conclusion deep in this mindset I came to Clement's account of her perusal of the children's section of a local bookstore and her dismay at how many stories contained little information apart from the fetishism of species names characteristic of many five-year-olds these days no ordinary pet will do for Alex but when Alex brings Fred a pet masospondalis home from the dino store he gets a whole lot more than he bargained for [Music] I remember this book it's one of the first books I ever read my parents say I forced them to read it to me every night for six months that I memorized all the words that I sculpted them if they got the words wrong and you can't buy dinosaurs at the dino store and that's not what a message modulus looks like but this is where it began dinosaurs I've always loved dinosaurs my favorite is the Triceratops dinosaur books and games and toys and TV shows and freaking calendars all my life I've been enamored with Dinosaurs I've always been on this dinosaur Journey a constant inspiration even as so many other passions faded and I had in my hand at once the beginning and the end [Music] and it all became clear there was in my opinion a single answer to my survey that got it right a single Guru graciously dispensing spiritual truth upon us what killed the dinosaurs it doesn't matter I can explain let me explain what is science is it hypothesis testing is it a method for reducing uncertainty about the world is it groundless incompressible didactic truth statements the question is hard to answer because much like dinosaur it means different things in different contexts but right down at the metal in the philosophical ideal I think William Glenn in this 1997 article puts it best science is the only self-correcting system of knowledge known to history in light of this let me pull up another response to my survey that stuck in my mind someone claimed to dislike paleontology because everything we know about dinosaurs keeps getting in their words retconned retcon noun the ACT practice or result of changing and existing fictional narrative whatever the ideal of science is it is not a coherent narrative biases and distortions arise because we as humans wanted to be one we want a satisfying story a simple memorable idea we want heroic Mavericks and great dogmas to overcome we want Beginnings we want ends seriously everyone seems to want to claim the end the final word the great summarizing certainty even I'm doing it right now I have the dramatic music for it and everything yet science is under no obligation to give us any of those the scientific method is valuable and has transformed the modern world precisely because it is designed to reduce this tendency towards good storytelling a corollary of science as a self-correcting system is that science will always be wrong but it's hard for our brains to deal with that there are some things significant evidence does make us sure about others we're still in the dark yet science requires us to doubt everything how can non-scientists assess the correct level of doubt we can't help but find this contradiction unsettling our communication as a species depends on forming a story the story of a scientific paper the story of an eye-catching result the story of Jessica Alba's sexy hips some of these are definitely more worthwhile than others but maybe it can't be avoided story with all its disfigurements is the inspiration we as a society rely on so here's what I think you can dismiss all of what I'm about to say again I have no Authority here whatsoever but this is my satisfying conclusion if we have to tell a story we shouldn't be telling this one because the one that actually matters is how do we know what killed the dinosaurs ensure that includes the evidence the deductions the results from the majority of specialist papers that have supported asteroid more than that though it's about the communication ecosystem that molded what you think you know the realization that an obvious fact resulted from innumerable poor judgments could in truth be thrown out at any moment and yet should roughly be accepted by the average person anyway because for everyone who isn't a scientist the result doesn't matter is knowing whether it was an asteroid or volcanoes that killed dinosaurs going to change anything about your life I don't think so but knowing the intricacies human inaccuracies and scientific ideals that made you believe it will dinosaurs are inherently inspiring and I believe that inspiration should be co-opted to shine a light on the story I've told today Clemens has a point in her dissatisfaction at children's books about dinosaurs but if it wasn't for them this video about the nuance and complexity of science wouldn't exist maybe it's survivorship bias but it proves the potential for everyone to reach a fuller understanding I believe everyone should repeat my journey why because there are a million more relevant scientific findings embroiled in constant debate that do demand your input questions like how dangerous is the coronavirus or are humans causing climate change the extinction of the dinosaurs may have a controversial history but by societal standards it's nowhere near as fraught with conflicting communication as issues like these by understanding how science Works in a relatively harmless petri dish one we can all be inspired by on neutral terrain we are all better equipped for bigger challenges I mean just listen to this headline I found conservatives and liberals united only by interesting dinosaurs a study claims dinosaurs are our only Common Ground the article seems to think that's a bad thing but I found a way to make it useful although the results of the study which correlated book by habits to judge political affiliation were that were United by dinosaurs and veterinary medicine only way to go I haven't just been keeping this counter for its vast comedic potential but because I hope it makes a statement knowledge is fractal well actually is upon well actuallys I've had to break my narrative coherency all that of others time and time again to deal with them it's impossible to make content for my intended context without missing some the same is true of everything on this site every piece of science you've ever seen I hope the takeaway is not the content of these corrections but that they exist the awareness that no matter what story someone tells you no matter the hold of its Paradigm over your mind the fact it is a story prevents it from being the truth in the mass extinction debates and in an interview which makes my own points much more eloquently William Glenn states he believes the purpose of Science History is to point out the seeds of subjectivity and make us aware of them he quotes from Harry overstreet's the mature mind in stating the single Criterion of mental maturity is the ability to hold a suspended judgment if I might paraphrase uncertainty is not the enemy it is the ideal we should all strive for not today throwing your hands up and deciding no one knows anything kind of way but in an inherent distrust of your own mind's desire for narrative fulfillment it is extremely hard I'm not good at it William Glenn admits he's not good at it society as a whole certainly isn't good at it but we can be better and if I and a load of dinosaurs can help with that maybe this story was worth telling after all you know last time one of my videos came to the conclusion that uncertainty was worthwhile I had my immediate comeuppance at the hands of a projectile from the sky good job there are none of those in this video guess the power of rejecting narratives has broken me free of my own tyranny wow I get to have an actual ending thank you all so much for watching I hope you got a lot out of it it's been a bumpy road to get here safe to say I'm not making a video this extensive again for a long time special shout out by the way to those on my Discord Who provided feedback on a draft version of this video and assured me I wasn't going completely Mad As a treat for sticking with me so long let's end with a review of the less conventional answers I received in my survey what killed the dinosaurs [Music] the great Jurassic eucalyptus famine big rock cause big boom do you count chickens and other birds as dinosaurs if so mostly humans oh my God that's probably technically correct no sun LOL I did Society evidence suggests an asteroid impact was the main culprit volcanic eruptions of course logical climate change may also been involved together with all gradual changes to the Earth climate have over millions of years I am not lazy Angie sperms mate angiosperms Veronica Sawyer and Jason Dean apparently this one's a reference to the musical Heathers I'm not doing any Googling I believe my first answer was well informed oh do I have a video for you I'm already procrastinating by taking this survey and wasn't expecting a research project hubris EA Games still aliens can't fool me Dwayne Johnson not gonna bother checking much I stand by my previous answer except to further distance myself from any claims about cladistics whatever status and to complain that what killed and the dinosaurs are two vague terms you're supposed to be the category Theory guy right ah looks like somebody got the point depression Obama yes nah a mass extinction either that they died of cringe an asteroid also there you tell us and finally your mom why do I even bother [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] thank you Epic Rap Battles of vegetables well Smith fireshirts William Smith again

Channel: Oliver Lugg

Views: 1,243,390

Keywords: Dinosaurs, Extinction, K-Pg Extinction, Asteroid, Volcanoes, Deccan Traps, Chicxulub, Alvarez, Science, Science Communication, Deficit Model, Continuum Model, Participation Model, Bad Science

Id: 6DHgkMYgp7w

Length: 131min 43sec (7903 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 28 2023