Posted: Monday 12 January 2009
Dinosaurs versus Graptolites
I have been thinking a bit recently about how the internet affects how we learn things. I expect many of us now regularly turn to Google or Wikipedia as a first step in finding out about something, rather than by looking it up in a book. Which is fine, and more often than not you get good, clear information very quickly, so I suppose we should feel satisfied with that. But I'm beginning to wonder whether there isn't a structural flaw in the internet as a source of knowledge, which is quite hidden unless you really look hard. Or happen to be unluckily interested in something that is popular.
To take an example (forgive me if I use something that may not be of much immediate interest to you, and...) see what happens if you type into Google the words ‘dinosaur extinction'. And then see what you get when you type in ‘graptolite extinction'. In the first case you get 450,000 results, the first page of which are quite well explained popular accounts of the various theories that exist about the extinction of the ‘dinosaurs'. I confess I was pleasantly surprised that the articles were not all saying that it was definitely the result of an asteroid/meteorite impact at the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary. This is an old bugbear of mine, that quite complicated science is often simplified down and sold as fact, even although there are major problems with it. But in this case, I think the interested reader could find out more and be reasonably sure that they were not reading a load of rubbish. Most of the links I tried led to pages that were quite good at pointing out different sides of the argument. How far you go through subsequent pages of results is another question. The problem is not the lack of links, it is the overwhelming number of them. How do you sift through them for the more scholarly ones?
When you change ‘dinosaur' to ‘graptolite' you get a very different picture. Only 18,000 results, for one thing. At the top of the page there is something called ‘scholarly articles for graptolite extinction' which leads you straight to Google Scholar pages with published academic papers - although quite often you only get the abstract, not the full paper, unless you pay online (and I wouldn't recommend you do that). If you have never used Google Scholar before I suggest you try it out on something you are interested in. It is quite superb at plugging you into the world of academic research - and if you ever do find a paper that you really want to read all of, just write to the author asking for a reprint and I'm sure they will email you one. That's academic vanity for you.... never refuse to let someone see your work. But paradoxically, these results pages show the opposite effect from the dinosaur one - it is very difficult to peer through the foliage of all the worthy academic science to find anything useful. What exactly is a graptolite, by the way? How come no-one ever takes much notice of their extinction?
My point is that the nature of what you are searching for affects the likely success you may have in finding it. If you happen to want general articles about dinosaur extinction and specialist articles about graptolite extinction then you are in clover.
But if it is the other way round.....