Follow up with Scott Sampson

Last month, we spoke with Scott just prior to his visit to Utah to launch his new book Dinosaur Odyssey: Fossil Threads in the Web of Life.

I followed up with Scott to see how the launch of his book and his new blog are going:

JF: How did your lecture in Salt Lake City go month?
SS: It was a terrific experience for me! It was certainly fitting that my book tour was launched in Utah, given my involvement with dinosaur paleontology there over the past decade. And it was particularly heart-warming to be surrounded by friends and long-time supporters of paleontology, including numerous volunteers who have put in long hours in the field and the lab. I had a great time, in particular, interacting with all those kids who are getting even more hooked on dinosaurs from watching [Jim Henson's] Dinosaur Train. The question & answer period was fun and surprising, and, as usual, the kids asked the best questions!

JF: What has the initial response to the book been?
SS: Although we are still in the early days (the formal release date of the book was last week, November 30th), Dinosaur Odyssey has had some extremely positive reviews. An author never knows how a book is going to be received, so it feels great to see one’s writing described with words like “engaging”. I am particularly excited that so many readers are picking up not only on the web of life approach, which aims to make diverse connections, but also on the fact that we humans still have a lot to learn from dinosaurs.

JF: Tell us about the blog that you have just launched?
SS: I launched The Whirlpool of Life on Tuesday, November 24, the sesquicentennial anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Posts will encompass a wide range of topics, spanning paleontology, evolution, ecology, education, sustainability, philosophy, and psychology. The thread that I will use to weave these topics together is science education in general, and nature literacy more specifically.

JF: How is the work of Darwin relevant today, 150-years later?
SS: Darwin triggered an intellectual revolution, with effects that have cascaded through science and society. Yet, one hundred and fifty years later, a portion of Darwin’s legacy, the foundational concept of common descent through deep time, remains virtually untapped outside academia. In particular, this concept has not been communicated in such a way as to shift our relationship with nature.

JF: When did Charles Darwin first enter your consciousness?
SS: As I recall, Darwin first entered my consciousness as a 14 year-old student in ninth grade biology class. But this introduction was anything but inspiring, and it really wasn’t until my undergraduate years at the University of British Columbia that I truly began to plumb the depths of evolutionary thinking.

JF: As a paleontologist, what contribution do you feel museum collections make to science and culture?
SS: Museums are the storehouses of living and ancient life. Fossil collections are used by researchers to conduct science. Some of the greatest “aha!” moments in paleontology occur in the bowels of museums when one is surrounded by the bones of ancient creatures.

Of course, museums also spark the imaginations of non-scientists too, and this is another of their crucial roles. Now it is time for natural history museums to enter the 21st century and define their place in helping the general public connect more deeply with the natural world.

Natural history museums were founded by people with a true love of nature, people who understood the plants and animals of their region, people who were naturalists. Today there are all too few naturalists around. Indeed the skill of knowing one’s place and communicating it to others might be regarded as a disappearing art. Yet this skill is more needed now than ever before. Natural history museums need to go back to their roots and foster a world of naturalists!

JF: What attracted you to paleontology as a field of study?
SS: I was the classic 5 year-old with a fascination for dinosaurs. Without any exaggeration, paleontology was one of the first words I learned how to spell. For me, one of the most attractive aspects of paleontology is that it requires mental time travel to places from the distant past. Imagining those worlds excited me as a youngster, and that excitement is still there today.


JF: With a book and a blog both geared for people like me (not a professional scientist) and involvement in popular, almost mass media television shows, you seem to have moved beyond a life of traditional academic work. Can you tell us about that, ahem, evolution?
SS: In short, I felt that the pressing issues facing us today required that I move beyond the narrow domain of paleontology research and education within a university. My underlying contention is that the current sustainability crisis is not merely an external crisis of the environment. More fundamentally, it is an internal crisis of worldview rooted in a dysfunctional relationship between humans and nonhuman nature. Thus, any meaningful resolution to the eco-crisis will require not only more and “greener” technologies, but also a fundamental shift in awareness and understanding, particularly within industrialized nations.

Since worldviews are built upon a lifetime of experience, it’s highly doubtful that the necessary transformation will occur solely among adults. Rather we must rethink, indeed reinvent, education, placing less emphasis on upward mobility and more on living well; less on generating consumers and more on serving communities, including communities of nature. Surprisingly, perhaps, I am convinced that the concept of evolution has a pivotal role to play in this gargantuan effort of “schooling for sustainability”.

JF: Tell us more about “schooling for sustainability”....
SS: Schooling for sustainability should be rooted in three intertwined elements, each of which informs the other two:

• new metaphors that augment the dominant “life-as-machine” and “web of life examples, enabling us to perceive reality in new and instructive ways;
  
• the Great Story encompassing the evolution of cosmos, life, and culture, which provides a universal origin myth and anchors us in the deep time evolution of life on Earth; and
• a strong emphasis on place.

Together, this trio of elements—metaphor, story, and place—have the power to transform education and help trigger a change in the dominant worldview, thereby serving as a springboard to a sustainable future.

JF: How can public education organizations — like natural history museums and public television — play a role in “schooling for sustainability”
SS: I see two fundamental roles for natural history museums and other natural science institutions in this redefinition of education. First, museums of natural history—home to both extensive collections and scientific expertise--are better positioned than perhaps any other institutions to communicate the nature of place and reconnect people to their local environs. Second, museums can communicate the Great Story, linking the origin of the universe, of life, and of humanity into a single story, and related that story back to their home regions. In particular, great potential exists for museums to help school teachers access the information and resources necessary for them to feel comfortable teaching these big ideas to their students.

However, both of these efforts will require that museum get beyond their four walls and guide visitors in direct experiences with nature. Television, on the other hand, is currently much more a part of the problem than the solution. To turn this situation around, public television in particular has potential to generate even more programming that helps viewers reconnect with the natural settings around their homes. And television too needs to do a much better job of communicating the Great Story at age-appropriate levels.

JF: One last question: Since the Museum's blog is a community exchange of ideas and books, what book is on your nightstand these days??
SS: I am currently reading a marvelous, though frighting, book by Lester Brown called, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (Norton, 2009). If ever there was a succinct description of our current ecological predicament, together with necessary steps that must be taken, this is it. Highly recommended!

Dry Storeroom No. 1....#1

Not to get too many books going at one time, but I have delved into the pages of the Book Club's November selection, Dry Storeroom No.1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum. This book is so enjoyable that I can't stop talking in the hallways about it!

The book is a memory of THE Natural History Museum (as in London, home of Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle collections, once part of the venerable British Museum) written by senior paleontologist Richard Fortey. Evidently, Fortey, who is a "trilobite man", has written other "page turner" natural history books that we will have to check into for future reading lists. He started at "THE" museum in the 70's and the book is his "own storeroom, a personal archive, designed to explain what goes on behind the polished doors in the Natural History Museum." Let us in!!

What I am initially enjoying is the deep appreciation he expresses for collections and the people who work with them. The value of collections to culture and scientific understanding is something that I have come to know only as an employee of the museum. As Fortney expresses:

"I believe profoundly in the importance of museums: I would go as far as to say that you can judge a society by the quality of its museums. But they do not exist as collections alone. In the long term, the lustre of a museum does not depend only on the artefacts or objects it contains -- the people who work out of sight are what keeps a museum alive by contributing research to make the collections active, or by applying learning and scholarship to reveal more than was know before about the stored object. I want to bring those invisible people into the sunlight....Although I describe my particular institution, I dare say it could be a proxy for any other great museum. Perhaps my investigations will even cast a little light on to the museum that makes up our own biography, our character, ourselves." [The British spelling Fortney's]

As the Utah Museum of Natural History is building a new home for the collection, the curatorial staff, and the community, we hope to draw the community into the many stories behind the objects and the many people who have contributed over 40+ years to make our museum a great museum for our region. I hope you'll join me in reading Fortney's memories and stories, and that both make you curious for your own natural history museum!

This book was referred to us by Peter Kraus of the University of Utah's Marriott Library. I currently have the libraries only copy (!) but understand that it will be released in paperback this summer. I'll let you know when it is available at the Museum Store or your local bookseller!

Voyage of the Beagle #1

This year marks the bi-centennial of Charles Darwin's birth! The Museum has created a series of Darwin programs to reflect on his scientific and cultural contributions.

My name is Janet Frasier. I am marketing director of the Museum and lead the community book discussion. Over this year, I hope to interview a handful of Museum curators and Utah researchers this year to get their professional and personal perspective on Darwin's work within their own development as a scientist.

I started the conversation with Dr. Sarah B. George, executive director of the Utah Museum of Natural History. Sarah is a biologist, one with a strong interest in museum collections. Prior to coming to Utah, Sarah was a curator of vertebrates at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. In her current role since 1992, Sarah is leading the Museum toward its new home, the Rio Tinto Center, scheduled to open in early 2011.

JF: When did Charles Darwin first enter your consciousness?
SG: I knew his name from early science classes, but he really didn’t register more than Pasteur and van Leeuwenhoek and Linnaeus did. I knew them all as scientists who had made great discoveries.

JF: What were your early attitudes toward "Origin of the Species" and the theory of evolution?
SG: As a military dependent, I went to a variety of Catholic and public schools, and evolution was the basis of the life sciences I was taught in these many schools. I had a lot of curiosity about how nature worked and why organisms look and function they way they do. It was clear to me from an early age that the evolution was the process behind the incredible variability in life.

I cannot tell you when I first heard about “On the Origin of Species,” but I can tell you when I read it! I had just started my doctoral program and was headed out for a 10-week field expedition in Sonora, Baja Sur, Baja Norte, and southern California. I knew that I had to be prepared for comprehensive exams not long after I returned in the fall, so I took “Origin” with me. Coincidentally, I also took Barbara Tuchman’s “A Distant Mirror” along and I remember being struck at some point in the summer that she was simply documenting a catastrophic selective event in human evolution from an historian’s perspective.

JF: What attracted you to biology as a field of study?
SG: My dad was a doctor who did his orthopedic residency in the 1960s in a military hospital. He sometimes sneaked me into rounds, where most of the patients were recovering from battle wounds in Vietnam. It was fascinating to me how they reconstructed these young people.

Science was definitely an interest, but wasn’t a conscious career choice until some years later. For that inspiration, I have to credit my high school biology teacher, Mr. Martin, who said that he thought I should major in biology and go to medical school. I thought, why not? Early in college, however, I took a class in mammalogy, got a job working in the university museum’s collection and never looked back!

JF: In your study and research as a biologist, how did you encounter Darwin’s influence?
SG: My field of study, systematics and biogeography, was all about reconstructing evolutionary trees of groups of species and connecting the divergent points in those trees to past geologic events and current-day geography. My work was all about evolution. I am in awe of Darwin’s keen observations and ability to detect pattern, given what was NOT know about plate tectonics, genetics, and other phenomena that we know about today.

JF: What sense of legacy do you feel with Darwin’s life as a naturalist in building collections?
SG: The nineteenth century was an extraordinary time for biological exploration and discovery—Darwin, Alfred Wallace, Joseph Banks, John Audubon and sons. They observed and documented the diversity around them and left collections as legacies of the biota of that time. When I started school, collecting was still focused on discovery, but on a finer scale than the 19th century—developing an understanding of patterns of diversity on a local scale rather than on continental scales. By the way: A great film that plays up the adventure of 19th century collecting is “Master and Commander”—the character of Dr. Stephen Maturin is based on Joseph Banks.

JF: As a biologist turned museum director, what contribution do you feel museum collections make to science and culture?
SG: With the benefit of collections that span more than 200 years, we have an extraordinary database that documents change in populations, species, geographic distributions, genetics, etc etc etc. Museum collections yielded the hard data that documented the devastation that DDT was having on avian egg shell density and hence viability. Museum collections are documenting changes in altitudinal distributions of plants and animals that almost certainly are the result of climate change. I could go on, but won’t! Suffice to say that museum collections, properly identified and databased, are more important than ever as tools to measure change over time and distance.

JF: What is the role of modern naturalists?
SG: Observing, documenting, and studying change in the world around us and providing a platform of data that we can use to make decisions about our future.

JF: If you were an adolescent today, how would you approach Darwin? What would you read to learn more about him?
SG: I’d beg to carry his bags! One of the great side benefits to being a naturalist is the opportunity to spend a lot of time in the field and to travel the world.

Oh, you mean how would I approach learning about Darwin! I would read “Origin”—it is surprisingly easy to read—or Darwin’s “Journal and Remarks” that we know as “Voyage of the Beagle.” Try “The Illustrated Origin” by Richard Leakey or if you can find it, “Darwin for Beginners.” And if you are more into adventure, dive into Patrick O’Brian’s series of novels about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin.

JF: One last question: Both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on February 12, 1809. Which one do YOU think has had more influence in western culture?
SG: Without question, Charles Darwin! Abraham Lincoln had a profound effect on the course of American history, but Darwin changed our way of understanding the world around us.