britain, but what was doing on tax policy that was very important. all right. well, thank you. thanks to everyone for your thoughtful questions. unfortunately, we do have to bring this to a close. for those of you who didn't get your answered, i'm sure the panelists would be happy to speak with you individually for few minutes. i also encourage all of you to go to the table outside the doors and pick up the handouts from today, which they referred to the charts that are in the handouts. and you're also welcome to pick up some stickers, pens and more information about the american historical associations. we hope to see you at future congressional briefings hosted by the aj. our next one will focus on the history. the u.s. senate in july. we don't have a date yet, but it will be available. more information will be available. our website soon. thank you all for being here today. and let thank the panelists.

welcome to the american philosophic society. my name is patrick spero. i'm thrilled you all could join us tonight. before we get to our conversation with edward, i just want to say a few things about the philosophical society. i know i have a lot of friends in the audience. many of you are familiar with what we do, but if you're not, we were founded by benjamin franklin in 1743. our full title is the american philosophical society, held in philadelphia for promoting useful knowledge. and that is really what our mission is, is to advance knowledge. and we do that in a number of ways that you can see here on the screen. first off, we have elected members. we have the smallest, which is to say the most distinguished, an elite group of members who help the society and all of its

programmatic activities. these are members who are elected because of a distinguished career, advancing knowledge and whatever field they work in. as you can see on our motto on our seal, our motto is new low, discriminate. we believe all knowledge can be useful. so we have members in every different facet of life that you can imagine. we also convene meetings, meetings of members that happen every april in november. and friends of the society at a certain level can attend these meetings as well. and here you see a range of cutting edge research and all different fields really showing that incredible collective wisdom that defines the philosophical society. we also have the longest continuously operating scholarly press in north america. i've been saying that for ten years and no one's corrected me. and i think. kim, you believe that, too, right? kim as a director of our press, we continue to publish books, journals. we also have a research program that provides over 300 research grants, a year. about 50 of those come here to the philosophical society to conduct research in our library. but we send around 250

researchers into the field on all seven continents of the world, conducting. again, cutting edge research in many of those that we support, our early career scholars really at the forefront of the future. and finally, we have a library and museum. that library has now amassed a collection of over 14 million pages of manuscripts. and we have an incredible museum and philosophical hall that has welcomed up to 200,000 visitors a year. and i hope you all come to our next exhibition, philadelphia, the revolutionary city. but without further ado, it is my great pleasure to introduce our my conversant tonight. eduardo dolnick. edward is the former chief science writer at the boston globe. he's written for the atlantic, the new york times magazine and many other publications. he's the author, also the author of numerous books. i have a long list here, madness on the couch, a critical look at freud's legacy. the rescue artist, a true crime account of the theft of the

scream. and i could go on and on. but we are here tonight to hear about dinosaurs at the dinner party. so if you could have a conversation about that for about 40 minutes and then we'll open it up to audience q&a. so thank you for joining us, edward. oh, terrific. it's a treat for me. yeah, well, it was a treat for me to read this book, and i can't tell you how much of this book resonated with the philosophical society's history and and what we do. first off, i was really pleased to see at least three citations of aps press works in your bibliography. and then in terms of our own history, we funded what was the first successful excavation of a mastodon on by charles wilson peale in 1801, and then in philosophical hall, which was peale's museum, was the first time a prehistoric mammal was mounted, i believe in the united states. so that happened here at the apes. and then we have an incredible rich collection documenting kind of the history of paleontology

here, beginning with jefferson, but going all the way up into the 20th century. so this book really resonated with so much the society has done and continues to do. so i want to begin with reading your book. what i never fully grasped was how dislocating the discovery, if you will, of dinosaurs were to 19th century society. i mean, it upset fundamental questions and ideas about time, about the earth's history, about humanity in its place in general. i mean, the dinosaurs were one of the great disruptors of the 19th century. so i don't know if you could take us back to the world before dinosaurs created all these challenges for poor thinkers. how did people imagine the natural world before dinosaurs? well, it's a terrific question, and it was a big surprise to me. and what started me on this book

is that the discovery of dinosaurs came late. it was it was pretty much 1800 in what you see is is the smartest people in the world finding these enormous bones and being bewildered by what they were. so what was so intriguing to me is you had these these brilliant people beating their heads against the wall, unable to come up with an answer that any six year old today who say, wait a minute, that's not so hard. i'll tell you all about it. so that was the question. how could it be that that it took so long and was so puzzling and the reason it's called dinosaurs at the dinner party, whether a couple of reasons. one was that it's meant to to convey that this book will not be this won't be homework. it will be fun to read. but but part of the dinner party notion is that the natural world in 1800, which is about when dinosaurs first turned up, was a cozy place.

deers bounded birds flitted through the sky. everything was lovely. the world people thought was was a kind of diorama. god had designed it. he had worked with meticulous care. he had put bushes here and and he'd chosen just which fish would be best in streams. and the flowers. and he'd painted every stripe on every zebra, every everything was just so it was it was lovely. it was perfect. and then in the course of of the industrial revolution, lots of digging begins digging railroads digging canals. in the course of that, digging, people come across these enormous bones much bigger than anything they had ever seen. and they couldn't think what in the world this could possibly be? could they be elephants? no, they were they were too big for elephants. giants, maybe because because it says in the bible there were giants in the earth in those

days. people maybe that was a little far fetched. so maybe that was wrong. but whatever these dinosaurs were were it shouldn't have said dinosaurs, whatever these bones were, whatever creatures they belong to, plainly weren't around anymore. and so once upon a time, there had been something very big and presumably very scary. now. now it was gone. what would happened to them? and so the natural world in the mind of these first discoverers, of these bones, changed from this lovely, cozy place where all was well and all was always sunshine and birdsong to a kind of spooky place. so, so so it's these dinosaurs are interruption of this cozy dinner party. it's as if you're at your party in a lovely country house and all of a sudden there comes a scratch at the window. you think, what was that? so it was so it was so

upsetting. this discovery, first of all, because no one had ever imagined that there had been such things. the notion of almost everyone was that the natural world had always looked the way it did. today, the creatures in the world were the ones you know from noah's ark. there were lions and tigers and bears. here was something plainly, plainly different than that and worse than that, whatever these creatures, whatever creatures these bones belong to, didn't seem to be around anymore. and if that was so, they had vanished and that was extinction was an idea that had almost not occurred to anyone else either. because if god had designed the world and god was a perfect creator, he wouldn't make mistakes. he doesn't try something out and think, oh, that's not good, and crumple it up and throw that in in the wastebasket. he he has created perfect creatures for each niche.

but but these were no longer around, so he'd got tired of them. and if he tired of them. this was the scariest thought of all. could it be that that that we who were the point of creation? could he someday tire of us? and that was a brand new question. and it was a spooky question because it was hard to deny the evidence. these these bones, these ribs were big. they were hard to talk away. something had been there. and now it wasn't. and that was that was a frightening thought. well, actually, your answer was a few things that really struck me in this book were, you know, these bones were before the 19th century. the bones were being discovered. and they're trying to be interpreted. and what they didn't realize was that things like the cyclops, which you mentioned, may have some the idea of the cyclops may have some roots in discovering bones. the griffin, which really surprised me, may have to do

with discovering fossilized bones. do you want to share with people that that that story, that these were surprise says to me to these bones as i say, turned up in great profusion starting in the early 1800s, not because people were more curious, but because there was more digging then for things like like railroads and roadways. but over the centuries, in the course of making a road or farming a field, people had had come across giant bones, but they always incorporated them into whatever the local mythology was. so in china, these were these were signs that there were dragons once upon a time in the new world, the aztecs had found enormous bones. but their story was that these had belonged to formidable people, that their ancestors had conquered. and so you could see what a mighty race we are. look, look, look at what our forebears. look at who they conquered.

but but this business of cyclops and griffins in in greece, there were in ancient greece, there was some kind of identity of of of of prehistoric elephant, smaller than than present day elephants that had lived there. and if you if you have ever seen the skull of an elephant, they have a curious look. our our skulls have the two big eyes in the front, in the hole for the nose. but the skull of an elephant is actually a more peculiar thing. the eyes. you'd have to know a little bit to find them. they're there round the side, toward the back. and what you see, if you look at an open skull is a giant hole. front and center, which is where the trunk attaches. and so there's a brilliant woman who's who's both a classic scholar and a paleontologist at stanford who has studied these ancient skulls. and what she has found is that the places in in greece where these skulls were found, the

places that that had the best the most detailed records of cyclops ears and stories about them were also the places where these these peculiar skulls with the giant missing hole had turned up in the first place. no, nobody knows which came first. do you do you do you have the mythology? and then you happen on one of these skulls and you say, see, i was right all along. or do you find this strange skull with the single hole in the center in from there? someone clever invents the myth. no one knows it. the story of griffins. who are these? these mythical beasts? half, half lion. half eagle seem to be also it early attempt to make sense of some some strange hybrid skeletons. so what happened in the 1800s? it wasn't that this was the first time giant bones were found. it was that this was the first

time giant bones were found in an era when people said, we have to come up with something more persuasive than than drag ins or or formidable giants in the past. but what's what's really going on here? in so it was it was as recent as that these early victorian scientists tried to say let's do better better than myths. let's see if we can figure out where these bones came from. yeah, a lot of these bones come from the cliffs in england. england itself plays a really large role. i don't know if you could share with us how bones fossil fossils actually created. they're actually not bones. and you detail the process here. i don't know. you can share with us how how fossils are actually created. well, this was this was a great mystery at the time. no one was. no one was quite sure what fossils were. they looked a lot like like relics of the natural world.

they look like like seashells or ferns or something like that. but on the other hand, seashells and ferns weren't weren't made of rock. so so it was hard to to sort out how that could be. and if you think about it, if you if you had as your career ambition to become a fossil, it's actually it's actually it's actually a terribly hard job, much easier to become an actor or a classical musician or something. you you have to die in the right place, first of all, so that you will sink slowly to the floor of an ocean is most likely rather than on land where where storms and wind and all kinds of critters will will tear into your carcass. so nearly all the fossils found early on were from sea creatures because life or death, more to the point, was gentler than it was on land in the great country of mercy. early on, around around 6000,

say was what these fossils were. they looked they looked like relics of animals or plants, as i say. but there was one school of thought that that that god had made them to test your faith. and so they weren't. it wasn't that this was a relic of a fern. it was demonstration of of how unlike witted god's artistry was, he could he could do this. or maybe the devil had done it. he had he had tried to befuddle you with these with these strange things that looked alive. but but were in a place that it didn't make sense for living things to be because fossils would often turn up in a quarry, say hundreds of feet underground, were where miners were digging, say slate for the roof of a building. and in the course of that, they would find find something that looked like like a fern. they it it was plain that the fern hadn't hadn't grown hundreds of feet deep. it wasn't that it had burrowed

its way in mica like like a hedgehog or something. and so it was, it was a great mystery and a great debate for a long while where these fossils came from in. sometimes they were the emblem of the mystery was that you would occasionally see sea seashells on top of a mountain of insults. seashells didn't belong there. the first two figured out how they had got there was robert hooke, who was a brilliant scientist, a contemporary and a rival of isaac newton. it wasn't good to be a rival of newton. he was a he was a nasty fellow. but but but, hooke explained it. he said, well, if if the seashells are on the mountain where they don't belong, maybe, maybe, but. but seashells do belong in the sea. maybe somehow mountains and sea. over the course of eons had changed places in this is this is demonstration of that. and it turned out that he was

right about that. he was ahead of everybody else by several centuries. the much more common attitude was, was voltaire, who was a great admirer of science and a brilliant, a brilliant fellow. but he comes along much later, much later than hooke. and he says, well, you're giving us all these all these strange notions about mountains and in the ocean changing places like like kids on a seesaw. that doesn't make much sense, he says. wouldn't it be more likely that that some picnickers happened to have left an oyster shell behind and after it so that that that was considered it a a conclusive dismissal of these highfalutin theories that there had been some sort of scientific explanation. it took a long while by 1800, by the time we get to that fossil debate, there had been had been pretty well settled. people finally believed that they were they were relics of

living creatures. but it took centuries, too, for that view to win out. yeah, maybe you can talk about some of the people that helped that new view of the world in the past, helped make that other people see. this one is mary anning's mate mary anning, who was she? what did she do? well, mary anning is one of the heroes of the story. i came i came to quite love mary anning. she was a she was a woman who was born in 1799, i think on the southern coast of england. she lived in in lyme regis, the town that if you ever saw the french lieutenant's woman years ago, it's the lovely romantic town there in her day. it wasn't it wasn't a lovely romantic town. no one. no one went on seaside vacation to the old days because the seashore was the the home of a haunt of pirates and fishermen and smugglers. it was it was no place for for respectable people.

but but then around around 1800, napoleon is now at luce in europe. suddenly, if you're english and you have lots of money and it's time for a holiday. europe doesn't seem as appealing as it once did. and at this point there becomes a vogue for for staying closer to home. and people explore these some of these seaside towns and a doctor who was a big name at the time says that actually there's all kinds of health benefits instead of going to spa like bath, you can go to these seaside resorts. and rather than drink the healing waters at bath, you should actually try drinking some some of the salt water which which was a difficult the recipe but but it did have a vogue at any rate these towns suddenly become inn and mary anning who is a member of a poor nearly nearly destitute family,

lives in one of this towns that suddenly has all sorts of visitors coming in. and she and her father are able to eke out a living by selling tourists these strange things that they've found after storms mostly in the cliffs that that you see on the edge of town, most mostly little things akin to nautilus shells, that sort of thing. people didn't know what they were really, but some people would want them for for a knickknack for their bookshelves or or that kind of thing. but mary had it an uncanny eye for spotting in a after a storm, say, in an eroded cliff. just a little a little nubbin. nubbin of something or other strange. and she would she would dig away and in tease it out. it took it took ages. but she became one of the first to find prehistoric creatures from from hundreds of millions of years ago.

no one no one knew what these things were. she she unearthed one that was her first great find was about the size of a dolphin. she had an older brother when her brother was coming home one day when he was 12, he brought home the skull. he'd found a strange skull, and she looks at it. and the two of them go back to the spot on the beach where he'd found that skull, and they dig around for more. and they can't. they can't find any more. but she persists. and over the course of two or three years, she finally finds the rest of the body. it wasn't far from the skull, but it was several feet away and several feet down in the ground as well. but. but she finds it and then she she makes other finds like which are these are unprecedented. people have no notion what they are. they're not much inclined. mary had three strikes against her in this area. she was she was poor. she was uneducated, and she was

female. that made it really hard to get a hearing. so what she would do, she had begun by selling knickknacks, the little shell she found. but now that she had made this amazing find, people had actually come to see them. and now some collectors would buy them and they would they would pay a good deal. so. so, mary, who's family was on the equivalent of welfare, all of a sudden they would have they would sell one of her finds. and for six months or so, the family the family would have enough food that that that dolphin skeleton and say that she had found would a collector would buy it for a considerable sum and eventually donate it to a museum which would put his name on it? never, never, never. mary antiques, it would say a generous bequest of so-and-so. she. she made made several of the

greatest fossil finds of them all. so much so that despite these strikes against her, the lack of education and so what scientists caught on that if you wanted to see these things, what you had to do is is make an excursion to lyme regis and ask mary anning if she would be willing to take you by the hand and show you around. and so now she becomes quite, quite a well-regarded figure, still not so well regarded that anybody puts her her name to it. she's she's constantly in money trouble, often finding things, selling them. but but the money the money soon runs out. today, if you go to the natural history museum in london, they're on the top floor. there's a room for four donors in where the the board of the museum meets for special occasions. it's it's the mary anning room. she she would never have been

have been allowed in the mary anning room. but there's a there's there's a portrait of her. there's a a copy of a letter she wrote to a to a friend of hers that says, i found something remarkable. no one has ever seen anything like it. the letter was just put up for auction a few years ago. the letter, not the skeleton she was describing, went for 100,000 pounds. but mary. mary, mary never saw anything like that. but. but she was she was formidable in the she she kept a diary. she wrote it. she wrote in it that these these men of science, you said, have so sucked me dry and never given me any credit. so. so i liked her. she was she was not only capable, but this marvelously feisty thing, but has been, as i say, passed over. but but one of the great heroes of of the fossil story, she had

a knack that no one ever matched for for doing where to look and what to find. if i remember right, the royal society knowledge was one of the greatest scientists of the modern era or something along those lines. yeah, yeah. they, she, she has come into her own lately. the bank of england decided that they were going to put a scientist on, i think it maybe was the 50 pounds note. i can't remember which they started with a list of a thousand names and mary made it down to, to the final 12. in the end, they chose alan turing himself, which not a bad choice, but maybe appropriate that mary, who all her life was, was scrounging for money. he had to be done in in by the bank. but people had thought in the museum, the natural history museum in london, in fact, has on a couple of of their walls a

quote that they attributed to mary annie. you know, she sells seashells by the seashore. well, supposedly that was mary. it was mary anning who's it wasn't true. in fact, it turned out that decades after her death, someone made up that tongue twister as a an exercise for elocution students. but somehow that was attributed to her. and now places as a ghost as the as the natural history museum have it an elegant script on the walls. she sells seashells. mary, mary, in a she did sell seashells by the sea, but she wasn't she wasn't the same. but one of the fun facts that is true has to do the shell transport company. yeah, i one of the things that's peculiar about this era, the book is about from 1800 to 1850 or so. darwin comes along. the origin of species is 1859. so this is just, just before

darwin and none of these people know as they talk about their diorama that god built and god did everything perfectly. none of them know that working away in quiet country, gentlemen, is assembling a bomb that's going to blow all their tidy theories. sky high. they don't. they don't know that yet. so. so tell me why. why are we saying that? well, i was like, yeah, this is a minor tangent that when the shell transport company so that's why that's why i was telling you that because because this whole this whole victorian era was mad about about everything, any anything from the natural world, not only bones, but but beetle collecting was a national sport because they're so colorful. there's there's so many of them

butterflies. seaweed was a great thing. you would you would go to the seashore. you would collect sea seaweed, you would press it in an album. and at a as a gift to a friend or as a fund raiser, where we would sell a pie or something to raise money for the local elementary school. in that era, someone would have contribute a a album full of seaweed queen victoria had a seaweed album. so anything, anything that lived or grew or ran or slithered was, was, was tremendously exciting. it one of the, one of the things that people collected were seashells because they were pretty. and if you would go to the beach, you, you might find them. and by way of showing just how crazed this society was for for any kind of natural history, knickknack. there was a couple in the east end of london, which was the slums in those days, who would

work and collect seashells of various sorts and put them up for sale. and people would buy those and they would put them on the mantelpiece at home or something, and then this couple, the seashell sellers, would get more ambitious and they would take lots of shells and they would glue them on a little music box or a jewelry box or something like that. and people would buy that, and then you would buy you could choose different arrangements of shells. you could have them around a mirror, or this became came tremendously popular. people really snatched up these these shells souvenirs. and the the couple deceased and couple who had been selling them did better and better. they expand it more and more now. they wanted they would hang out at the docks. and when sailors came back from far fetched places, if they had happened to buy or see a shell in someplace exotic like the philippines, the kind that you

didn't see in england, our seashell buyers would buy those and mark them up and put those those for sale. and soon they became the the shell transport company was their name because these shells came from all over. finally, finally they sold out. but shells were still the the big part of their business, although they had branched out so much that the the company still exists today. but now it's now it's shell oil that that was that was the founding of the fortune was these eager victorians buying buying seashells for for for their mirrors. yeah. that was just an unbelievable fun fact when i was reading it. so getting back to the story of the dinosaurs, so they're working within a paradigm that thinks that the earth is only 6000 years old about they're focused on, you know, the idea of evolution, even extinction

doesn't exist. so can you talk about some of the theories people had about what these bones meant? and in particular, could you talk about the guy over your shoulder, thomas jefferson, and the role he plays in this story? so so thomas jefferson does does come into our story. it was a if you had been here 127 years ago, i think you would have had a much more artistic or speaker said either of us here, here, here, here, here is thomas jefferson talking about a a marvelous that he was tremendously interested well in everything under the sun. but but in in fossils and prehistoric creatures of all sort. and there was a notion at this time america, when it comes to science is still still kind of a backwater place. all the action is in europe in this era, around 1800, it had

particularly the most eminent naturalist of the day who's a frenchman, who was kind of a walking sneer of contempt for all but all that was not not him. it was not the french had a theory that that that america was kind of a cold and dreary place and therefore all its natural creations were themselves small and stunted. so in america they wrote the dogs didn't have the energy to bark and the old world had elephants. but the most imposing creature the new world could boast was a mule and that was that. that was how terrible life was in this in cold, wet, clammy climate. so jefferson furious about this this was this was a slander on all things american in imposing. so not only was he interested in fossils and bones just because

he was interested in science, but it turned out that right, his era people had found what today we know where are mammoths and mastodon. so these enormous things far bigger than elephants. so he he could now say to the europeans, you say, we're so puny. what do you have to to match this? and in fact, jefferson, he wrote in a letter to a friend he had the good taste not to publish it. basically, you know, this theory about how we so puny might i point out that i'm six foot two, whereas count before my great critic is a little runt of five foot five, but that's neither here nor there. you at any rate, he was he was thrilled that america had been been home to the mastodon and he said in this lecture in 18, in 1797, not only do we have mastodons, these these marvelous

creatures, but but we have a lion that makes the african lion look look like a tabby cat. and and he he said, i've i've seen teeth of this and whereas the teeth of an african lion are about yay big the teeth of the american lion are like this. and he that was what he unveiled at his lecture here that, that america had been home to this marvelous it imposing lion he gave that talk and a few days later he was browsing in a bookstore not far from here and there he reads a scientific article that somebody in south america has found a giants loaf, and it has the strangest bones. it has teeth or claws that are this long. and if you didn't know better, you might mistakenly think that you had seen some kind of a lion. this is so now. jefferson is not thrilled with this. and he his manuscript is already

is already out of his hands. and he writes to the publisher, let's change things where i said, american lion, let's say creature of the clawed kind. it. so it turns out that america is lions. we're not just this enormous mega creature that jefferson had hoped for, what he had found bones from was a giant ground sloth, a prehistoric vegetarian and not nearly as good to to fling in the face of of europeans as this lion. but jefferson and franklin and george washington, they were all thrilled with fossils, thrilled and fascinate it. for jefferson in particular. so when jefferson sends lewis and clark west part their instructions and i got to see

the real life letter thanks to labors today, part of jefferson's instructions to lewis and clark is i want you to to write down the name of every river you see in every flower in every plant. and if you see any lions or any mastodons, take special note. he his notion this a big country. these are big animals but there's no telling what might be hiding out there in in particular he didn't believe in extinction because although he wasn't a he he wasn't a fundamentalist by any means. he didn't believe that the bible was literally true. he did believe that that creation was orderly and tidy. and so for a species which had once lived to have vanished, suddenly would be this kind of unsightly intellectual defect. it would be kind of like a gap in a smile. it would it would ruin the

entire intellectual edifice. so extinction could not be so. so these fossils, these bones that he had found or that people had found and shown to him, it couldn't be that the creatures that they belonged to advantage, they must be lurking somewhere in maybe the west, which was big and unexplored, was the somewheres. that's and that actually brings me to the asked what you refer to as the asteroid, which is george cuvier and his theories that really upset in many ways the jefferson's idea of extinction, the idea of the what dinosaurs could be. do you want to share? and i love the analogy of an asteroid, which we know is what destroyed the dinosaurs most likely. what is the asteroid that could be a lens, if you will, in the scientific community. so so george cuvier is a frenchman, the great eminence of this cuvier was was so

impressive a figure at identifying fossils that at piecing them together, at seeing from a tiny bit of evidence what the whole picture was, that in one of the sherlock holmes stories, somebody says, oh my god, sherlock holmes is as brilliant as cuvier. and this was this was the highest praise you can imagine in what cuvier did, in what made such trouble for jefferson in the others who had argued that extinction was impossible, was he looked at these at these mammoths, in these mastodons, these these these great bones in their teeth. and he said the closest relatives they have today are elephants. but but these weren't elephants. and he listed the specific ways you could tell which was that elephant bone in which was one of these mammoth or mastodon bones. these these mastodon relics. cuvier said improved were

different than anything anything seen today. there are creatures that are akin to them, but they didn't they weren't responsible for these for these bones that we found. whoever these bones belong to is no longer here in cuvier was so eminent and he made the argument with such specificity that no one could rebut it. that was that was the end of the argument that extinction is impossible. so that made what cuvier did is establish that the world, contrary to what everyone thought, the world had not always looked the way it does to us. it wasn't that the only animals that had ever been were the ones we know lions and tigers. once upon a time there had been these strange things, these massive elephants. it seemed as if there had once been lizards bigger than an

elephant, complete, slightly strange and bygone world. this is this is an utterly new notion. natural history was a phrase. it was an ancient phrase, but there had never been any history in natural history. the notion had always been that the world wasn't very young. it wasn't very old, as you say, and always the way it does now. now, all of a sudden came, this utterly contrary notion the world had looked much different it. in fact, there had been a previous world. there may be a sequence of previous worlds, one on top of the other. and we were we were only the latest it wasn't that we were the only one in the whole the whole point of creation. there had been other creations. it seemed they were they were now gone. and then just two more questions for we opened up to the audience. your book really ends on this kind of battle between what i would say describe maybe as paradigms there's own in england.

robert owen i believe. and then also coming out of england is charles darwin and they offer two very different arguments. do you want to talk about andrew and ultimately wins out, but what was their debate? so in the first half of the 18th hundreds, the most famous scientist in england was a fellow named richard owen, a a brilliant kantanka this impossible, impossible fellow he accumulated enemies by the score. he was he was brilliant, but but insufferable. terribly vain, terribly argumentative, always is always eager, eager to pick a faith tall, skinny. he looked he looked like ichabod crane. someone said, actually, that unfortunately, as he grew older, he grew to look more and more like the fossils that he'd studied. he had these deep sunken eyes and an immense high forehead and

and skinny as a stick and very tall. and if you buy your book afterwards, which everyone should, their photographs and their document that but what what richard owen believed it was actually hard to sort out what exactly what he believed when historians said that his his prose was difficult at best and incomprehensible at worst. so so it takes it takes some deciphering. but what he thought was that. he believed in the kind of evolution. but it wasn't darwinian that for lucian with with with survival of the fittest in nature red in tooth and claw. it was a kind of unrolling an unfolding which is the way we still use the word evolution in ordinary speech we say, my father was insufferable. is such a bigot but but he's evolved over the years and

that's how that's how richard owen thought of the natural world once upon a time there had been slug and snails and worms, and then along had come slightly more impressive expressive creatures mice and hamsters. and then had come along horses and deer. and now, with the flourish of trumpets at the end, had had come us in darwin. so richard owen says this all through the the middle decades of the 1800s, darwin's origin of species is 1859. darwin's theory is completely different. instead of this tidy unfolding life as a game of musical chairs, there aren't enough chairs to go around ever so slightly sharper elbows ever so slightly quicker reflexes might

get you a seat in one of those if you do it, if it so happens that you're able to pass along those sharp elbows or those quick reflexes, maybe the world will change in that way and soon we'll have a lot of of of quick, sharp witted creatures. but it could easily will go a different way. it isn't it isn't an orderly unfolding like richard owen says. owen hates that owen hates darwin. darwin, who is a a lovely, gentle, mild man, one of the heroes of history, that the more you look, the more his heroism still holds up. you don't have to say, you know, i wish he hadn't said that he was he was an admirable character but put darwin writes to a friend, you know, i have vowed never to hate anyone but richard. what i'd make i'd make an exception.

he. the owen, as i say, was was a giant towering figure in his day, in his his legacy, his ideas have nearly been forgotten. but his legacy is the natural history museum in london, a great cathedral. if you've ever been. it's the one that has the mary anning rooms, a huge temple to science stained windows every kind of creature in the world, a beautiful, a beautiful monument to science and to the intellectual life. it was owen's idea. owen, raise the money for owen put a huge statue of himself front, front and center. nowadays, if you go to that museum, you have to ask. and it takes a long time to find where the statue of richard owen is. it's it's tucked away in a custodian's closet somewhere but front and center in might in white marble. is charles darwin preside and in glory owen's owen's great enemy and people come up and they take their picture with with darwin

he's the hero of the day in no way. no, no, no. he's irwin darwin. got it right. owen got it wrong on a very important question, how does the natural world come to look the way it does today? we all know darwin and hardly anyone knows that when you hand. i have to say that this book was an incredible romp through time and space with these amazing characters that you really bring to life. and i think you've done that for us tonight. my big with this book was the limits that strongly held beliefs can put on scientific imagination. you know, the first part of this book is how people are struggling to fit dinosaurs into the paradigm or into the narrative of the world that they have accepted. and the answer is actually outside of that. and it took a long time for people to come to terms with that. so what i want to ask you for my last question is when you think you've been a science writer studying science for decades, when you look at the world

today, are there areas where you think are strongly held? beliefs are limiting our imagination and our creativity and might those be. it's such a good, hard question. you know, every generation takes for granted. it's hard not to take for granted that there's a kind of escalator of progress that that we know a lot today. and in the past, we didn't know so much. but but we always think that that escalator of progress stops on our floor. isn't it good fortune that we happened to be alive in the era when we've figured out everything? so presumably we haven't. but what's odd in what means that i can't really answer your question properly is that we all live inside an intellectual bubble where certain questions make sense and certain ones don't occur to us. my strong belief is that six

year olds of the future will look back at us and say, how could they have been so silly? how could it have taken them so long to catch on? but i don't know what those six year olds, those future six year olds will be pointing at. grateful. thank you, edward. thanks. i think we have time for a few questions, if there are any from the crowd. it's. yeah, we've got people online and c-span. yep. thanks for that. really interesting debate and i wondered whether you use any instances in your book when dinosaurs literally were at the dinner table or i'm thinking of the events at crystal palace in

the 1850s, the dinner table is literally inside the dinosaur. that's that's a wonderful story. and the book that's that's how the book winds up. we're we're we're at a dinner, exactly as you say inside a 30 foot long replica of a dinosaur. this is just before darwin where where richard owen and his friends think, you know, this was a big mystery. it took a long time to figure out what these bones where we figured it out. let's celebrate ourselves. it's new year's eve, 1853. they have this long rollicking inside this model of a dinosaur it's so tall that the waiters have to climb a staircase to bring course, after course, to these to these diners who are who are celebrating around the table. richard owen is at the head of the dinosaur and at the head of the table in the two songs, in the drinking and the toasting

goes on so long into the night it starts. it's new year's eve, but the party starts at about four in the afternoon at midnight, they're still at it and they kind of kind of toddle home considerably. the worse for wear, but very pleased with themselves. they've figured out this evolution business they know all about dinosaurs. very soon after, mr. darwin would come along and explode that complacency. i believe also the apes, they may have had a dinner party in the mastodon when humboldt visited the philosopher. oh, is that so? oh, i didn't know. oh, how wonderful. yes, sir sir. good evening. thanks for coming out. question for you, did you come across any secret truth? maybe you held since childhood in your research and say, well, i'm surprised that that's not the way when or anything surprised you in your findings? well, the big surprise, as i say, was that this was this was a new story.

i had been like every other six year old i had i had little plastic dinosaurs. and i probably had dinosaur pajamas, although i can't i can't remember. i know. i liked to draw them. it did only. only recently dawned on me that that at some point, at most points in history, no one would have known what i was up to with those little creatures in those strange drawings that that you always read to how leonardo da vinci had thought of everything in galileo and ben franklin. it it's true. they had thought of nearly everything. but but they hadn't thought of this. they hadn't thought of a bygone world with these strange slithering creatures. i taken for granted that what i knew everybody had always known i should have known that was wrong, but that it took me a long time to learn it. sir.

the talk. very interesting. thank you. i know that you're not an ethicist or a futurist necessarily, but the concept of of, you know, they started it took really a very short time or 60 some odd years to go from the dinosaur tracks in new england to charles darwin. it did as a function of of the to construct it. they existed in you can't really call them science deniers but as a metaphor for some attitudes that exists in the world today. do you ever see a time when that concern of science denial might go by the wayside? well, let's hope. what's strange about this story is that there have been eras when science and religion did clash galileo, leo versus the

church is is a correct story. the i mean the way it's told is is roughly right. what was surprising about this is that the scientists and the people were not at odds. they were the same people quite often. a lot of the scientists that we talk about were not only devout, but were clergymen in the reason they could get away. that is because their beliefs didn't clash. their notion that the world was perfect and orderly and look at the eagles. i say look at the cheetahs speed all fit with what a marvelous creator we have. and so studying the natural world was a way of paying homage to religion in. so part of the reason that darwin was such a shock was it wasn't simply that he came along with a different scientific theory. he came along with the theory that that dislodged us.

it said, you who made your living by saying you're so special. maybe you're not so special. and that was really, really a hard lesson. and so when you say, will we do better? well, you certainly like to hope so. but you can see from the way that darwin it's not it's not utterly settled today because i think this notion that we're not the point of it all is a hard lesson for us. it's its cycle. logically, hard. it's intellectually hard. so so if we'll be able to, to learn our lesson to to to say let's take longer view, well, i hope we will. but but it's a hard question. yes. if i could follow that. well, this is getting down there. if you want to share would also

surprise me in this book is how late the word dinosaur itself was coined. it did come related was it was 1843. it was in fact, our man richard. oh, with this this well leveled by the brilliant fellow who saw it in what he said was that i found a collection of bones here and a collection here in a collection here. and they don't seem to have anything in common, but actually they have something terribly important in common. and what they have in common was that there was a category of prehistoric creature that no one has ever called attention to. no one has ever recognized. and they deserve they deserve a special name, special, special recognition. he was right about that as difficult a character as he was, he was also a brilliant fellow. and he made that that nervy call that based on only three cases, i see a whole new category in the world. he made that call and he got it right. last question question.

darwin had a tiptoe around a bit because his wife, of course, was highly religious and was quite upset by his some of what he was suggesting. so the clash between religion and science in that context was actually within darwin's own family. but i've just been reading a book that tells us that darwin's great grandfather discovered dinosaur bones in england but had no idea what they were. and his grandfather father erasmus darwin, also in naturalist, was actually a member of the american philosophical society here in philadelphia. so my question is, were you able to connect his grandfather's work, erasmus? because obviously erasmus was admitted because of his scientific prowess. but were you able to connect his you know, his grandfather's work with the work of the society here in philadelphia at all?

i wish i had i didn't. my story was was mostly a story set in england, because that's where most of these early discoveries were. the story you tell about darwin and his wife. so is this this marvelous, poignant story? darwin, over the course of 20 or 30 years is working on the origin of species. now he's got to the point where he's he's pretty sure he's he's got it right. and he writes to a friend of his he says he's going to to unveil his theory at some point. and writes, it is like confessing a murder. he he knows that that the world is going to come down on his head and he writes in a letter, you can tell me. i can't. i believe found found after his death that that his wife had had pleaded with them. if if what you've been working away on all these years, if it looks as if it's going to undermine religion.

please, please, please don't go there with it. it would it would it would destroy me. they they had lost a child that darwin's had. it is darwin's wife knew that there would someday reconcile in the in the afterlife. it now darwin was what was he shooting that down and darwin quotes this letter from his wife when she'd asked him to soft pedal it and he writes in the margin he says, i have often cried over this. so so it is it is terribly personal. debate, debate for him. he, too, is is fighting the hold of religion on our on our psyches and our intuition with this notion that the evidence just seems different to that great point. and don. so thank you again, edward.

and books are available for sale in the back and i think you're willing to sign some of them as well. of course. thanks.