"Palaeontologists use fiction all the time"
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"Palaeontologists use fiction all the time" is a sly provocation masquerading as a shrug. Coming from a writer, it’s less an accusation that scientists are making things up than a reminder that deep time can’t be recovered like CCTV footage. Fossils are fragments; the story is the glue. Macleod’s line works because it collapses a boundary we like to police: science as pristine fact, art as imaginative play. In practice, palaeontology lives in the liminal space between evidence and narrative, where you’re forced to build plausible worlds from partial remains.
The intent feels twofold. First, it disarms the reader who thinks “fiction” automatically means “false.” Here, fiction is closer to modeling: constructing best-fit scenarios, running counterfactuals, filling in missing behavior, soft tissue, ecosystems, and evolutionary pressures the rock record won’t preserve. Second, it quietly critiques the performance of certainty in popular science. Museum murals, documentaries, even the iconic T. rex silhouette are persuasive not just because they’re evidence-based, but because they’re narratively coherent. Coherence can seduce.
The subtext is about authority. Scientific storytelling earns trust by admitting its seams: hypotheses, priors, and aesthetic choices. The danger is when the fiction becomes invisible, hardening into “what happened” instead of “what most likely happened given what we have.” Contextually, the line lands in an era of probabilistic science and media-driven certainty, asking audiences to respect imagination not as the enemy of rigor, but as one of its tools.
The intent feels twofold. First, it disarms the reader who thinks “fiction” automatically means “false.” Here, fiction is closer to modeling: constructing best-fit scenarios, running counterfactuals, filling in missing behavior, soft tissue, ecosystems, and evolutionary pressures the rock record won’t preserve. Second, it quietly critiques the performance of certainty in popular science. Museum murals, documentaries, even the iconic T. rex silhouette are persuasive not just because they’re evidence-based, but because they’re narratively coherent. Coherence can seduce.
The subtext is about authority. Scientific storytelling earns trust by admitting its seams: hypotheses, priors, and aesthetic choices. The danger is when the fiction becomes invisible, hardening into “what happened” instead of “what most likely happened given what we have.” Contextually, the line lands in an era of probabilistic science and media-driven certainty, asking audiences to respect imagination not as the enemy of rigor, but as one of its tools.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
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