Siliceous and Delicious

Time to take it down a notch. After yesterday’s distractions, I took a moment today to reflect, inspired by Beau’s thoughtful comments. It makes no sense to try and push through a three-day push when I’m distracted with other tasks, and not able to fully get into it—it devalues the three-day push and robs it of its very essence, the motivation that makes it work. So, I’ve learned from my mistakes, and put off the three-day push until such time I’m actually able to devote my energies to it.

I spent the morning instead reading Dave’s manuscript, which appeared in my inbox yesterday. It kicked me back another notch, because it’s a spectacularly negative piece of writing—essentially, it’s a punishing 42-page tractate on why the microfossil record sucks ass, and consequently can’t be used for macroevolutionary studies. Not the most inspiring thing to read when you’re working on a thesis mostly focused on using the microfossil record for macroevolutionary studies. It carefully goes through all the reasons why the record of microfossil diversity—well, basically Neptune—doesn’t represent the real history of microfossil diversity: incomplete preservation of species, collection of occurrence data for only a subset of the species actually seen by micropaleontologists (because, in essence, they’re checking presence/absence boxes on a list of biostratigraphically informative species), reworking of older fossils into newer sediments, lousy age-models, and a taxonomic system that artificially inflates species counts. Then he goes on to wax poetic about how bad this all is, and how it screws everything up. Finally, he promises to present a glimmer of hope in a last section entitled “solutions”, but this turns out to be more of a critique of why approaches taken to date don’t work. The final straw, in the “Discussions, General Recommendations and Conclusions”? The microfossil record is great, but to fix our problems we have to go back and reanalyze an entire composite section from one of each biogeographic province, this time counting every taxon that’s there. Crazy? Yes.

Had a very helpful chat with Andy on a round trip to the coffee machine—complained to him at length about this paper, and he seemed to agree with me that it was unnecessarily negative. He suggested that I could certainly encourage Dave in my comments to balance his critical eye with more positive points on the sorts of studies that can in fact be done with the record as it is.