Paleontologists study time on a scale that is difficult for humans to grasp – millions, billions of years. How might that awe-some sense of time inform our spirituality and our sense of existence? What does it mean to – to Judaism, and to others faiths – to dive into deep time and understand how briefly humans have been on Earth, and what amazing things came before us?
Dr. Roy Plotnick is a paleontologist and professor emeritus in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is a fellow of the Geological Society of America and the Paleontological Society. His new book, Explorers of Deep Time, is available from Columbia University Press.
Geoff Mitelman: I’m Rabbi Geoff Mitelman. I’m the founding director of Sinai and Synapses, which bridges those worlds. And I’m sitting here while I’m sitting in New York still as COVID is raging on. I don’t know if you’re in your office or in home, but outside of Chicago –
Roy Plotnick: I’m in my home office in Oak Park.
Geoff Mitelman: – Home office in Oak Park is Professor Roy Plotnick, who is the author of the new book Explorers of Deep Time: Paleontologists and the History of Life. He’s also a member of Oak Park Temple, which was part of Sinai and Synapses’ project, Scientists in Synagogues. He was there in partnership with Adam Lyon, who is joining us (he was also a previous guest as well, thinking about questions of time and Judaism, which was just a fascinating conversation). But Roy’s new book, I believe it is about to come out, correct? Or is it published right now?
Roy Plotnick: It is out. It is available for purchasing.
Geoff Mitelman: All right, so we’re going to talk about that in just a moment. But Roy, thank you for taking some time here with us this afternoon.
Roy Plotnick: Sure. My pleasure.
Geoff Mitelman: So, I’d love for you to start by talking a little bit about your book, because we sort of have an image of what a paleontologist does. And I know – we’ll talk a little bit about dinosaurs and Jurassic Park – but you are actually a paleontologist. So, I would love for you to share a little bit of: What is it that you do on a day-to-day basis? How do they spend their time?
Roy Plotnick: Well, first of all, I like to point out that myself, like most of my colleagues, the vast majority of my colleagues, don’t work on dinosaurs. We work on almost anything else that ever lived as part of life – so, anything that lives or has lived has a potential to become a fossil. And that is what we paleontologists are interested in. We’re interested in not just the fossils themselves, but what they can tell us about how life has evolved and the Earth has evolved over time.
Now, some of us are specialists in particular groups of animals. The beastie behind me is a euryptorid, which is what I did my doctoral thesis on. And there are some of us who have spent a lot of our careers working on these, and I’m back to working on them again. Other people work on fossil clams or fossil snails, crabs, plants, microscopic organisms, almost any kind of thing that you can imagine that is a living organism – not just the bones and teeth and the shells, but, for example, anything they may leave behind, for example, footprints or burrows, are also things that paleontologists would be looking at. So it’s any preserved remain that says, “hey, there was something once living here” – is what paleontologists interested in. But that’s sort of the meat and potatoes. That’s the text for us. And then it’s a question of trying to help put that into the bigger story of what the life on earth is.
In terms of day-to-day stuff, it depends on where most of us work. I have just recently retired as a professor. So, much of my time was spent teaching, both on the graduate and the undergraduate level, but also writing papers, doing research in my lab, going out in the field. It’s a tremendous variety of different things that people do. Some people are museum scientists, some people help prepare fossils, some people collect. It’s a diverse field.
Geoff Mitelman: As you’re talking about what the work is on a day-to-day basis, I’m seeing an analogy with text study, with Torah study. And I’m curious as to your reaction to this and if this has a similarity of – you and I are both Jewish, but most people who identify as religious have a sacred text. So we’ll talk about the Torah, because that’s our text. There’s what’s been written down and what’s been written down – some of that was because of randomness. Some of that was because of culture. Some of that was whatever happened to be left over. Some of it was because it was very important. But we have only a small fraction of what was written, what was created. So, we’ve understandably created narratives and stories based on the fragmentary nature of what’s been left behind. And a lot of paleontology, I would think, as well, is trying to see, “These are the things that we know, and there’s this whole ocean of things that we don’t know. How do we reconstruct? How do we build from the fragmentary nature of the evidence to be able to create meaningful, accurate stories?”
Roy Plotnick: A large part of paleontological research, including some of my own, has been in the field of what we call taphonomy, which is the study of how fossils get preserved – or, in many cases, do not get preserved. And the vast majority of things that ever live don’t leave anything behind them, because nature recycles. Nature takes what was there and leaves it behind. So, Darwin had a metaphor about a book in which you keep tearing – most of the pages have been torn out, [for] trying to interpret the history of life.
For example, the animal behind me – that’s about two meters long from tip to tail, it’s huge. But we don’t have any complete specimens. What we have are fragments. We have some that are relatively intact, but none that have are pristine. So you have to look at a lot of stuff in order to make sense of what you have.
So, we recognize that the fossil record is an incomplete record of what the history of life is. Some parts of it are very good. We know animals – with, again, getting back to things like clams or snails – they have a wonderful fossil record, and they’re actually reasonably, because they have their shells, it’s reasonably complete. Other animals – I’m working on a paper on sea anemones. You go out in the world today, you see sea anemones everywhere, but there’s only one place in the world where they’re common and abundant. And this is a thing that was misinterpreted as a jellyfish. It turns out it’s an anemone. So to make sense of it, you have to understand, first of all, how modern anemones are put together. So I spent a lot of time looking at specimens of modern sea anemones, looking at how they’re put together, and then looking at many hundreds of specimens – my colleagues and I – of this particular fossil, trying to see how, through the lens of preservation, we can reconstruct it as a living animal again.
And so it’s a combination. You have to know how organisms work, how animals and plants and so on are put together, and then you use that knowledge to help guide you to reassemble what was once there. The other thing, too, is we know that animals lived in a physical environment, that physics was physics, chemistry was chemistry. The animal behind me had to move in water, and the physics of moving through water were the same. So we can use some of those tools to help reconstruct what we have. But we recognize that one of the long-term discussions in paleontology is – and we try to get away from the term bias – we say “the record has been modified.” We have to see “What is the signal of the biological world that we see?” And I think our signal is pretty strong. We have a pretty good understanding of the basic structure of the history of life, but there are pages missing.
Geoff Mitelman: Right. And I think that’s what’s interesting of the difference between physics and chemistry versus biology – that biology, I guess, by definition, is changing and organic, versus physics and chemistry, which tend to be a little bit more – I mean, they change to an extent, but a lot of the biology just happens to be what’s working at that particular time, and the level of randomness of sexual selection, and what works in that particular environment and what doesn’t work in that particular environment, and being able to understand. I’m seeing as analogies, too, with Judaism, of what is an organic change? What are the elements that are going to be static and true forever? And what are the things where there’s evolution that happens?
Roy Plotnick: One of the long-term discussions, which I spend a little time about in the book, is – and this is something that the late Jewish paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould brought to the world – was the concept of what we call contingency, how much of what we see in the world today, and it’s not just the biological world, it’s also the physical world, is the result of events, of something that happened. If this had happened, had not happened, the world would be different – versus, how much of the world is utterly predictable? How much is because of physics, because of chemistry, because of just the way organisms are put together, we’re going to always find this is going to be the case?
So, again, this animal behind me has little paddles on its legs, which it uses to swim. It looks just like the paddles that a modern-day blue crab has. And the reason is because they are for underwater flying, and the physics determines that. So we get what’s called convergence – things that look the same because they’re controlled by many of the same kinds of factors.
On the other hand, as often pointed out here, that if the asteroid had not hit the earth 66 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs – or as some of my colleagues call it, the non-avian dinosaurs, birds are still with us – that was a turning point. That reset the world. And one of the things we do see in the history of life are big resets – mass extinction event, when things change, there are events. And these are very these contingent events. If the asteroid hadn’t hit, if the gigantic volcanoes hadn’t gone off in the Permian, who would be there to survive? And Gould’s phrase, you look at something like, in the Cambrian, there are little fish-like forms, which are ancestral chordates.
If you were in the Cambrian, you could not look at that thing and say, “Oh, yes, one day that thing will rise to basically rule the world.” You couldn’t make that determination. And I think you would say for Judaism, Jewish history. where are the Moabites? Where are the Amalekites? Where are all the other the Edomites? Where are all those people? We’re here, right? But could you have predicted that back then?
Geoff Mitelman: Right – and with Christianity as well, of what happened to be the right place and the right time, in the right location. And I’ve quoted this line, I think, on the show a few times, and certainly when I teach, is I love the line from – I think it’s from Kierkegaard, who said, “life has to be lived forward, but can only be understood backward.” And that’s true for our own personal lives, but I think that’s also true for paleontology.
Roy Plotnick: Yeah.
Geoff Mitelman: I’d love for you to talk a little bit about deep time, because I think that’s something that – it’s a concept that’s hard for people to get around. And I know dinosaurs are not your area of expertise, but one element that always blows my mind is, and you can correct me if I’m wrong on this, is that, for example, there was more time between Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex than it is between Tyrannosaurus rex and today. So, we collapse all the dinosaurs together, but Stegosaurus was 200 million years ago, 300 million years ago, and that’s –
Roy Plotnick: That’s almost as long as the entire Cenozoic period. The Cretaceous alone is like 40 million years long. You look at the time scale – getting a sense. There’s a lot of ways. We’ve had a working group at one point discussing this. How do you get the sense across, of deep time? I like to refer to Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. He talks about that. We complain how long a walk it is to the drugstore around the corner, but that’s nothing compared to space. And deep time is basically directly analogous to deep space. How do we imagine how far it is to the moon, let alone to the other planets, let alone to the stars of the other galaxies? The immensity of space is incredible, and it’s very hard to wrap your head around. So people use metaphors, or they use some sort of scaling. Like, you know, “if the distance from the Earth to the sun was the size of a baseball field, then Jupiter would be out in the suburbs.” Those kinds of things are done a lot. People build scale models to that effect. We try to get that sense across by often using various metaphors related to either distance or time. I think it was Gould, again, following John McPhee, who said, “If the history of the earth was the old English definition of a yard, from the King’s nose to the tip of his fingertips, this is the beginning of life. If you then file off your fingernail, you’ve removed all the human history.”
So we try to understand this by sort of doing metaphorical concepts: “If the history of earth was an hour or a day or a year, then this is how each of these things would be.” And that’s kind of helpful, but it doesn’t really give you that deep, interior feeling of, “this is how long it takes.” I was at an online conference yesterday, and they were talking about, “Oh, this happened a billion years ago, and this happened almost at the same time, 1.2 billion years ago.” I’m going, “Wait a minute. No, that’s 200 million years. That’s a huge swath of time.” So we are, in my field, are very used to sort of glibly throwing out “10,000 years,” “a million years and so on.” And we kind of know what we do, but deep down, internally, to say, “I really know what a million years would be like,” I don’t know. It’s like, again, imagining 93 million miles to the sun.
Geoff Mitelman: And some of that is because as human beings, we evolved on the African savannah to be able to deal with proximate causes and proximate times. And these ideas of being able to have science as a study, to be able to say, “here’s how we’re going to reconstruct some of these questions,” that didn’t exist 100,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, even 1,000 years ago. Did dinosaurs exist? On one level, the answer is yes. But on another level, they didn’t, until we understood what they were, until we were able to reconstruct other fossils and being able to look through, how did life start? How did the Cambrian explosion start? I mean, certainly it did when it did, but we didn’t know about it until we were able to have the tools to be able to look at these questions.
Roy Plotnick: Even until Darwin was aware of this in the 1850s – people call this Darwin’s dilemma, of when he knew of the Cambrian life, and we knew that in the Cambrian, life radiated a tremendous amount of new and different forms – but below that, it was a total mystery. Somehow or other, these things all of a sudden were there.
And it really wasn’t until the 1950s, and the decades since then, that we’ve really come and understand the previous 3 billion years of history of life on earth, and it’s still being unraveled as we speak. I mean, again, part of this is new technology is new finds. But again, paleontology, we’ve been doing this for 200 years as a discipline to some extent, and we’re still coming up with new stuff, still a lot of stuff. It’s still hard to figure out.
Geoff Mitelman: Well, one of the things that there’s been actually some significant research [about], and we’ve talked with a couple of people who do this work about, particularly deep space and deep time and the level of awe that people use, and smallness, and humility. And I’m curious as to your work, and you’re writing this book about deep time, and trying to understand the history of life and what our place in it is – I’m wondering how that connects with feelings of awe or wonder, or if there were any experiences that you had of really feeling, in the Yiddish word of, “in your kishkes,” about how…
Roy Plotnick: There are all sorts of times when you say to yourself, “this is just an amazing thing to look at. That’s just absolutely amazing that this thing exists here.”
Just recently, and I was at one of the local public libraries, about walking distance from my house. And I realized that they had on display the remains of a mammoth. And the mammoth was collected from a cemetery near the library – again, about a mile from my house. And I said I was going to ask myself, “based on how we can date it, this is about a 14,000-year-old fossil. And saying, “14,000 years ago, just down the block, there were mammoths walking around. That’s amazing.” I mean, just to think about that little – and in the opening chapter of the book, I talk about this. We are doing mental time travel as paleontologists. We are carrying ourselves back in time. And you can do that where you live. I think back and, I’m just where I am – 9,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, was under a lake, and a little before that, there was a shoreline, there were mammoths walking around, mastodons and other big things. I’m going, “just to think that that was here.” Or I take my students out to local quarries and those that are 400 million years old. And it was a tropical ocean, and you’re sitting in Chicago, middle of the winter, and you’re going, “wait a minute, this is 400 million years ago, you would have need scuba gear to be survived here, and you would have seen these weird animals swing around.” That’s really something to get your mind around, that the world is not static – that where you are today is the product of a history.
Geoff Mitelman: And even the 14,000 years [since] seeing a mammoth – for us, that’s an incredible amount of time. But compared to the animal that’s right behind you, it’s a blink of an eye.
Roy Plotnick: It’s a blink of an eye, yeah. The last mammoth died out up in a Siberian island about 7000, 8000 years ago. To my mind – there were pyramids. I mean, human history and the mammoths basically overlapped. We just missed them in terms of human history. And so that’s always kind of upsetting to me.
But, yeah, this is the kind of thing you think about, again – how humans view our history. We think about when you go to someplace like, “My house here is built in 1914. Oh, my God, this house is old.” But when you go to Europe, you go, “Oh, wow, this 13th century castle.” You go, “Oh, that’s old.” But then you realize that even the oldest human structures that we have are recent in vintage, compared to the history of humanity or the history of life.
Geoff Mitelman: One thing that I know that we, as Jews are very proud of is how ancient our tradition is. And it is, I think there’s a lot to be proud of, of two, three, 4,000 years, however long you want to date it. But that is still, in a lot of ways, the blink of an eye, because so many of the questions that we grapple with are questions that human beings have been struggling with – I think that questions that anything that is alive is struggling with – of, how do we find pleasure, and how do we avoid pain, and how do we protect ourselves, and how do we pass things on to the next generation? Those are the fundamental questions of life that then get spun out in different kinds of ways as humans build larger and larger social structures. But these are questions of, literally, “How do I live in this world?” That’s the most fundamental question that we grapple with.
Roy Plotnick: Yeah. How do we make sense of it? I always felt that religion is one of the [things] we try to do, to make sense of what the world is as opposed to just existing in it.
Geoff Mitelman: I’d love for you to share a little bit about the work that you did – and I know Adam, who’s also with us, and we talked about this a little bit when he was on – about the project that you did through Sinai and Synapses, through Scientists in Synagogues of Judaism and time. It now feels like a long time ago – I think it was five or six years ago. But I’d love for you to share a little bit about how did you think about these kinds of questions about Judaism and time from both, I think you as a paleontologist, Adam, who was a particle physicist, and I think if I remember, there was a philosopher as well.
Roy Plotnick: There was a physicist.
Geoff Mitelman: Yep. So, how do you approach these questions of scientific time and deep time on your day-to-day work and then reading Genesis?
Roy Plotnick: You know, I wrote an essay recently on. I have a blog post where I talked about – I have a pair of Shabbat candlesticks that my great grandmother. And that’s a tying-back to that. And you think about. And this is something that came up with discussions with Rabbi Weiss when we were doing this, too, is that Judaism has time in two different ways. There’s time that’s the linear time going from the Torah, from the creation, through the kings, and so on. It’s a narrative. It’s a story that we tell. But while that’s all going on, while we have the narrative story, we also have the cycles. We have the cycles of the seasons. We have the cycles of the week with Shabbat. So we always have the calendar cycle that tells us repeating kinds of things going on.
And in the world of the earth sciences, which is paleontology – it’s embedded as a more part of the earth sciences – we see the same thing. We have a narrative. And again, one of the things we do, as paleontologists, are trying to put together the narrative of the history of the earth and of the life that lived on it. At the same time, one of the first things we teach our students is the rock cycle, that the rocks come up to the surface of the earth. They get eroded, they get buried, they get metamorphosed, they melted, they come back up and around again. We have a plate tectonic cycle, we have a carbon cycle, we have a water cycle. So throughout all the time that we have this linear history, we also have things that are going around and around and around.
Now, these change over time, too. One of the things we look at – we know, for example, a billion years ago, the carbon cycle was not the carbon cycle of today. But there was still a cycle. So I think the relationship is we both have in both sort of the Jewish view of life as the cycle of the years and the seasons and the direction of life – we have both of those components in it.
Again, Steve Gould wrote a book called Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, and he was trying to look at how people view history. But that’s basically, I think, where the tie-ins between the two go.
Geoff Mitelman: As you’re talking and thinking about the world of paleontology and evolution, that a lot of evolution, almost by definition, is gradual, right? We will not be able to – even if we had a digital camera, we would not be able to say, “Well, this was a Neanderthal, and this is a human being. This was part of a human monkey, and now this is the first human being. This was something that was this type of animal.” There’s a gradual progression. And at some point, I would think paleontologists have to just say, “Okay, it’s arbitrary, but here’s where we’re marking this. Here’s what we’re saying what this is.” This is just like in Judaism, you don’t know, when is it light? When is it dark? It’s a gradual process. And at some point, you just say, “Shabbat starts now. And here’s when we’re saying this.”
Roy Plotnick: Well, again, one of the things that this is one of the, again, debates came up. Niles Eldridge, who was one of my professors and Steve Gould talked about, is that species actually come into existence and persist almost unchanged most of their existence. And then the transition to a new species is actually relatively short in geologic time. So, I think we would see Neanderthals and Neanderthals, and we would say homo sapiens and homo sapiens. But the transition would have been fairly brief, because they’re usually done in small populations. But again, we do have other times we see gradual transitions from one form to the other. So evolution can be – again, not on human scales, but on geologic scales – evolution can be fairly fast. And we actually have examples where even, today, we see things are changing. Omicron variants, delta variants, are examples of how evolution can clock really quickly when the situation is correct for that kind of thing.
Geoff Mitelman: And I think that’s one thing that we often forget. I don’t know if you talk about this at all in your book, but I think one thing that, as you’re talking about all the different COVID variants that have existed over the last two years or so, we frame it as a battle, right? “We’re fighting this virus. We’re fighting this virus.” And yet there is a coexistence. They exist with each other. Without human beings, COVID would not be able to spread. If we didn’t have our noses and our hands in our mouths it wouldn’t be COVID. COVID needs human beings to be able to do this. And COVID has its own desire to be able to reproduce. Sometimes we frame these questions as an either or in a battle. But I think a lot of evolution is a much more nuanced and much more complicated story.
Roy Plotnick: As pointed out – again, this is out of my direct area. But again, there’s a lot, a whole field of medicine that looks at this from an evolutionary perspective. And we know, for example, if you had a disease that wiped out its host, the disease would disappear, too. So over time, diseases often themselves become less virulent, because that allows them to keep their hosts around. Parasitism is the same way. So that’s one thing we can hope, is maybe if Omicron is less, more transmissible, but less deadly, then that’s actually better for both of us – put it in that term. But you cannot give a value judgment to these things. This is just the way the world works. Life was – Jurassic Park. “Life finds a path. Life finds a way to do things,” or “existence discovers a path,” is the way somebody else put it to me.
Geoff Mitelman: Well, as you mentioned Jurassic Park, I want to talk about essay that you wrote, or an article that you wrote a couple of years ago called “Jurassic Pork” – which is a great title – asking, “What could a Jewish time traveler eat? What would be kosher and what would not be kosher?” And that’s actually, it’s an interesting question of when Jews came to the New World and they came across bison. They had never seen bison here, so the rabbis had to make a decision: were bison kosher? And so, they had to look and see what were the elements of a bison that match what the levels of Kashrut are. But I would love for you to share a little bit about what that article was about and what the thought process was.
Roy Plotnick: This started, actually, strangely enough, as a Facebook discussion. One of my non-Jewish colleagues was asked whether something called a brachiopod was kosher in the core. In the context of this class, a student wanted to know, so he posted that question. And brachiopods are shellfish – they’re not related to clams or snails, but they are a shelled organism – so, obviously, to us, they’re not kosher, which is how we responded. Then a Jewish female colleague of mine, Jessica Theodor, who works on fossil mammals, said she gets asked that question all the time by her relatives: “Would this particular fossil mammal have been kosher?”
So we got together with a dinosaur specialist friend of mine, and we said, “You know, this is kind of a fun question.” And the idea was not – it’s kind of tongue-in-cheek, but the real idea was, “How would we use the tools of paleontology to answer that question: which of these animals would have been something that would have been kosher? How can we use our tools to answer that question?”
So we just explored through various types of groups how that question could be answered. In order to do so, from my end, I had to go much more deep-diving into the rules of Kashrut than I had ever done before. I mean. you know, grew up Conservative – it’s like, “Okay, you don’t have a ham and cheese sandwich.” So I ended up doing a lot of reading into writings about Kashrut. I discovered, for example, the debate about whether turkeys were kosher. It called for the same thing. They came to the New World – apparently, people decided they were kosher before there was a rabbinical ruling. And the rabbi said, “You know, we’ve been doing it for so long, it’s okay.” And it was discovering things like – we know for seafood, it’s very specific exactly what makes them have pins and scales. And there’s a discussion of “What is a scale?”. That’s another story. But for things like birds, essentially, “you can eat these, but don’t eat these.” And there were not, at least in the Torah, there were no specific rules. You had to then go into the Talmud, and they would say, “Well, it’s something that, based on what animals are forbidden, these are the things it shouldn’t have.” So it was entertaining to go into – interesting for me to go into that depth of knowledge about Kashrut.
And then there came the question of: How do we know, for example, a fossil fish had scales? Or, how do we know that a particular fossil mammal had cloven hooves and chewed its cud? And so, how would we answer that question? Then we did that in the paper – sort of went through the various groups of animals and said, “How would we know that a fossil representative would have been kosher?” And then we said, “Well, let’s do a mental thing and say, let’s go back in time and say, how far back could we go until we ran out of things to eat. “For example, again, the time period behind me – nothing you could eat.
Geoff Mitelman: And trying to be able to see what is culturally relevant, because I think a lot of the laws of Kashrut – there are some potentially incorrect reasons as to why the laws of Kashrut are there. And there may be, actually, deeper reasons that actually were. And so, trying to be able to say, “What are the clues that we need to be able to figure out? Here are the rules of the game. Let’s figure out what would be able to play that game.”
Roy Plotnick: Yeah. We very deliberately stayed away from trying to explain why these rules exist. There’s a large literature, both secular and rabbinic, about why the Kashrut rules are the way they are. We didn’t want to go there. They just said, “This is what’s in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. We’ll go with what those rules are, and we’ll see how we can fit those into what we have.”
And again, you cannot use – the Torah is not a book of science in that way. For example, it says, “these are the birds you can’t eat,” and has bats listed. We know that bats are not birds. But by birds, they meant flying animals, rather than a taxonomic group.
Fish was tough. Apparently, there is somebody back in the 70s or something like that put together a list of kosher fish, and that’s what’s used very much nowadays. So we had to rely on that. So, again, it was an entertaining thing. And again, the other thing, too, is if you look at every time we talk about the Bible and science, it almost always comes down to the first chapter of Genesis.
Geoff Mitelman: Yeah.
Roy Plotnick: But they say, well, really, there’s a whole other five more books, plus every other thing in there. What else is there? So we thought we’d get away from Genesis, and go into elsewhere in the Torah.
Geoff Mitelman: Well, that’s a great point. And that actually came up a little bit in the chat just now, of the questions of Genesis 1 – I have my own take on it and interpretation of that, because I also think Genesis and the Torah as a whole is not designed to be a scientific textbook, because science as we know it today is relatively recent – also a blink of the eye as compared to when the Torah literature was written – and its purpose was different. But I’m curious as to how do you think about and read the opening stories of Genesis, particularly with your work on deep time, and being able to think about these stretches of ages that we can’t really comprehend as human beings?
Roy Plotnick: I have to put my – you know, again, I’m fairly secular. I just put myself into the context of saying: The people who were alive at the time were trying to make sense of the world that they saw around them. They knew that what they could observe about the world, and they were trying to come up with a narrative that made sense of the world that they saw. And some of this was things that – again, it’s not literal, but it is trying to put together at least a semi-coherent narrative of what the events would have been to try to explain what we see in that regard. All I can say is, I enjoy reading it, but you can’t view it as sort of saying, “Well, this is what tells us what the world was like.” I don’t go for the, “Oh, well, each day was actually a billion years.” I’ve heard that kind of explanation also. It’s what we say.
Geoff Mitelman: Yeah. I tend to agree. I think of the opening stories of Genesis as poetry, and it’s almost as actually pretty clearly designed to be poetry, the way that Hebrew poetry is written, with repetition and certain linguistic features there, [and] that you wouldn’t necessarily use poetry to be able to study paleontology. Although there are some beautiful elements of paleontology, but the beauty of the poetry is not the goal of paleontology.
Roy Plotnick: I was just readin – there was a recent article on we have the class, the four elements that people used to talk about: fire, water, earth, and so on. I was reading, and I kept thinking they talk about how the history of the development of the concept of the four elements actually has very close parallels to the Genesis story, how the major materials were created, that are in other cultures too. So again, I think it’s also trying to understand how the world came to be.
Geoff Mitelman: Right.
Roy Plotnick: And it’s beautiful poetry.
Geoff Mitelman: I know as you’re talking about this, too – we talked with Professor Larry Lesser a couple of weeks ago, who is the professor of mathematics. And I think there are elements of the mathematics that’s there, and math informs all the physics and the chemistry. I think what’s so interesting about paleontology – and we actually talked with also Briana Pobiner, who’s at the Smithsonian, who does a lot of work on paleobiology, but she’s human evolution, so she’s much more recent. She’s only in the last couple hundred thousand years, a couple of million years. And when we talked with her, of a big difference of the biological sciences as opposed to the physical and the chemical sciences, is that a lot of, at least the experiments of physics and chemistry, they’re supposed to be repeatable. They’re supposed to be, you can know it and you do it again. It’s a cycle, right? “If I do this, wherever I am right now on earth, that’s what it is.” But historical, or rather biological sciences, are historical, that humans evolved one time and the Cambrian explosion happened one time.
Roy Plotnick: There was a wonderful – I assign to my students this essay written about the philosophy of geology, again, using geology, sort of including paleontology, and how we get this idea of the scientific method, the way to do science is the way we get taught from the chemists or the physicists pretty well, and some biologists. You come up with a theory, you do an experiment and the experiment works, doesn’t work, it changes the theory, and so on. And that’s only one school of philosophy of how science works. There’s a whole European school of philosophy in which paleontology and so on is embedded. And that is again, doing circles. “We have evidence, we have theories,” large-scale stories. We put what we find into the stories.
What we’re trying to predict is what we’re going to find next. What we’re trying to predict is aspects of history. We can’t do an experiment. There are experimental paleontologists, and I’m one of them. There are a lot of experiments you can do with paleontological questions. But our major story is we are putting together a narrative, but it is as scientifically valid for us to do that as for somebody to do an experiment. It’s just a different way of doing science. And so, again, we do these circles, of going back and forth from the general to the specific, and specific to the general, trying to build up a coherent narrative that fits all the data that we have, and to always looking for more data to help fit our narrative.
And so, part of this is this phrase “physics envy.” We don’t have it. I’m going to talk about my field. I’m going to say we are probably the most interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary scientists out there in paleontology. We have to know biology, we have to know geology, but many of us also use a lot of chemistry and physics and astronomy – and you name the discipline, we try to bring together threads from many other fields to try to understand what we’re looking at, because it’s not isolated well.
Geoff Mitelman: And that’s such a wonderful way to come towards a close, because what so much of Judaism and so much of life is supposed to be is trying to be able to find wisdom and knowledge from as many sources as we can, and making sure we use the right tool for the right time in the right place, but being able to say, “this has value in the conversation,” “this has value in the conversation, “this has value in the conversation.” If we want to fully know who we are, we’ve got to find wisdom from wherever we can find it.
Roy Plotnick: You go outside, people have interesting ideas outside of your own discipline, maybe you can use them.
Geoff Mitelman: Yes. Right. I don’t remember who said it, but there’s a line that I love, “which is that people don’t remember what they hear. What they remember is what they themselves say.” And being able to spark conversations: “I hadn’t even thought of that conversation,” but being able to talk across disciplines, across faiths, that’s so much of what we aim to try to be able to do, is to be able to spark ideas and get people thinking about their own life and who they are from so many different perspectives.
Roy Plotnick: One of my favorite things in science is when somebody else comes up with that, you’re going to go, “oh, I should have thought of that, too” – just that unexpected little insight that comes out of doing things, or you look at something, and say, “wait a second, I know what that is.” And nobody’s ever thought about that in my field before. I should do that, though. I was mentioned earlier, I introduced the concept of fractals into paleontology, and I was just sort of looking at book about fractals and said, wait a minute, I’ve seen that. But I’ve seen that in my field. I can tie those together. I can go outside.
Geoff Mitelman: Yep. And see where they can come together.
Roy Plotnick: Yeah.
Geoff Mitelman: Well, Roy, thank you so much, not only for your time here this afternoon, but for the great work that you’re doing. And I highly recommend that people buy Explorers of Deep Time, which people can find wherever they go – wherever books are sold.
Roy Plotnick: Wherever books are sold. That’s correct.
Geoff Mitelman: So, we will be taking a break next week as we’re waiting for the new year. And we will start our conversations up again on Sacred Science on Tuesdays at 02:00 p.m, jewishlive.org/Sacred science. We have some terrific guests that we’re talking to. We’re trying to connect up with Professor Martha Minnow, who is the former dean of the Harvard Law School, talking potentially with Amy Herman, who’s written some great books about visual perception and intelligence. We have some terrific, terrific guests coming, so we hope you will join us. Roy, are you on Twitter if people want to follow you?
Roy Plotnick: No, I don’t tweet. Look me up through the university, or I’m on Facebook, too. But no, I don’t – Social media is such a time sink.
Geoff Mitelman: Well, we hope that you’ll be able to find Professor Plotnick on his work, on his website. You can follow us on all the social media channels. You can find me on @RabbiMitelman on Twitter or at @SinaiSynapses. But we hope you will join us again for more conversations at sacred science. And thank you all for taking some time here this afternoon.
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