Lots of us marvel at dinosaurs — and not just young kids. We line up to see their skeletons in museums and go to theaters to watch movies about them. But, humans didn’t always have such positive feelings about these creatures. And, those views were sometimes used to justify peoples’ opinions about more current events, as well.
Thomas Moynihan has written about this; he’s a visiting researcher at Cambridge University, where he studies the history of ideas.
He spoke with The Show, who asked him to briefly take us through the evolution of thought on dinosaurs — how they were seen as not that impressive, and then how and why opinions about them became better.
Full conversation
THOMAS MOYNIHAN: I guess, yeah, to start at the beginning. My beginning, as a child, as is completely un-astonishing. I was obsessed with dinosaurs and admired them. And so, you know, becoming an adult and studying what I study in the history of ideas, I was very surprised to learn that up until surprisingly recently, people were shockingly spiteful about them and denigrated them to a surprising degree.
And, you know, when I say people, I actually mean the people that dedicated their lives to studying them, paleontologists, scientists, evolutionists.
MARK BRODIE: And it seems to be almost a sense that, like, these creatures deserved extinction, right? They weren't fast enough. They weren't smart enough. They weren't agile enough. So, like, whatever happened to them, they kind of deserved it.
MOYNIHAN: Yeah, for sure. So the overriding assumption from the discovery of the dinosaurs and their popularization in the Victorian period. So dinosaur bones had been around for a while, but people had miscategorized them, you know, as the bones of giants, et cetera.
But in the early 1800s, people, scientists began to classify this new family of creatures dinosauria. And then during the Victorian period, you get Darwin come along. And the overriding Victorian interpretation of Darwinism was that creatures are generally pushed to their extinction by their fitter, more competitive descendants or competitors.
Which all tied up together in this inherently deeply progressive view of life and time and the cosmos itself. So this was all propped up by this idea that things were getting better, that the fitter was always selecting out, the less fit. And so they could point to dinosaurs and just assume that, you know, these somewhat bizarre, unnatural looking creatures were, you know, ugly, stupid, deserving of their extinction.
BRODIE: Do you have a sense of how much of that sentiment in terms of, you know, the, the fitter sort of weeding out the less fit was maybe a convenient way to think about not just dinosaurs, but things like colonization and, you know, eugenics. Other experiments being done on other human beings as well.
MOYNIHAN: Indeed, yes. Absolutely. So, that kind of deeply progressivist view of evolution and the cosmos that I just mentioned. There's motivated reasoning lurking behind that view, wishful thinking, if you will. For one reason, zooming out very far. The idea that the fit always went over the unfit and, you know, natural selection’s rejections are always for the better of the world in general. That allows humans to, you know, as the these latter day inheritors of the earth, you know, as they saw themselves to think of themselves as the inevitable and best end result of this search for the best.
But then more particularly, European scientists, for sure, they certainly pointed to the dinosaurs as this prehistoric example of a deserved extinction tactfully placed millions and millions and millions of years ago, AKA beyond the realm of the political. And they could use this as this precedent for what was currently then happening across the world, due to Europe's colonization of other continents. And so that involved the eradication and the downright genocide of indigenous peoples.
BRODIE: So what changed then? Both for dinosaurs, in terms of people, maybe seeing them for what they were and having a a better view of them. But also in terms of us as humans, maybe taking more care with, you know, endangered species or trying to make sure other plants or animals didn't go extinct. Or that, you know, maybe we just treated other humans a little bit better.
MOYNIHAN: Yeah. Yeah, that's a great question. So, you know these old, older views that I'm talking about, you know, they were applied across the board. So, you know, from the Enlightenment down to the early 1900s, it wasn't just other cultures and other people that were, kind of dismissed in this, in this way, it was also entire ecosystems. So it's actually relatively recent that this idea that anthropogenic extinction of other species is somehow wrong.
And so one of the reasons for what changed is that basically this sense of the dinosaurs is, you know, somehow deserving of their obsolescence remained in sway throughout most of the 1900s. Then things begin to change around the ‘60s. There's some new evidence implying that dinosaurs weren't these cold blooded slow pokes but were actually agile and behaviorally complex, perhaps even intelligent. But still, their extinction remains a mystery. And it was thought of this gradual twilight that was gonna happen sooner or later anyway, to make room for the plucky mammals, AKA our ancestors.
Anyway, this all, it all changed in the 1980, when increasingly undeniable evidence was found for the fact that the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid or a comet chancing upon earth 66 million years ago. So that changed everything, ‘cause no longer could you say that the dinosaurs died of bad genes or bad design, but perhaps from predominantly just sheer bad luck.
And also at the same time, in the 1980s, this idea that the marks of chance events cast their legacies far and wide throughout time in history. That also gave more salience to the ways in which there are things that we, as a species, are doing now that could be leaving similar marks upon the future history of life on Earth.
So it was precisely around the same time the evidence of the asteroid was found that scientists begin to argue that humanity has inaugurated a sixth mass extinction to add to the fifth, which was the, the mass extinction that led to the loss of the dinosaurs. So these were all intertwined developments.
BRODIE: So how do you see this new and evolved mentality manifesting itself now, especially as it relates to issues like climate change and whether our planet will be inhabitable by humans or really anybody else going forward?
MOYNIHAN: So the asteroid taught the lesson that the history of life on Earth is open. It can go in many different ways. And so the same thing also applies to the future. The future is also open. It's the product of what we do today. But what we do today isn't a matter of fate or necessity entirely, we can choose.
So I think that the vindication of the dinosaurs is a happy, salutary lesson. And we should apply it to ourselves that we have agency and we can choose. Our future is open just as the future of life on Earth was open in the past to going different ways. So, yeah, I think that there's a hopeful aspect to this.
