How Scientists Differ from Clerics

When more evidence is garnered, whether through the analysis of additional characters, through the discovery of new specimens, or by pointing out errors and problems with the original data sets, new trees can be calculated. If these new trees better explain the data (taking fewer evolutionary transformations), they supplant the previous trees. You might not always like what comes out, but you have to accept it.

Any real systematist (or scientist in general) has to be ready to heave all that he or she has believed in, consider it crap, and move on, in the face of new evidence. That is how we differ from clerics.

Mick Ellison, Mark Norell, American Museum of Natural History. Division of Paleontology, Unearthing the dragon (2005)

• evidence
• religion