This is a really good essay

When British paleontologist Martin Rudwick translated Cuvier’s works into English in 1997, he left out the sections on fossil myths as irrelevant to science

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeah. So.many. dimensions. Of yikes.

nineteen goddamn ninety seven, ffs

(to soothe myself I am picturing Stephen Maturin's FACE)

Stephen Maturin: /has pulled a man's nose for less!

And yeah: a lot of the sciences have this problem, where a lot of history of the discipline written by people who practice the discipline deliberately obscures huge chunks of that history because the motivation behind writing the history is not -fundamentally - examining how we know things, exploring human knowledge and such like

But a narrow bid for professional "respectability"

Since the project of professional respectability is unavoidably racist, classist, sexist and self valorizing-

yeeeeeeah

(Stephen: /choice string of adjectives for anyone who suppresses CUVIER on the grounds of not being SCIENTIFIC ENOUGH--!)

(yes, Stephen, we know)\

Ugh people

You get an even more distorted historical narrative than you would if the professional respectability weren't driving the work

real history is so cool ;;

(Removing that narrow self definition of professional respectability wouldn't remove the racism, classism, sexism and self valorization, of course. Decolonizing a discipline is bigger than that. But I do think it's an intensifier.)

Real history is so cool!

the thing about the myths is so cool

I LOVE that kind of thing

the different ways people keep records

AbsoLUTELY so cool! The way that use of story is a part of the lived environment too, so that there are all kinds of experience and knowledge reinforcing the structure of it in many ways

I mean: the story of the vision in more recent time that reveals the deep past, with the journey that confirms the vision - so that making that same journey for a contemporary person then reconfirms the vision, the account of the vision, and the confirming journey.