NOVA Online | The Missing Link | Diva of the Devonian (5)

In the august precincts of Cambridge, Clack and her team are trying to paint a portrait of life on Earth as it appeared over 350 million years ago.

Diva of the Devonian
Part 5 | Back to Part 4

The big picture

NOVA: So what are the big questions you're currently trying to answer?

Clack: Well, we want to understand the history of the planet, where it's been, and that might shed some light on where it's going. But you mustn't think of it just in terms of where humans fit into the picture, although that's one side of it—you know, how we came to be here. We also want to find out what life was like so many million years ago in order to put together a coherent story of what was going on then. There are several transitions for which you could put together a really neat, graded sequence of animals—for example, the origin of mammals. The origin of birds, too, is a story in which we're now beginning to fill in some of the gaps. [Take a closer look at the geologic table.]

But even if there are gaps, you can still make sense of what you've got. That's really the challenge, not to think, Oh, I must have a whole lot more fossils before I can say anything about this—although the more you've got the better it is—but to try and derive from the information that you have available a scientifically testable idea about how the animals relate to each other, how evolution has proceeded.

NOVA: Why should the average Joe on the street care?

Clack: Well, why should you care about history at all? I ask this question of art historians, or historians of any sort. Why music? It's a cultural activity. It's a mistake to think of science as something that's just about producing things, making things, technology. Science is a cultural activity, and it expands our understanding and our appreciation of our place on the planet and in the universe.

"There are people like me who would be the first in the time machine to go and see whether we were right or not."

Paleontology teaches you that human beings are very, very recent, and they perhaps need to be put in their place a little bit. Paleontology puts people in perspective. They've been around maybe half a million years, while the animals I'm talking about lived 370 million years ago. Life didn't begin on Earth until maybe four and a half billion years ago. It really makes you feel quite insignificant.

NOVA: What about the idea that we'll never know for sure, we'll never be positive about what happened, say, 370 million years ago?

Clack: That's the frustration. In my mind there are two sorts of paleontologists. There are those who really don't want to know the answer but are just content with the finding out of what they think went on. Then there are people like me who would be the first in the time machine to go and see whether we were right or not, or just to be there.

Interview conducted by Joel Olicker, Powderhouse Productions
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