Anna’s eyes swept across the seat rows. There was Jens and Cecilie, and Karen next to them. They all watched her with excitement, and Jens’s eyes were moist. Anna had asked him not to take photographs, that it would distract her and make her nervous, but she couldn’t stop herself from grinning when, for the fourth time in less than ten minutes, he sneaked out his camera and snapped a picture of her.
They all had dinner together the other day, Anna, Karen, Lily, Jens, and Cecilie, and it had gone very amicably. They had talked about Troels, and Karen and Cecilie had cried. That was all right. Anna understood they were shocked. After the meal, Karen had gone to the corner store and Jens, Anna, and Cecilie had cleared up while Lily put her dolls in a drawer in the living room. Cecilie started to speak, “Er, Anna,” she said, in a certain way. Anna stopped her.
“But we have to talk about it,” Cecilie protested, her voice thick and Jens standing behind her, nodding.
“We do, Anna, my love,” he said.
“And I want to,” Anna replied. “I promise you. But not now. I’m exhausted.”
Cecilie and Jens had accepted that.
At that moment, Karen returned with marshmallows, and they all played a game of Monopoly.
Her lecture would begin in five minutes. Anna was sweating. They had agreed that Karen would pick Lily up from nursery school between Anna’s lecture and examination. Afterward there would be cake and champagne for everyone in the department, and Lily was, of course, invited.
Dr. Tybjerg sat in the front row, tilting his pencil. He was dressed in the crumpled suit he had worn at Asger’s funeral, and he looked gravely at her. He pointed to his watch with his pencil and Anna nodded.
She lowered the lights and took a deep breath.
She opened with a short historical review and proceeded to the in-depth presentation of scientific ideals where she succinctly accounted for Popper, then Kuhn and Daston after which she extracted the basic rules for scientific integrity, the same that had been listed on the paper she had given to Professor Freeman. It took her about fifteen minutes. The next thirty minutes she spent reviewing the morphological evidence linked to the controversy. At fairly high speed, she went through the stratigraphic disjunction, the half-moon-shaped carpus, the furcula, the ascending process of the talus bone, the fingers of the bird hand, and the base of the pubic bone, whereupon she considered in detail first the disputes and then the theoretical science problems linked to the evolution of the feather. She held a small remote control in her hand, and while she explained, illustrations and keywords flashed up on the screen behind via a computer.
Anna briefly looked out into the darkness.
“After this review it should be clear that Clive Freeman, professor of paleoornithology at the Department of Bird Evolution, Paleobiology, and Systematics at the University of British Columbia, didn’t adhere to the most basic rules for sober science, and his archosaur theory is riddled with major internal contradictions and a striking absence of consistent methodology. The central question is . . .” Anna paused and tried to find Dr. Tybjerg’s eyes in the half-light, “why? Why is the opposition reluctant to accept that birds are descended from dinosaurs? I propose three possible reasons.”
Anna took a step toward her audience.
“Firstly, it’s human to see what you want to see.” Anna dearly wished she could look into her mother’s eyes, but Cecilie was lost in the darkness. “And in people’s minds, dinosaurs don’t have feathers as per previous definitions. The same conservatism applies to birds. Birds are unique and advanced, and every child can tell you they look nothing like dinosaurs. After all, they’re not big scary creatures with teeth!”
A short burst of laughter from the hall.
“The truth often lies elsewhere,” she went on, “in the ground, from where it must be excavated, dusted down, and interpreted as objectively as possible.” She let the conclusion linger for a moment, and then she went on:
“Secondly, there’s human obstinacy, here camouflaged as scientific prestige. The opposition and Professor Freeman, in particular, have obviously invested considerable resources in supporting a position, which at some stage has turned out to be scientifically untenable. Acknowledging you were mistaken is no defeat. Acknowledging you were wrong is to accept that you participate in a discipline called science, where the overall dynamic depends on scientists constantly proposing possible hypotheses and trying to support them with evidence and, more important, reject them when they can’t. Not to acknowledge this is, however, unscientific. Clive Freeman can maintain his position as much as he wants to, also for reasons we cannot fathom, but he doesn’t have the right to call it science.