Eminent evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin has been tapped to lead the National Academy of Sciences, where he will use his extensive expertise in catastrophic Devonian die-offs to help federal scientists successfully transition into a layer of sedimentary rock.
The National Academy of Sciences announced Tuesday that it has appointed Dr. Neil Shubin—best known for discovering the 375-million-year-old transitional fossil Tiktaalik—to lead the organization through what experts are characterizing as a rapid, localized extinction event for federal funding. Shubin’s extensive background in analyzing how thriving, diverse ecosystems are abruptly compressed into lifeless shale by hostile environmental shifts reportedly made him the unanimous choice to guide the scientific community over the next four years.
Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the transition committee detailed their findings, concluding that morphological adaptation alone would not be sufficient to survive the incoming political climate. Instead, the Academy will adopt a taphonomic strategy, allowing scientists to harden their remaining data into a calcified shell that might be discovered by a more advanced civilization millions of years from now.
Our analysis indicates that the most viable survival mechanism for a climate modeler in this deeply partisan era is to simply sink to the bottom of a shallow lake bed, allow the crushing pressure of congressional oversight to replace their organic tissues with minerals, and hope to be excavated during a more enlightened geologic epoch.
However, other experts in the field caution that the transition to a purely fossilized state may face significant methodological hurdles. Dr. Hopi Hoekstra, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University who was not involved in the NAS selection process, noted that replication of these survival rates remains difficult. "We must be careful not to over-extrapolate the benefits of becoming a trace fossil," Hoekstra cautioned. "While Shubin’s models show that burying the Department of Energy’s climate division under heavy sedimentary rock will preserve their basic morphological outlines for future study, the sample size of actively publishing researchers will still drop to near zero. We need more field experiments to see if any federal biologists can successfully adapt to breathing atmospheric ash."
Still, looking at the preliminary data modeling the complete decimation of the American scientific apparatus, it is difficult not to be struck by the sublime, terrifying beauty of the process. To watch a vibrant, humming ecosystem of laboratories, peer-review networks, and post-doctoral fellowships be systematically buried by a suffocating layer of partisan sediment is to witness the awe-inspiring, unfeeling power of deep time at work. One can only marvel at the spectacular fossil record we are about to leave behind.