Free Bunch of Amateurs by Jack Hitt Page B

science requires that you make the most likely interpretation: “The proportion of white to black on this bird can’t be the dorsal of the ivory-bill,” Robbins told his grad students that day. “We pulled our specimen,” he said, “and sure enough it didn’t fit and everybody is going, ‘Holy shit.’ ”
    Robbins kept this skepticism to himself but only for a day, at which point his old officemate Rick Prum called. Prum had since moved on to Yale (and he’s a neighbor of mine now), but he and Robbins maintained their old water-cooler chats by phone. And without so much asa howdy-do about Robbins’s overseas trip, “Rick was right off the bat with ‘What do you think about this ivory-billed proof?’ ”
    Turns out Prum had seen what Robbins saw—a pileated. Still, it seemed crazy to question it since there was so much other proof—the numerous sightings by professionals, the telltale bark scalings, and other evidence. Yet by the end of the conversation, Robbins and Prum felt compelled to make the scientific case, especially about the ambiguity of the video. They would prepare a paper and submit it to a peer-reviewed journal, in this case,
Public Library of Science Biology
.
    This was how we are all taught science is supposed to work. Data and conclusions get set down, then presented to other people in the field to review (or duplicate), and then those peer reviewers give the paper a thumbs-up or -down to publication. This idea of peer review is what makes science different from other forms of truth construction. Originally, the scientific method might have been an effort to keep the language of miracles and faith and Scriptural Authority out of observations and conclusions. But now we understand that it’s also meant to scrub secular flaws as well—logical holes, rhetorical leaps, insistence based on seniority or ego.
    As he and Robbins wrote the paper and finished it, I got a call from Prum. He was asking me for advice about how to get the word out about his paper. I immediately told him of my own failed involvement in the story so far and, frankly, was excited to hear that there was a controversy. Again, my magazine deadlines would not be fast enough, and it hardly mattered. Just before they were set to publish, Prum and Robbins received a call from an acquaintance inside the Cornell lab who had heard about their upcoming article. She warned them that Cornell had put audio machines throughout the woods and were still analyzing the numerous calls and knocks picked up on the tapes, but that the sound prints looked like the rock-solid evidence everyone wanted. And yet, in the paper, Cornell refused to say anything about the sounds other than that they were “suggestive but not proof.” Prum and Robbins were permitted to hear the audioand compare it to the soundtrack of the only film of ivory-bills made in 1935, shot by a legendary ornithologist named Arthur Allen, then also the director of the Cornell lab.
    The recordings convinced Prum and Robbins that while they might be right about the video specifically, perhaps they were being too impetuous about the general claim. So they did what scientists are supposed to do. Faced by better evidence, they held their article. Given the fame of the bird by now, Prum and Robbins’s retraction itself became national news.
    I remember Prum called me the day this happened. I was on my cell and stood in my driveway. Prum talks fast to begin with, but he was a flywheel that afternoon. The words zipped by. He said he was pulling his paper because that is what good scientific method mandated. But he was also saying that he still didn’t believe the video. It was an important distinction but one I felt helpless telling him would never survive the blunt instrument that is our national media. Indeed, within hours, the whole story became a parable about a failed attempt to bring down Cornell. But it was much weirder than that. For the time being, the bird existed in the most