Journal of Paleontology, 92(5), 2018, p. 946–947 Copyright © 2018, The Paleontological Society 0022-3360/15/0088-0906 doi: 10.1017/jpa.2018.52
Awards and Citations
Response by David Jablonski for the presentation of the 2017 Paleontological Society Medal
tend them, is literally incalculable. Individually and as a society,
we should do everything we can to support them, and also to find new ways for their personnel to archive and share their huge well of knowledge. I’ve been remarkably lucky in my students, postdocs, and
David Jablonski
I’m very grateful for this honor. And I’m grateful to Michael Foote for his very kind remarks. As is traditional, I want to say some serious thank-yous, and then a few words about our field and where it’s going. It may seem odd for an old guy to still be thanking his
parents, but it’s more clear than ever that a lot of what I do and how I do it comes from them. Both my parents were writers, and although there are few people more pragmatic than a free-lance writer trying to raise three kids in New York City, the most basic rule was to follow your passion, and of course that’s what I’ve managed to do ever since. In light of the political climate, it may be worth saying that I also benefited from the social programs of my day. The Urban Corps put low-income kids into work-study jobs, and allowed me to work at the American Museum of Natural History, for an actual salary, which was literally a dream come true. And I’m eternally grateful to Norman Newell, Roger Batten, and Niles Eldredge, and their grad students for being so welcoming to what must have seemed like a hairy creature from another planet. That early job set a theme to my career that I should men-
tion. Museum curators and other staff have been incredibly welcoming to me wherever I’ve gone, not just giving me access to their collections, but also their often-underappreciated expertise on the taxonomy, phylogeny, ecology, and distribu- tions of the organisms in their care. I’mnot saying anything new here, but the value of museum collections, and the people who
collaborators. The cliché that I’ve learned at least as much from them as they have from me, truly applies here. I can’t list them, but several are in this room and I hope I’ll get a chance to thank them again in a few minutes. One person who isn’t in this room that I must mention is Jim Valentine. I’ve already said in print how Jim’s Evolutionary Paleoecology book changed my life when I read it in college, and he’s followed through on that promise ever since, as a friend and collaborator. It’s been an immensely rewarding and enjoyable experience to work with him over these many years: he challenges and inspires me, and in the kindest way—the perfect combination for a colleague, especially when he’s that much smarter than you are. Speaking of colleagues smarter than I am, it’s been a privilege to be a part of the program at Chicago, embedded not only in a great geol- ogy department with a phenomenal set of paleontologists, but also in the Committee on Evolutionary Biology, an extra- ordinary consortium of faculty and grad students from multiple institutions. It’s hard to imagine a richer and more interactive environment. Merging my weekly lab meetings with those of biologist Trevor Price is just one expression of that environ- ment, but a fantastically valuable and fun one that deserves a special mention. There’s one more person I have to mention and of course
that’s Susan Kidwell. As everyone who knows us knows (as Lorde would say), she’s the love of my life, and a truly amazing partner in science and in student training. She’s a long-suffering sounding board and an unbelievably skillful and critical reader. What I’ve said so far has been riddled with superlatives, but words can’t express how grateful I am to her for all that and more, not least for her willingness to let me dismantle the entire front half of our house every May for the past 28 years. And I can only hint at the joy of being able to dance with her, literally and figuratively, through that time. Shifting gears, paleontology has changed a lot since I
started, but we still walk around in a miasma of received wis- dom. Some of this is quite accurate and true, but some of it is the raft of unexamined assumptions that we all carry—including ideas imported, or perhaps I should say imposed upon us, from other fields. There are many ways to help grow scientific knowledge, but we sell ourselves short when we don’t examine assumptions or expectations from other fields that don’t have as direct a window into the past as we do. That said, our data are
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