Science is not just a quest for new facts; it also is a contest between rival models for interpreting nature

 --- Kermit Pattison, in Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind Hardcover (2020, p. 360), via Stephanie Hanes's review in the CS Monitor, December 2020.

In context

The Royal Society conference began to expose the battle lines around the oldest family skeleton. Those guided by genetics and primatology used living apes to make logical inferences about our common ancestors. ("I have no more direct access to the last common ancestor than anyone else in this room," McGrew explained to the audience. "So we have to model. We're forced to do so.") In contrast, those guided by fossils took a ground-up approach— bones revealed what really happened. Those two mind-sets placed faith in different lines of evidence, made different assumptions, and inevitably reached different conclusions. In the first approach, the relationships between humans and apes were irrefutable, but the form of their common ancestors remained conjectural. In the fossil-based method, bones provided rock-hard evidence of past forms, but their places in the family and relationships to humans could only be surmised. Both sides fought to make their work relevant to human origins—and Ardi [a 4.4-million-year-old female skeleton, short for Ardipithecus ramidus] became the flashpoint. 

In short, it was a classic clash of scientific worldviews. Science is not just a quest for new facts; it also is a contest between rival models for interpreting nature. In his 1962 milestone The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, historian Thomas Kuhn introduced the idea of the scientific paradigm—the set of theories and methods that …

Another excerpt the Stephanie Hanes points to, on p. 399-400

One of Ardi 's main lessons is that the simplistic narratives contrived to fill gaps in the fossil record often turn out to be wrong. Consensus can be a poor predictor of who turns out to be right in science. The most enduring work is that which describes things never seen before—human anatomy, fossils of extinct animals, ape behaviors, genetic code, ancient ecosystems, and more—without distorting that novelty to conform to the expectations of the era. But we humans hunger for more than just pure description—we search for meaning and emotionally satisfying endings, and that's when we run astray, because our reach for narrative often exceeds our grasp of facts. In the struggle to comprehend the unfamiliar, we invoke familiar analogies, but nature usually turns out to be more complex than what we imagine in our little brains. The only way to know for sure is to discover.

 

magic is ... any kind of personal supplication from a once-dominant religious system which got pushed off center stage by a new system

--- Christopher Fennell, quoted in "Searching for the Witches’ Tower," Archaeology Magazine, November/December 2019, p. 37 (web version, p. 4)

From the article

Another explanation for the Pendle witch trials may lie in forgotten folk practices that often go unmentioned in official historical documents. Seventeenth-century Britons were mostly illiterate, lived by the rhythm of the agricultural calendar, and fought illness without the assistance of modern medicine. For decades, many historians subscribed to the notion that as Christianity replaced indigenous pagan religious systems in the British Isles from the late Roman period onward, magical superstition died out. Archaeologists, however, do find objects, markings, inscriptions, and other evidence of rituals and practices that should, they say, be considered magical. “When people start talking about magical invocations, they rarely try to define magic,” says archaeologist Christopher Fennell of the University of Illinois. “One definition of magic is that it is any kind of personal supplication from a once-dominant religious system which got pushed off center stage by a new system.” Christianity, Fennell says, by way of example, marginalized paganism in England, but individual rituals surviving from those belief systems continued to be carried on in private spaces.

"The polar ends of a society's assets -- its wealth and its criminals -- are guarded with equal vehemence"

--- Avi Steinberg, p. 214 in Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (2010)

Excerpt, from a meditation about a ruined prison:

But ambiguity is born of long life. Archaeologists are occasionally unsure whether an unidentified solidly built ancient structure is a prison or whether it is a treasury building. The polar ends of a society's assets -- its wealth and its criminals -- are guarded with equal vehemence. Both are of supreme concern and utmost value. Ultimately they are indistinguishable.

This is particularly salient in the United States since, as Steinberg notes on p. 394, "America has 5 percent of the world'ds population, 25 percent of the world's prison population. A population the size of an American city left without the vote."

For more on prisons in America, see these two July 2010 Economist articles:

• Rough justice (leader)
• Too many laws, too many prisoners (reporting)

 In the second story, The Economist writes: "The system has three big flaws, say criminologists. First, it puts too many people away for too long. Second, it criminalises acts that need not be criminalised. Third, it is unpredictable. Many laws, especially federal ones, are so vaguely written that people cannot easily tell whether they have broken them."