There is something fascinating about human beings.

Give us a bone and we’ll reconstruct an animal that supposedly lived millions of years ago.

Give us a photograph and we’ll tell you where it was taken.

Give us a point of light in the sky and we’ll calculate its distance.

Give us a fossil and we’ll give it a name, a diet, a family tree and occasionally a personality.

Give us a few pieces of evidence and somehow we end up with an entire documentary.

Humanity is ambitious.

Very ambitious.

Sometimes impressively so.

Sometimes so ambitious that you have to stop and ask:

WHY?

Why this explanation?

Why this interpretation?

Why this reconstruction?

Why this timeline?

Why this photograph?

Why this model?

Why this assumption?

And most importantly:

What was actually observed?

Because there is a difference between an observation and a conclusion.

A fossil can be observed.

A reconstruction of the animal is an interpretation.

A photograph can be observed.

What somebody says the photograph proves is another question.

A biological change can be observed.

A complete story about the origin of every living thing is a much larger claim.

A mathematical model can describe observations.

A model is not a time machine.

And a computer-generated image can be spectacular.

It is still a computer-generated image.

That last one seems obvious.

Until somebody puts dramatic music behind it.

Suddenly the pixels have authority.

This book asks uncomfortable questions.

Not because every alternative explanation is automatically correct.

Not because every conspiracy theory is automatically true.

And not because every scientific claim is automatically false.

The point is much simpler:

WHY SHOULD ANY CLAIM RECEIVE A FREE PASS?

If something is true, examine it.

If something is false, examine it.

If something is uncertain, examine it.

If something is reconstructed, examine the reconstruction.

If something is presented as absolute certainty, examine the certainty.

The world does not become less interesting because we ask questions.

It becomes more interesting.