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"None of her taxonomy or quantitative studies can be reproduced,"
said Huber; "the gradual side of the debate doesn't hold water
because of her inconsistencies."
3
2
Keller responded in a letter to Sci-
ence in which she cited 13 errors or misstatements in Kerr's article.
3
3
For one: "It was I who could not confirm Brian Huber's . . . study
rather than the reverse. . . . Huber's comments are therefore not
likely to have been objective."
3
4
Kerr responded: "By combining the
efforts of all four blind testers, Smit intensified the search until all of
Keller's gradually disappearing species were found to persist up to
but not beyond the impact."
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5
The results of the El Kef blind test were finally published in
199 7.
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6
Not surprisingly, Keller and Smit continued to disagree.
Thus the notion that a blind test can resolve disputes of this kind
seems not to be borne out in practice. Even when fossils are as abun-
dant as the forams, uncertainty remains.
The key point in the dispute between Keller and Huber was the
identification in the core from Ocean Drilling Program (ODP] Site
738 of specimens of a particular foram species,
Parvularugoglobige-
rina eugubina.
Though Keller said that
P. eugubina
was common in
the core from ODP Site 738,
3
7
Huber could not find it.
38
'
3
9
To re-
solve the dispute, Huber asked Keller for permission to visit her
laboratory so that she could point out
P. eugubina
to him in her sam-
ples. She agreed and Huber set off from his home base in Washing-
ton, D.C., to Keller's lab at Princeton, where he was joined by pale-
ontologist Chengjie Liu of Rutgers. Even under Keller's supervision,
however, they could not find
P. eugubina
in Keller's slides, and,
according to Huber, she refused to show them the most critical sam-
ples.
4
0
Thus with regard to
P. eugubina,
it was Huber who could not
confirm Keller's taxonomy, not the other way round, as she had
claimed in her response to Kerr.
After Huber returned from "the worst scientific experience of
his life," he learned that Keller and Norman MacLeod, who was also
present at the Princeton meeting, had resorted to an unusual course
of action.
4
1
Taking their disagreement with Huber outside the pages
of journals, they went to the top, writing to none other than the
secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Robert McCormick Adams,
to complain of Huber's behavior and to ask for the loan of certain
specimens, requesting that the loan be handled by some other
Smithsonian paleontologist than Huber.
4
2
Adams replied that he
preferred to see such differences resolved "through the normal
channels of scholarly discourse."
4
3
MacLeod and Keller went on to co-edit
Cretaceous-Tertiary
Mass Extinctions: Biotic and Environmental Changes,
which contains
