You take what you see, you build theories, you test them, etc. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.
I've noticed that Old People (yes, I'm including you in that) tend to be pretty cynical about paleontology especially, because of how much has change in the last half-century. T-Rexes don't drag their tail anymore, the brontosaurus was just a mismatched skull, apparently some of them had feathers etc.
You realize that the field was more or less revolutionized by advanced technology, same as everything else, right?
Are you also cynical about microchip fabrication, simply because 50 years ago a computer was the size of a Winnebago? All the benefits from technology and computers- advanced scanning, advanced data processing, advanced fabrication, advanced global communications- have boosted the study of dinosaur bones, just like everything else.
Sorry, but it just touches a nerve when people go "Scientists are so dumb, ugh, in 50 years they'll be saying everything they think now is silly." Dude, a human calculated the circumference of the entire WORLD back before Jesus had played his first wedding. We learn things, and we build on them.
Well, it doesn't sound like we've learned much. The development of technology is not the same as static facts, like actual dinosaurs. Your own point shoots down so many liberal assertions. How do we know that we will not find out in the future that a week old fetus exhibits quantum manifestations of human life? How do we know that the advance of technology will not discover a natural pattern to explain climate change or a feedback mechanism that would absorb any possible accidental man-made effects? Or diagnostic procedures that will discover transgendered people are just crazy?
The left goes around brandishing incomplete science, saying "We've found the beginnings of line! There is absolutely no direction this could go but straight! We demand that public policy change to immediately reflect the presumption that the line WILL continue to the extent we claim." Or "We find no evidence of X, therefore it cannot possibly exist, so no more looking for it." And the "Straight-line deniers" are condemned with such vituperation and zeal that would make an inquisitor say "Whoa, can we at least discuss this rationally before leaping to action?"
The popular portrayal of scientists as skeptical truth seekers bears almost no resemblance to the scientific proponents in the public arena, who present themselves as 'truth-havers' and pat themselves on the back, not for questioning, but for accepting, the general consensus. Which is, essentially, the whole point of my original post. The left claims Science as their ground and uses it as a label for their positions, when they are no more scientific than anyone else. They ignore the possibility of developments or finding things they don't want to find. The proof of the life of a human fetus is of no more interest to seek for them, than the missing link is for a creationist. The difference being, if you leave the one alone, it will turn into a human life, but poking and prodding at the notion of evolution has done nothing to affect the practical world. People managed to live and reproduce and build great civilizations and invent science, without having the faintest idea they might have come from a monkey. They figured out the really important stuff, as you point out, without even access to electricity. Arguably, knowing about evolution could be said to have hurt science, since the stupid and lazy and moondog-esque scientists now have a convenient, if wildly inaccurate, label to slap on observations of changing traits in a population.
The left are every bit as unscientific as anyone else, as prone to dogmatism and zealotry and outright mendacity in the evasion of known facts. I want them to stop pretending that they are somehow more enlightened, because they brandish "science" as an argument-winning incantation.