Q12 - by dating the fossil of ...

[nflamel69]

Why is E the correct answer? I thought this would explain the discrepancy

[ohthatpatrick]

(E) doesn't explain the discrepancy because we're concerned about the end of a specific Ice Age and how soon beetles and pollen "came back" to a certain area.

(E) is concerned with the entire history of the planet. It just tells us that many beetles existed on this planet long before many warm-weather plants. That's too general of a fact to be helpful in explaining our specific predicament.

We want to know why the evidence seems to suggest that beetles returned to a glacial area sooner than pollen from plants did.

Both the beetles and the pollen already existed before the Ice Age glacier. We're focused on how soon they come back once the glacier leaves.

A) suggest that we didn't really see warm-weather beetles return right away, we saw cold-weather beetles. The warm-weather ones showed up later, with the warm-weather plant pollen, once the glacier had left.

B) suggests that once warm weather returns to an area, beetles will establish themselves sooner than plants (this fits both halves of our surprising data)

C) suggests something very similar to (B), that beetles can return to a barren postglacial area sooner than plants can.

D) suggests that our evidence is just misleading -- beetles and plants returned to the area at the same time, when the area warmed --- it's just that we don't have as much evidence for fossils of pollen in the area so researchers interpreted that to mean that pollen hadn't returned.

Hope this helps.

[matthew.mainen]

This isn't what the question focuses on but its something it very well could have, and I want to see if my argument analysis is on point -

The prompt says that by dating fossils of pollen AND beetles, an approximate date can be reached. At the same time, however, looking at either one of these individually yields vastly different results.

If this was more of an explicit resolve the paradox question, the paradox being that this technique is useful despite that the individual elements yield different results, would an appropriate answer center on the notion that only analyzing the conjunction of data from the two elements can allow for approximate dating?

[ohthatpatrick]

I think LSAT has adequately infiltrated your brain.

Yes, I think you've brilliantly written a very feasible Resolve/Explain type question + correct answer choice there.

Keep it up ... without going off the deep end.