It was not meant to denigrate any human effort to know. The point that I was trying to make was that there are other, equally valid sources of knowledge besides highly quantifiable studies on subjects matter such as physics, and paleontology is one of them.
Science is fundamentally a method of inquiry that is much broader in scope.
I can show you many articles published in the social sciences that are based on sound statistical inferential methodology. These are all rightfully called science in the sense that they share the same method of inquiry, involving the generation and testing of falsifiable hypotheses, replication, and theory-revision. And much as you would like to believe, the other disciplines are not trying to emulate physics in other to gain some illusory status. What they are trying to do is to borrow strategies, techniques, data-modeling approaches from different disciplines which are appropriate for investigating the subject matter.