Comment by 3RTB297
13 hours ago
I'm not the person you asked this of, but I've worked in museums and research settings and can lob a response your way.
Ultimately, it's that scientists are humans, too. Despite some of them really making their research data-forward, things like tenure, career, funding, and even who would publish your work now and in the future all create normal human environments that reward small, incremental changes to a body of knowledge that don't upset the apple cart, not discoveries that suggest huge changes. In fact, large changes and discoveries can be resisted and denied further research in favor of the status quo.
This is not a new phenomenon by any means:
Both warm-blooded dinosaurs and the Chicxulub impact were both theories dismissed as fringe for decades before overwhelming evidence led to them being accepted as likely. In no small way thanks to Jurassic Park.
Recall that eugenics and phrenology both used to be widely accepted scientific "fact."
100 fairly prominent scientists signed a letter stating emphatically that Einstein's Theory of Relatively was categorically wrong and should be retracted.
Plate tectonics was seen as fanciful crackpot musings for decades. The author of the original theory died 30 years before plate tectonics was even considered possible.
Germ theory was dismissed for most of Louis Pasteur's lifetime, despite being able to literally show people yeast in a microscope.
Helicentrism has a storied past.
Quantum theory was also denied heavily at first. Now it saves photos to our hard drives.
And how many times has the earliest dates of hominids and tool use and human thresholds of development been pushed back by tens of thousands of years?
This is not an exhaustive list, by any means.
So we have ancient examples and modern ones - and everything in between. So the level of education or scientific progress or equipment are not the cause. Humans are. Humans do this all the time. So until overwhelming evidence surfaces, which can take decades or longer, claims like this shouldn't be dismissed out of hand until proven solidly in error. A theory is a theory, so let it be a theory.
> Both warm-blooded dinosaurs and the Chicxulub impact were both theories dismissed as fringe for decades before overwhelming evidence led to them being accepted as likely. In no small way thanks to Jurassic Park.
The main rejection of the impact hypothesis was that the dinosaurs had already died off by the time of the impact, the idea that the iridium in the layer came from an impact was reasonably well received. In 1984 a survey found 62% of paleontologists accepted the impact occurred, but only 24% believed it caused the extinction. The Alvarez duo, who proposed the impact hypothesis, were proposing to redefine where the cretaceous ended based on a new dating method (at the time the end of the cretaceous was believed to be a layer of coal a few meters off from the now accepted boundary), and fossil evidence at the time seemed to show gradual decline. A big part of the acceptance of the theory was the development of new analysis methods that showed the evidence for a gradual extinction prior to the impact to be illusory. By the time the impact crater was identified, it was already the dominant theory. Actually in the early 90s major journals were accused of being unfairly biased in favor of the impact hypothesis, with many more papers published in favor than against.
Completely coincidentally, the theory that the chixulub structure was an impact crater was initially rejected and it wasn't until 1990 that cores sampled from the site proved it was.
Dinosaurs being warm blooded was well accepted by the late 70s.
>So until overwhelming evidence surfaces, which can take decades or longer, claims like this shouldn't be dismissed out of hand until proven solidly in error. A theory is a theory, so let it be a theory.
I like how the word “overwhelming” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
Imagine if those 100 scientists had gotten their way and Einstein had retracted his Relativity paper. It would have taken decades of observations of gravitational lensing before someone else proposed gravity affects light and why, and then said "huh.... yeah, I guess this other guy had a similar theory a while back."
> I've worked in museums and research settings
You've worked in those settings, and you think archaeologists reject tool use older than 1 mya?
Also, you don't understand that science is a process, based on evidence, and revision is an essential part of that process? Archaeology especially advances regularly, because evidence can be relatively very rare. If they weren't revising it, it would mean the whole research enterprise - to expand knowledge - was failing.
> how many times has the earliest dates of hominids and tool use and human thresholds of development been pushed back by tens of thousands of years?
I don't know, how many times? Tool use is universally believed, in the field, to have begun at least 2.58 million years ago, and with strong evidence for 3.3 mya. Tens of thousands of years isn't in the debate. See this subthread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46782072
>Also, you don't understand that science is a process, based on evidence, and revision is an essential part of that process?
I do, and the process is exactly the point. That human emotions affect the process far more often than we like to admit. Not always, but it's not completely removed from the process by any means.
In each of those cases, it's that no one says, "Oh, new theory, new evidence. Cool, let's test the hell out of it!"
People in positions of relative power sometimes say, "New theory? Nope. Not even going to look at it. No, in fact, you're crazy and you're wrong and get outta here!"
In each of those examples, to some degree the eventual more accurate theory met emotional resistance by people adhering to the status quo, not resistance because of questionable data or poor research methods or non-reproducibility.
>Both warm-blooded dinosaurs and the Chicxulub impact were both theories dismissed as fringe for decades before overwhelming evidence led to them being accepted as likely. In no small way thanks to Jurassic Park.
I mean that's how science works. Things can be dismissed until they're proven true. If there's a valid path to finding out it's true then you can try to get funding, it just takes work and convincing people as you're competing for sparse resources. And getting egg on your face is also part of the process.
>dismissed as fringe
>I mean that's how science works.
So you're saying it's a good thing to dismiss potential new discoveries because of feels? Not investigate further, not look for additional data to refute the theory or not. Just dismiss as crackpot BS? IIRC, that's not how science works.