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Author Topic:   When the Evidence Isn't Enough.
NosyNed
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Posts: 8996
From: Canada
Joined: 04-04-2003


Message 1 of 1 (76095)
12-31-2003 10:47 PM


I thought I'd start this thread and add a few things to it over the next few days. I'll pull some stuff out of Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything". This is by no means a primary source and I will not try to back up what he has to say but I think it will be useful for all of us to take a lesson from it.
The lesson is that, while science is a process for working from evidence, the all to human individuals that are supposed to be using that process sometimes fail at it. In fact, there are a number of pretty important cases of this. Mostly it is the tendency to stick to your own ideas in the face of evidence.
I know that some of our creationist friends will jump all over some of it but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be discussed.
My personal opinion is that there is less of this going on today than a century ago but I think that only the passage of decades will make that clear. Today, there is more of a ferment of nutty ideas afoot. As an example, look how "dark energy" is being given so much credance already. The really is a willingness to overturn major views of the nature of the universe around us. All it takes is, initially, hints of a problem and then some real evidence. Is any being missed? Knowing us humans I'm sure it is.
My first example will be the ice age: (page 420 and on)
"The great British geologist Arthur Hallam has suggested that if James Hutton, the father of geology, had visited Switzerland, he would have seen at once the significance of the carved valleys, the polished striations, the telltale strand lines where rocks had been dumped, and the other abundant clues that point to passing ice sheets. Unfortunately, Hutton was not a traveler. but even with nothing better at his disposal than secondhand accounts, Hutton rejected out of hand the idea that huge boulders had been carried three thousand feet up mountainsides by floods -- all the water in the world won't make a boulder float, he pointed out-- and became one of the first to argue for widespread glaciation. Unfortunately his idea escaped notice, and for half a century most naturalists continued to insist that the gouges in the rocks could be attributed to passing carts or even the scrape of hobnailed boots."
"Local peasant, uncontaminated by scientific orthodoxy, new better, however."
Agassiz picked up the idea (stole it?) later.
"Agassiz's theory found even less support in Britain, where most naturalists had never seen a glacier and often couldn't grasp the crushing forces that ice in bulk exerts."
"Willion Hopkins, a Cambridge professor and leading member of the Geological Society, endorsed this view (one of "ice mad" geologists), arguing that the notion that ice could transport boulders presented 'such obvious mechanical absurdities' as to make it unworthy of the society's attention."

Common sense isn't

  
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