On 11-11-15 10:49 PM, Joshua Cude wrote:
On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 7:53 PM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com
<mailto:jedrothw...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Suppose, in a parallel universe, scientists in 1990 did science
instead of treating theory as a form of religion.
If theory were treated as religion...
OK, OK, you don't like any of Jed's examples.
But here's one you may find harder to dismiss: For a couple of
generations dinosaurs were said to be very much like big lizards: Cold
blooded, slow moving, and most important, walking splay-legged.
No available evidence supported this point of view, and in fact it had
been believed, before the "dark ages" of dinosaur research set in, that
things had been different.
Museums around the world during this period set up their dino exhibits
with the legs splayed out to the sides; the ceratopsians looked like a
bunch of Marine recruits, frozen in the middle of perpetual push-ups.
The whole lot looked ridiculous, if you thought about it, but nobody did
-- paleontological thinking outside the box was strongly discouraged,
even stamped out, for at least a couple generations.
The darkness finally lifted two or three decades back. Bakker's book,
The Dinosaur Heresies, may have played a role in finally turning the
lights on; it came out around the time that paleontologists finally
started thinking again, rather than just "following the rules". If you
look at illustrations showing "reconstructions" of dinosaurs in museums,
you'll still see that half or more show them in the old "push-up" poses,
because there were so many drawn that way. (In some museums there may
even be an explanation with the pictures, pointing out that they're
totally wrong. IIRC the Yale-Peabody in New Haven has such explanations
posted, for example.)
The thing that's spooky about this is that the view of dinosaurs we (at
least us oldsters) grew up with was wrong-headed in a number of ways,
blatantly wrong-headed, and yet *nobody* within the field challenged it,
for decades. It was as though all of the world's paleontologists had
been infected with some virus that blinded them when it came to certain
things, like dinosaurs -- and yet, they couldn't see it.
So, the question we're left with is ... how do you know if the field
you're working in is infected with a similar virus?
