Hell, I’d ridicule practicing sepsis in delivery. What Semmelweis practiced was asepsis.
I thought it was just an objection to interpreting quantum mechanics as involving genuine randomness.
Some of the cases people are mentioning don’t involve ridicule. Skepticism and disbelief are not the same as ridicule.
And skepticism often turns to cynicism. It’s a fine line that many are not careful about crossing.
I’ve noticed that this is what most refusal to accept new discoveries hinges on. People demand an explanation, and are reluctant to accept things that otherwise have very strong evidence. Gone is the time when people were comfortable knowing things to be true without knowing why. If a convincing mechanism is not postulated, the whole hypothesis is very likely to either be met with derision, or politely ignored. On some level this makes sense, but ultimately it is poor reasoning.
The Time Cube.
One day you’ll see… YOU’LL ALL SEE…
This is an interesting one. Long after general germ theory was accepted (which has its own legacy of resistance), there was still resistance to acknowledging germs as cause of specific conditions.
I remember reading an article years ago about the idea of bacteria causing ulcers, and how controversial the concept was. Everyone knew that ulcers were caused by excess acid in the stomach, right? That the cause of that excess acid was often stress or poor eating, excess drinking, and the like, right? Still, the article outlined the experiments and trials that had been done, and it was obvious to me as an educated layperson that this was a no-brainer. Yet it was still not accepted by the majority of the medical community at the time. This would have been … 15 years or so ago.
Looking at Wikipedia, bacteria were found in conjunction with peptic ulcers as early as 1915. Conventional wisdom, however, was that bacteria could not survive the acidic gastric environment, so despite being rediscovered over and over again, and even being identified H. pylori in 1939, others claimed not to be able to reproduce results. Articles by researchers on H. pylori were repeatedly refused by medical journals over the years, funding was denied, etc. etc.
Two Australian doctors, Robin Warren and Barry Marshall, began treating patients with antibiotics in '81 (they were not the first, btw). They went through the cycle of having papers denied in for publications and conferences, and receiving poor receptions when they were accepted. But they kept plugging away, even intentionally consuming the bacteria, developing ulcers, and curing themselves with antibiotics. (Again, they weren’t the first to do this.) Gradually medical orgs and boards fell in line. Interestingly, in 1994 the patents for acid-reducing drugs started to expire, removing financial incentive to keep promoting them instead of antibiotics for ulcer treatment. That same year the NIH acknowledged H. Pylori as the cause of ulcers, and the WHO even identified it as a carcinogen. In 2005 Warren and Marshall won the Nobel Prize.
Here’s the Wikipedia link: Timeline of peptic ulcer disease and Helicobacter pylori - Wikipedia
People certainly accept that phenomena are real without having explanations for them. What you call “very strong evidence”, others might judge to be weak or non-existent evidence. Claims of phenomena that outright contradict our best scientific understanding require the strongest evidence. Anectdotes posted on the internet are not evidence. When some guy claims that, while working on his cure for cancer, he accidentally discovered how to run use water as a fuel, yeah, most scientists are going to be extremely skeptical.
It’s common to hear claims from alternative medicine proponents that the Helicobacter-gastric ulcer link was derided/suppressed by mainstream medicine for many years. This is a myth. Once solid evidence was presented there was marked interest in following up on the initial paper, and antibacterial therapy to prevent ulcers (and treat a type of gastric lymphoma) was widespread in a relatively short time. This article helps explode the myth about the discovery and acceptance of the Helicobacter theory.
You typically have to go a long ways back to find good examples of “ridiculed scientific breakthroughs” that have been shown to be true. It’s far, far more common to find examples of well-established science that still get ridiculed and denied by quacks and cranks far outside the medical mainstream. Examples include AIDS denialism, rejection of the value of vaccines, denial of the germ theory of disease (you’ll find many alties who claim that Pasteur was wrong), creationists and so on.
The idea that scientists are prone to unreasonable prejudice against new ideas is fostered mainly by people frustrated that their pet theories, unsupported by good evidence and reliable research, don’t get the respect they think is deserved. Der Trihs’ line about Bozo the Clown bears repeating - for every historic case of a breakthrough that was slow to be accepted, you’ll find thousands of examples of anecdotes, case reports and “breakthrough” theories that never made it because they were flawed and based on bias and falsehoods.
The bottom line is that science, imperfect as it can be, works to weed out flawed ideas and incorporate good ones. Those who embrace anecdote, supersitition and conspiracy theories desperately cling to them despite all evidence to the contrary.
Um, no. It is good reasoning for the same reason that the inhabitants of Plato’s cave would not make good investigators. “Evidence” of a phenomena without a persuasive and, more important, falsifiable hypothesis of what causes the phenomena to occur cannot be judged as strong or weak; it is merely a pool of random data awaiting an explanation. For instance, if your data is that only oranges grow on trees it doesn’t mean that you have a coherent theory, only that you’ve been trapped inside an orange grove all of your life, but without any theory of why you’ve only seen oranges on trees, or what the function of an orange is, you’d never know to question your conclusion.
In any case, evolution and natural selection is a counterargument to this claim; evolution was widely accepted even before Darwin’s theories came into public consciousness, and natural selection received general acceptance and popular acclaim, as judged by the consistently sold out printings of every edition of On the Origin of Species, even lacking the specific mechanism of transmissibility of inherited characteristics. This is in no small part due to Darwin’s compilation of a massive body of thorough evidence for variation of inherited characteristics. It just took the inclusion of genetics and a larger view of evolutionary action to craft the holistic modern evolutionary synthesis, which itself is subject to challenge and debate even as the overall theory of evolution is universally accepted among educated people.
Stranger
That article was written in a very non-impartial style, and does not address Claire Beauchamp claim that Warren and Marshall were treading over work that had been revisited repeatedly for 65 years.
Of course it can. Let me give a more concrete example, one that I think is even rather profound. The example being the treatment that has a far greater potential for extending life, and youth, than any other regiment discovered, including of course exercise and good diet. I am referring to calorie restriction. There is strong evidence for it (and yes, it being demonstrated in almost every animal except human, on whom it is unfeasible to test, is strong evidence), yet it can be said its conclusions largely go ignored. Anorexia is villified. It seems in British tabloids anyone who is skinny is accused of “killing themselves.” It is a total disconnect with reality, and it is mostly owed to a lack of a known mechanism behind calorie restriction’s effects.
Now. Things with irrefutable evidence obviously are accepted without too much fuss. But, there is a line between strong and irrefutable that people often love to deny.
Stranger, I strongly respect your posts and you are trying to make a good point. But while a postulated mechanism can give credence to a claim that is otherwise unfalsifiable (eg, that trees only produce oranges), it is not necessary to judge evidence to be valid.
Another not-really-controversial thing that gets ignored because it has no accepted mechanism is hormesis–the experimentally-supported principle that low doses of stressors actually stimulate organisms rather than harm them. It has wide-ranging implications for everything from pollution limits to toy safety to debates on nuclear energy, yet for the most part it is not included in them.
The life-extending effects of caloric restriction are widely accepted among scientists, so I don’t see how this supports your assertions. It would, in fact, seem to be a counterexample to your claims.
Well … no, it’s not. The alternative medicine community may promote this point, but that doesn’t mean it’s mythical. Take a look at the very well-referenced timeline I linked to. I am the first person to admit (and explain to others) that you can’t count Wikipedia as an entirely reliable source, but this particular article is drawn from reliable sources. Another note is that, contrary to every other sizable W article I’ve seen, there is ZERO discussion by people disputing the content and reverting each other’s changes.
I would not have used the word “suppressed” – that implies all sorts of conspiratorial intent – but it WAS derided. Here’s an obit of Al Freedberg, another scientist whose work pointed to H. pylori, and who was considered a crank on this topic, despite the rest of his work being well-regarded: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/health/24freedberg.html
First of all, the benefits to longevity are both pretty widely accepted among the medical and biology community, and there are several potential mechanisms that explain or contribute to it, including a reduction in the creation of free radicals that occurs during a highly energetic respiratory cycle and attendant oxidative stress, and the reduction of error-prone replication of mitochondrial DNA that may cause dysfunction the energy production cycle). This is hardly a case of no plausible mechanism existing to explain the phenomenon, though there are several competing mechanisms which may contribute to the overall phenomenon.
Second, you are conflating potentially healthy, nutritionally balanced calorie restriction with anorexia nervosa, a mental illness that causes the sufferer to have a distorted body image and consume a diet that is both deficient in critical proteins and micronutrients and substantially less than the minimum caloric requirements for lean mass retention. Studies have not definitively shown that the extreme caloric restriction (<70% of recommended caloric intake) offers significantly greater health and longevity advantages over moderate caloric restriction (~80%), and it is possible that the reduction of high caloric density and high glycemic index foods–such as saturated fats and starches–from a calorie restricted diet may be more advantageous than the restriction of calories of all kinds in and of themselves. From the blind data it may seem that less is good, so even less is even better, but in fact it may be some small aspect of a caloric restriction diet that gives the overall advantage.
Stranger
I’m not certain where you get the idea that hormesis is strongly experimentally supported. In fact, in peer reviewed double blind studies of homeopathic treatments versus placebos there is no statistically significant difference in effect, never mind that the explanations from homeopathic ‘physicians’ achieve the level of pseudoscientific bullshit matched only by Hollywood screenwriters of summer popcorn blockbusters.
In fact, this points to the basic problem with ‘evidence’ without hypothesis; without understanding the influences and parameters of the phenomena it is impossible to run any true neutral control experiment with confidence or test the evidence against external variables, and therefore draw any definitive conclusions. Taking any kind of core principles away from such data results in an untestable premise, and thus, an argumentum ad authoritatum, i.e. it is true because I say the data says so. This is like reading the last page of a detective novel to ‘deduce’ who the criminal is without building a logical and testable case.
This is not to say that such blind experimentation doesn’t have its place in science, and in fact, many major revelations have begun, often serendipitously, from experiments that tried to prove the contrary or another principle entirely. The Michelson-Morley experiments was intended to measure the movement of the Earth against the background of the luminiferous aether, and instead, after a decade of much consternation, demonstrated that there was no fixed plenum that served as a medium for the transmission of light and circumstantially gave credence to Einstein’s theory of special relativity that there are no privileged coordinate frames. This is the process that presages, and sometimes redirects, the well-known iterative scientific method of hypothesis and falsifying experiment, but by itself doesn’t justify basic conclusions.
Stranger
Beginning in the 1920s or so, the geologist Harlan Bretz’ came to the inescapable conclusion that the Scablands of Washington (including Palouse Falls, Dry Falls, and much of souteastern Washington) had to have been caused by catastrophic flooding. Catastrophic as in a wall of water 300 feet high or more blasting across the landscape, scouring the terrain as it went, creating coulees and radically changing the terrain. His idea flew directly in the face of conventional wisdom, which stated that all geologic change was the result of millenia of gradual erosion and other long-term factors. Bretz had the burden of proof, of course, and while his extensive investigations and mapping clearly pointed to flooding as the cause, he could not explain where floods of that magnitude may have originated.
Much of the resistance was due to geology being historically treated as one of the lesser sciences; it was only through adherence to the concept of change through millions of years that it gained any credibility. So the notion of catastrophic change smacked of creationism and was anathema to current thinking.
Unknown (initially) to Bretz, another geologist, J.T. Pardee, was uncovering evidence of a gigantic flood issuing forth from glacial Lake Missoula at the end of the last ice age about 10,000 years ago. It has since been shown that there were likely several of these catastrophic floods, but Bretz’s ideas did not gain traction until 30 years after he had completed his investigations and published his reports to general ridicule.
Full vindication finally came in 1979 when Bretz was awarded the Penrose Medal, geology’s highest award. He was 96 years old at that point, but it was a matter of great satisfaction to him.
It should be noted that, while most new scientific ideas come under heavy attack (though not necessarily “ridicule”) initially, this is not a bad thing. Yes, established scientists attacked relativity, and particle-wave duality, and the heliocentric model of the Solar System, but they were right to do so. The reason that relativity and the rest are accepted so strongly nowadays is precisely because they were attacked so heavily, and stood up to the attacks. If you’ve got some new idea about how you can cure cancer or solve the world’s energy problems, you should gladly welcome established scientists attacking your idea, because that’s your opportunity to prove your point.
I was doing my PhD when Luis Alverez came out with his theory as to the extiction of the dinosaurs. It was certainly ridiculed by the professors in my faculty. “The dinosaurs died out because they got bonked on the head by meteorites” is one comment I recall.
Touche!
Sure … and hindsight is 20/20 and all that … to a point. In some of these cases, though, the amount of time in which new evidence was ignored and/or laughed at is striking. In the case of H. pylori, nearly 90 years passed between discovery (of some bacteria, not yet identified) and general acceptance. Meanwhile, billions of dollars were spent on antacids and chasing the wrong solutions and people still suffered and even died.