Science is both a body of knowledge and a process of discovery. Conservatism is necessary to protect the integrity of established knowledge; however, it can be deleterious to the search for new knowledge.
Here are some quotes and some links that may serve to illustrate, identify and document problems presented by entrenched ingrained conservatism with respect to the search for new knowledge:
"Due to their highly conjectural nature Datzeff's ideas have hardly ever been commented on." - Max Jammer, The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics (Wiley, New York, 1974, p. 431)
"It was a classic example of a discovery made ahead of its time. At first, Altman was ignored, then he was ridiculed, and finally, after failing to receive tenure at M.I.T., he moved to Purdue. With no recognition, he was quickly forgotten. The field almost dried up." (Michael Specter, "Annals of Science - Rethinking the Brain" The New Yorker, July 23 2001, p. 47)
"Sumner's discovery that one could crystallize an enzyme shocked biologists at the time... In fact the discovery was denied for a long time. And the second discovery - this was of great psychological rather than actual scientific importance - was the crystallization of tobacco mosaic virus by Wendell Stanley in 1935. Right away there was a lot of stupid discussion about 'Can you crystallize life?' and that sort of thing." - Jacques Monod, quoted in The Eighth Day of Creation (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1979, p. 212)
"In various fields of science an essential early step consists of abandoning a long held assumption that was considered 'obvious', any alternative being viewed as inconceivable and indeed absurd. ... It happened in atomic physics when the ... notion of universal determinacy had to be (most reluctantly) abandoned. It was not appreciated that in a fully deterministic Universe experimentation becomes meaningless, since the outcome is the result not of any recent set-up, but of endless chains of causal links starting in the most remote past." - Harmann Bondi, "Cosmology in the first half of the 20th century", Europhysics News November/December 2001, p. 209.
"But I decided to look again at that assumption. I have always been seen as one of those scientists with good intuition, but one who is maybe simple in his approach. Now people were saying my intuition had dried up. People in my own lab begged me to stop. I saw the pity in their eyes. They were saying, 'Fernando has lost it completely'." - (Fernando Nottebohm, in Michael Specter, Annals of Science - Rethinking the Brain", The New Yorker, July 23 2001, p. 44.)
"Science is not an edifice, it is a process. Scientists are human, and along with all their activities, ideas, and constructs, they are biological entities whose enormously complex existence can only be explained in terms of Darwinian evolution. Just as in biological evolution, deviations from the generally accepted ideas or the "standard models" of science cannot be too radical without risking almost certain death from a hostile environment. Conformity with accepted models may be one of the criteria for the survival of a scientific idea, but this is not the same as saying it is true." - Michael Hawkins, in "Hunting Down the Universe" (Addison-Wesley, Reading MA, 1997), p. 5.
"In a talk that opened the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium of 1966, ... Crick looked back to Hinshelwood's proposal as the first that could reasonably be discussed in modern terms. At the time [1950] its influence was negligible." - Horace Judson in The Eighth Day of Creation, p. 247.
"Many in the audience were hostile to the idea; others laughed. Skepticism is the prime currency of science, and challenging a basic belief about how the brain works brought much of that attitude to the surface." - (Michael Specter, "Annals of Science - Rethinking the Brain" The New Yorker, July 23 2001, p. 47)
"You can find yourself thinking about what you should do next to satisfy your critics, instead of what is the most interesting thing you could do as a scientist...That is the route right to death. When you make your decisions about your life based on what the scientific community is saying, you should quit. I think about that a lot these days. I mean, if you are doing your research for some other scientist, why even bother?" - Elizabeth Gould, quoted in Michael Specter's "Annals of Science - Rethinking the Brain", The New Yorker, July 23 2001, p. 49).
"...he said,'You must be so happy that all the things you said truned out to be true,' and of course I am. But, honestly, it used to be much more fun when nobody believed it. In science, by the time everybody tells you it's true you have to scratch your head and look for another business." - (Fernando Nottebohm, quoted in Michael Specter's "Annals of Science - Rethinking the Brain", The New Yorker, July 23 2001, p. 53).
You can download several papers discussing aspects of conservatism in science, such as "Have referees rejected some of the most-cited papers of all times?" at J. M. Campanario's website.
And some ad hominem attacks associated with disagreements in science:
- Biologist and evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould was described as "a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with" by British biologist John Maynard Smith, in The New York Review of Books.
- Physicist Paul Dirac's cosmological theory was violently attacked when it appeared in 1937 by astrophysicist and philosopher Herbert Dingle, who referred to it with the words "a combination of paralysis of the reason with intoxication of the fancy. . . a pseudoscience of invertebrate cosmythology", quoted in Physics World, August 2002, p. 30.
This page updated 20 August 2002.
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