Originally published 2 March 1992
Every scientist in the public eye is the frequent recipient of off-beat theories from out-of-the-mainstream amateur scientists.
These offerings range from the clever and thoughtful to the merely silly. They are almost always accompanied by protests against the close-mindedness of the scientific establishment. The same lament is heard from proponents of creationism, astrology, parapsychology, and other pseudosciences.
Even mainstream scientists sometimes claim their work is unfairly excluded from normal channels of communication. For example, I have recently heard scientists protest that evidence for cold fusion has been deliberately ignored.
Is there any truth to these complaints? Can a fresh or oddball idea receive a fair hearing in science? Or is science locked up in an iron-bound orthodoxy that admits no breach of faith?
I think there is truth to the charge that science is exclusionary. Further, I believe the conservatism of science is part of its strength.
Any system of ideas that makes a claim to truth must be conservative. If every idea has equal currency in the marketplace of ideas then truth becomes a matter of whim, politics, expediency, or the tyranny of the strong.
Evolving a system for truth
Science has evolved an elaborate system of social organization, communication, and peer review to ensure a high degree of conformity with the existing orthodoxy. This conservative approach to change has allowed for an orderly and exhaustive examination of fruitful ideas. It has allowed science a measure of insulation from fads, political upheavals, religious conflicts, and international strife.
An offbeat idea has a hard time of it in science, but not an impossible time. Revolutions in science are few and far between, but they do happen. Science is conservative, but of all truth systems that have helped people organize experience, science is the most progressive.
Alan Lightman, of MIT, and Owen Gingerich, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, discuss the conservatism of science in a [1992] issue of Science. They admit that scientists may be reluctant to face change for the purely psychological reason that the familiar is more comfortable than the unfamiliar. But they also recognize that a conservative system of truth provides an efficient framework for assimilating the multitude of facts that scientists observe.
Lightman and Gingerich are particularly interested in the fate of “anomalies,” observations that don’t fit the accepted orthodoxy. They offer examples from astronomy, geology, and biology of exceptions to a prevailing theory that were simply ignored.
For example, for centuries naturalists marveled at the exquisite adaptation of organisms to their environment. Camels carry their energy-storing fat in one place, on their backs, so that the rest of their bodies can efficiently cool off in the deserts where camels live. Giraffes have long necks to allow the animals to eat from the high trees in their environment. And so forth. This wonderful specificity of design was taken as compelling evidence for the work of an intelligent designer.
Explaining the anomalies
But what about birds, such as the ostrich, that have wings and do not fly? What of fish that live in lightless caves and are blind; why do they have eyes? These examples of apparently maladaptive design went unrecognized until Darwin proposed a new theory — natural selection — that explains both the camel and the ostrich, the giraffe and the blind fish.
Usually, say Lightman and Gingerich, anomalies are recognized only in retrospect. When a new theory gives a compelling explanation of previously unexplained facts, then it becomes “safe” to recognize anomalies for what they are. In the meantime, scientists often simply ignore what doesn’t fit.
“Exactly!,” say creationists, astrologers, parapsychologists, and assorted proponents of new theories of the universe. “Scientists ignore what doesn’t fit.” “Scientists work with blinders on their eyes.” “Science is an orthodoxy more rigid than the most conformist religion.”
Well, yes and no. It is true that science is conservative, as it must be if it is to provide a stable framework for understanding the world. But science is also radically open to marginal change and marginally open to radical change, as it must be if progress is to be made at all.
Progress towards truth is the central goal of science. I know of no scientist who does not admit that our present understanding of the world is tentative and incomplete. Even cherished ideas have been overthrown when the pressure for change became irresistible — witness recent revolutions in geology and cosmology that cast aside firmly-held beliefs in fixed continents and a universe without a beginning.
Pseudoscientists concentrate on anomalies and ignore the vast system of interlocking ideas that is orthodox science. Scientists focus on the orthodoxy and generally ignore the exceptions. Neither attitude towards observations is ideal, but the latter attitude is certainly the most fruitful.
For some people, the path towards scientific truth seems frustratingly strewn with obstacles. Like everyone else, scientists can be arrogant and close-minded. But science is the one truth system with its goal set firmly in the future rather than the past. Ironically, some measure of conservatism may be the best way to ensure that progress is made.
