Individuals outside the scientific mainstream often complain about people within it refusing to listen to them. As if listening was the same as accepting an idea. Real scientists make high demands for accepting the ideas of others. If they are not accepted they usually don’t live up to demands. (Are there other reasons they are personal.) Older scientists may have hard to incorporate new ideas. But this is because they are old and not because they are scientists.
Moreover the ideas presented are rarely anything new. Instead they have been presented over and over for decades or generations. The scientific community has long since written off such ideas. This applies to such as Lamarckism, spontaneous generation, free energy, arbitrary movements of the celestial bodies and the ground changing all at once. Testing them once more would be a gigantic waste of time and energy. In contrast there is an advantage if established ideas are examined. All scientific ideas have limits to their applicability. Through systematic examination one can figure out where they are.
There is today a great agreement on many scientific ideas. Examples of this are evolution, germs, climate change, absolute dating, geological timescale and plate tectonics. An overwhelming part of the scientists in the relevant areas agree they exist. In contrast there can be disagreements on smaller details. For example there are dividing opinions on whether Sinosauropteryx was reddish or yellowish brown. However, everyone agrees on this dinosaur having existed.
An important skill in scientists is avoiding getting stuck in premature conclusions. One example is the biologist George Shaw. He first thought the platypus skin he got was a hoax. So he checked out that the bill was not sawn to the rest. Then he did not manage to find any stitches. After that he accepted it likely was real. Although he confessed he could not help doubting.
Other times the error could not be revealed so quickly. In 1991 Iraqi soldiers put Kuwait’s oil wells on fire. Carl Sagan then warned that the resulting climate effects threatened harvests in Southeast Asia. But the black smoke from the fires did not spread beyond the Persian Gulf. Neither did it rise as high as needed for global climate influence. During the following year a certain cooling was observed. It is now considered to have been caused by Pinatubo’s eruption the same year. A few years later Carl admitted that he had been wrong.
The great scientific ideas are rarely abandoned nowadays. Everything easy to demonstrate has already been established. You think young earth creationism would be easy to prove? The scientific community tried that already in the 19th century. There are good reasons why such ideas were abandoned. In the same way geocentrism was abandoned more than 300 years ago. The belief that the world is flat was never particularly widespread.
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