Very good article by Richard Conniff. It points out how rigid and resistant to change the scientific community can be. As a general rule, I follow the advice of the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who said it is alright to disagree with the experts when they are strongly divided, but it isn't wise to do so when the great majority agree on an issue. In this case, however, the great majority was wrong, and we don't have to look far to find other examples.
In 1980 when Luis and Walter Alvarez proposed that the extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous was caused by the catastrophic impact of a large meteorite their hypothesis was met with a firestorm of ridicule from geologists. This reaction came, in large part, because of a conflict between religion and the fledgling science of geology in the 1800s. The religious establishment saw the earth as having been shaped by cataclysms induced by God's wrath, while the geologists countered with the principle of uniformitarianism which emphasized the influence of slow natural processes of the kind we see acting around us every day. As a counterweight to religion and superstition, uniformitarianism became so entrenched in the basic wisdom of geology, that claims of catastrophic events were immediately rejected. This was something I heard many times as a geology student. When the Alvarezes announced their meteorite theory, with all its attendant media attention, geologists rushed forward, hotly proclaiming that the story was like something from the pulp magazines at the check out counter. It took a number of years before the accumulated evidence was persuasive enough to win over the geological establishment, which is still not entirely convinced. Extremely rare events, especially highly destructive ones, were just not a part of the normal criteria for evaluating the world, even among a group that studied eons of earth history. The resistance to Wegner's continental drift theory wasn't based only on the lack of a reasonable explanation of how continents might move across the earth's surface; it depended equally on how tenaciously we all cling to apparently logical decisions, amplified and reinforced by a community of peers and backed by the authority of established institutions.
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