tions unanswered or it fails to deliver a complete explanation, is confusing the responsibilities of evidence and hypothesis.
“The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein, and resists it with a similar energy. . . If we watch ourselves honestly we shall often find that we have begun to argue against a new idea even before it has been completely stated.” [Trotter, 1941]
“In the 1790’s, philosophers and scientists were aware of many allegations of stones falling from the sky, but the most eminent scientists were skeptical. The first great advance came in 1794, when a German lawyer and physicist, E.F.F. Chladni, published a study of some alleged meteorites. . . Chladni’s ideas were widely rejected, not because they were ill conceived, for he had been able to collect good evidence, but because his contemporaries simply were loathe to accept the idea that extraterrestrial stones could fall from the sky.” [Hartmann, 1983]
Confusing the Package and Product
Scientists are not immune to the quality of the sales pitch for a set of evidence. Unless the reader is put off by blatant hype, the sales pitch exerts a subconscious influence on one’s evaluation of the evidence. For example, consider the statement “All hypotheses are wrong, but some are more wrong than others.” Catchy expressions tend to go through one’s head and thereby gain strength, while qualifications and supporting information are forgotten. In this one a defeatist mood is enforced, rather than the optimistic prospect of growth and evolution of changing ideas. To separate the objective evidence from the effects of presentation style, paraphrasing arguments can help.
Pitfall Examples
For over 2000 years, from the ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Chinese, and Japanese cultures to the 19th century, there persisted the myth of the oxen-born bees. The myth, ‘confirmed’ by observation, explained that decaying carcasses of oxen transformed into a swarm of honeybees.
The birth that people witnessed so often was not of honeybees but rather of the fly Eristalis tenax, which looks similar. The flies do not generate spontaneously; they hatch from eggs laid in the carcasses. In all that time, though people had seen developing honeybees in honeycombs, no one captured the oxen-born bees and attempted to raise them for honey, nor did they compare them with honeybees, nor did they observe the egg laying or the eggs [Teale, 1959].
Pitfalls: failure to test long-held theories;
missing the unexpected;
missing important ‘background’ characteristics.
In 1887, physicist Albert Michelson and chemist E.W. Morley carried out an experiment to detect the earth’s motion through the ether. They measured the difference in the travel times of light moving at different angles to the earth’s presumed direction through the ether. Although theory indicated that the measurements were sensitive enough to detect this effect, the Michelson-Morley experiment found no difference. Fortunately for physics, these scientists did not suppress their negative results. They published, although for 15 years Michelson considered the experiment a failure
