Hard on the heels of the Atlantic noting the resistance to valid new ideas in science, we hear from Inside Science that :
Scientific Consensus Is Almost Never Wrong – Almost
The man who shifted the geology paradigm was Alfred Wegener and he was never mentioned in my Geology 101 class. How this happened was discussed at a meeting of the Geology Society of America in Baltimore earlier this month.
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No one knows how it happened, but likely one day Wegener simply looked at a globe and noted that you could slide South America right up against Africa. The bulge in Brazil near the city of Natal, would fit snugly into the bight of Africa near Cameroon. There are other places in the world like that. The bottom of the Arabian Peninsula, fits right into East Africa around Somalia.
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Wegener’s study was interrupted by World War I. Wounded twice, he spent time in hospitals and thought about the continents again from his bed. When he was released, he wrote a book, The Origin of Continents and Oceans, which was to geology as Darwin’s Origin of Species was to biology. Unlike Darwin, who was an instant phenomenon, Wegener was rejected. More.
Of course. Because, as ought now to be a commonplace among thinking persons, Darwinism was accepted because it provided a “scientific” basis for an existing social agenda of eugenics, racism, and naturalist atheism. It also spawned an academic industry of Christian Darwinism, to get Christians to accommodate the demands of that agenda.
As Darwinian philosopher Michael Ruse puts it,
Evolution after Darwin had set itself up to be something more than science. It was a popular science, the science of the marketplace and the museum, and it was a religion—whether this be purely secular or blended in with a form of liberal Christianity.
By sharp contrast, continental drift theory did not advance social and political goals.
Wegener was ostracized and lost several teaching appointments because of his unconventional theory. The eminent British geologist Sir Harold Jeffreys wrote that his theory of drifting continents “is a theory which explains nothing we wish to explain.”
Ironically, of course, Darwinism (natural selection acting on random mutations explains everything) may end up as the province of process theologians huffing at Huffpo, retirement age academics, “aren’t I good?” girls, and Bimbette and her ardent fans.
And the continents can still be fitted together clearly – which explains a fair bit of Earth’s history.
See also: Will Dawkins’ selfish gene concept die as its proponents retire?
If everyone tries to do “consensus science,” there is no science
and
Why Darwinism is failing II
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