Your own faith in the efficacy of systems of peer review to judge new ideas (which we should mention might stem from some new worldview not possessed by those reviewers) is unfortunately contradicted by your own lack of curiosity. We’re supposed to take it on faith that such things get studied, and in a fair manner, but that would require that the scientists decide to be more curious than yourself. Right?
There is a bigger picture here, and it’s called pseudo-skepticism (or skepticism which is not evenly applied). This phenomenon which I believe was popularized through the Sagan Standard (“extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”) simply undermines the traditional scientific values of open-mindedness and curiosity. It has created an entire generation of thinkers who believe that if the textbook theory is wrong, then it will necessarily be obviously wrong. And what that does, in practice, is lead to a generally lazy approach to judging information which is almost entirely based upon authority. It also shifts the focus away from the observation that our current theories have thus far failed to resolve many significant problems. This debunking mindset reserves the critical spirit exclusively for beliefs which defy scientific consensus. History will prove this approach to be completely ineffective, given the complexity of modern science.
What happens in practice is that – much like your own approach – professionals simply assume that the anomaly can be fit into their existing worldviews. And so they adopt all of the assumptions and speculations inherent to their worldviews to address the observation. So, it’s not that – simplistically – professionals do not engage the anomaly. The problem we see is that they refuse to contemplate the anomaly on the anomaly’s actual terms, without recourse to their own personal worldview.
After all, we do see reference to a phenomenon within peer review which looks suspiciously like the Ebner Effect …
From Genome duplication encourages rapid adaptation of plants
Genome duplication encourages rapid adaptation of plants
May 03, 2011
Plants adapt to the local weather and soil conditions in which they grow, and these environmental adaptations are known to evolve over thousands of years as mutations slowly accumulate in plants’ genetic code. But a University of Rochester biologist has found that at least some plant adaptations can occur almost instantaneously, not by a change in DNA sequence, but simply by duplication of existing genetic material.
Ramsey’s findings are published in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
While nearly all animals have two sets of chromosomes—one set inherited from the maternal parent and the other inherited from the paternal parent—many plants are polyploids, meaning they have four or more chromosome sets. “Some botanists have wondered if polyploids have novel features that allow them to survive environmental change or colonize new habitats,” says Assistant Professor Justin Ramsey. “But this idea had not been rigorously tested.”
There are certain points within the scientific methodology where worldviews play an incredibly important role – namely, at the inferential step and when proposing hypotheses. What we tend to observe with conventional thinkers is that they see no philosophical problem with generally ignoring competing worldviews in science. But, what they fail to usually see is that this is actually how we train professionals too: To think within the confines of a theoretical box that is assigned to them. In each case – with the professionals and the non-professionals – there is no effort to deal with the philosophical problem of unconceived alternatives which necessarily originate from competing worldviews.
It’s a vicious cycle: The worldview is used to propose the hypothesis, and when the data comes in, the worldview is again used to propose inferences to explain the data. Essentially, in the event that the worldview is fundamentally lacking or just plain wrong, this approach creates the opportunity for those types of mistakes to never be noticed. A better, more effective approach to science would be if both the non-professionals and the professionals were more willing to question their worldviews in the event of anomalous observations. This would create opportunities for potential errors in the worldview to become visible.
