Here’s the problem: you are talking about some guys who claimed exposing seeds and eggs to electric fields creates strange prehistoric mutants. You claim scientists aren’t looking at it because they are too caught up in current dogma, to beholden to industrial interests like Monsanto. But anyone who has actually seen scientific literature knows stuff that important does get some investigation regardless of corporate backing, if there is something substantative to it, and I’m sure can easily imagine some other reason people might not be looking at it - say, that it turns out to be crazy nonsense with nothing to back it up, to the point where counter-evidence is hardly worth publishing.
You seem incapable of imagining the second possibility; you’re happy to report this not as a hypothesis but a fact. Nor is that unusual here; for instance, previously you took your argument from a website claiming there was no time dilation, something that is measured every day. You’re saying you’re concerned science isn’t considering new ideas, but from your examples, you’re only arguing science shouldn’t have standards.
Forget that. Again, peer review does have problems; but if your cure is that scientists should stop building on what’s well-established for checking every claim that shows up on the internet, figuring out that relativity does still work and perpetual motion machines still don’t, and trying to figure out how to test time cube guy’s ideas, that’s a much better way to impede discovery. wysinwyg has brought this up, and you’ve avoided addressing it.
The other problem, of course, is you’re talking about some guys who claimed exposing seeds and eggs to electric fields creates strange prehistoric mutants and so made the thread all about Jeff Schmidt and how that somehow means you should only trust fringe science, yet again, instead of the topic. But I guess that’s also our fault for indulging you.
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 …
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.
Beg pardon? ALL individual mutations occur instantaneously. It’s just that normally they are either negative or neutral. Eventually a selection pressure comes along which screens out those not carrying the main trait, and the population changes – but that isn’t gradual mutation, it’s random mutation accumulating over a long time and then finding a use.
Replicating a whole chromisome (polyploidy) is considered a form of mutation. And this is absolutely nothing new; we’ve known that many plants (especially some of the domesticated varieties) are polyploid for quite some time now.
I’m not sure those accusations reflect what I’ve said, where I note peer review does have problems and on occasion have suggested non-standard ideas might be worth exploring. But more important, are you going to address the central question: how you think poor ideas should be weeded out, or if you think science is better served by everyone spending all their debunking whatever fringe notions are proposed instead of building on what seems probable, right down to time cubes?
Because thread after thread you’ve offered reports with all but no evidence as if they were facts, and rejected ideas with lots of evidence - even quoted ‘problems’ with standard theory that are straight-up fiction - and so it seems your real idea is that science simply shouldn’t have any standards. That’s not what an open mind means, and whatever problems there in peer review, that’s not an improvement.
