That often gets brought up in arguments about pseudoscience, but I think it’s a bad example. Yes, the scientific community didn’t accept Wegener’s proposal of it in 1912, and now we accept plate tectonics, but it isn’t that the scientific community decided that Wegener “was right” but rather that later scientists like Bruce Heezen and Marie Tharp in the 1950s came up with better versions of the theory that actually had a meaningful mechanism, which Wegener never did. Wegener deserves some credit for having a basic idea that turned out to be more or less right in the end, but science isn’t just about having the right basic idea – it is about explaining why the idea is right. It’s not unlike the various pre-Darwinian scientists who proposed a form of evolution. Yes, they were right that evolution happens, but without the idea of natural selection, they had no real mechanism of how evolution could occur.
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