Here are two possibilities:

One thing that tempts scientists to ignore warnings that a theory might be wrong is that the troubling results from experiments or investigations may be quite small. Thus, it is tempting to ignore them or explain them away.

For example, as Mario Beauregard and I note in The Spiritual Brain:

In science, small, persistent effects cannot be ignored. Sometimes they force a revision of major paradigms. For example, Lord Kelvin remarked in 1900 that there were just “two little dark clouds” on the horizon of Newtonian classical physics of the day, namely, Michelson and Morley’s measurements of the velocity of light and the phenomenon of blackbody radiation. Kelvin was certain that these troubling little clouds would be blown away shortly.149 Yet all of modern physics—relativity and quantum mechanics—derives from these two little dark clouds. (p. 172)

Other times, they can be so emotionally committed to one picture of the universe that they cannot imagine another. Even Albert Einstein had this problem. But he isn't the only one.

Science journalist John Horgan created a minor stir a decade ago with his book, The End of Science, arguing that the major science discoveries are all behind us. Now that was hardly a popular thesis. As he recently recalled,

One of my most memorable moments as a journalist occurred in December 1996, when I attended the Nobel Prize festivities in Stockholm. During a 1,300-person white-tie banquet presided over by Sweden's king and queen, David Lee of Cornell University, who shared that year's physics prize, decried the "doomsayers" claiming that science is ending. Reports of science's death "are greatly exaggerated," he said. Lee was alluding to my book More than a dozen Nobel laureates denounced this proposition, mostly in the media but some to my face, as did the White House science advisor, the British science minister, the head of the Human Genome Project, and the editors in chief of the journals Science and Nature.

Nothing like being toast of the town! However, the initial uproar seems to have blown over. Discover Magazine invited Horgan to revisit his thesis in its October 2006 edition. And it has stood up surprisingly well, at least on the surface.

There have been advances. Dolly the sheep? New vaccines? The chess computer? New antibiotics? Alternative energy sources?

Yes, but, as Horgan notes, these advances depend on existing science. They do not forge new frontiers in our understanding of our world.

Some people dismiss Horgan's thesis outright because prophecies that "everything has gone downhill" are common, and they are usually wrong.

But, he rightly notes that dismissing his thesis only on that ground is based on a fallacy - that past experience predicts future experience.

Does some natural law govern science discovery? If so, what is it? If not, we cannot assume that past experience is a prediction. Actually, whole centuries have passed without significant discoveries, and no natural law was violated. Let's look a little deeper.

Horgan makes one fundamental assumption that I think is wrong and his error is the main reason why I am more hopeful than he is. He clearly sees science as nothing more or less than applied materialist philosophy.

For example, he reminds us to temper our expectations of future science by writing, "Evolutionary biology reminds us that we are animals, shaped by natural selection not for discovering deep truths of nature but for breeding."

Hmmm. Where have I heard this before? We are animals who could not recognize truth? Oh, yes!

“Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truths but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive and leave descendants.” - Francis Crick, co-discovered of the double helix, 1995 “Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes the truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.” - Harvard cognitive scientist Steve Pinker, 1997

This materialist silliness slows current science down. People who don't think they can discover truth may turn to propaganda, I suppose, in an effort to shore up what they think they already have and don't want to lose. .

Yes, there are new frontiers in science. The greatest new frontier is human consciousness. But no materialist hypothesis for consciousness is believable. So the doors to new discoveries are wide open, but a materialist may not want to walk through them.

Today, it is actually better to be a non-materialist. You can reasonably believe that you actually have contact with reality; your mindless selfish genes are not simply using your brain to get themselves spread.

Even great scientists can get it all wrong, and it is interesting to see how and when they do. Physicist Gerald Schroeder recalls an interesting fact about the career of Albert Michelson, of the 1887 Michelson Morley experiment that measured the speed of light,

"In 1894, Albert Michelson delivered the main address at the dedication of the Ryerson Physical Laboratory of the University of Chicago. Michelson took the opportunity to declare that "The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered." The physics community thought that there was not much new to learn about our universe. (p. xi-xii)

In fact, a little over a decade later in 1905, Albert Einstein published a series of papers that completely overturned physicists' picture of our universe, replacing it with the bewildering world of relativity both of space and of time.

Yet Albert Einstein, who had himself revolutionized physics by introducing relativity, committed what he called the "biggest blunder of my life" in an attempt to defend the traditional preference of scientists for an eternal universe.

Einstein's biggest blunder: Attempting to "save" the eternal universe

Here's what happened, as Schroeder tells it:

In 1917, Einstein developed equations to describe the universe using the general relativity laws that he had published two years earlier. But he didn't like his equations because they seemed to show that the universe was "dynamic." He thought it should be static and eternal. Still, Vesto Slipher's astronomical measurements at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, which depended on Einstein's own relativity laws, implied that our universe is expanding.

But Einstein so much needed to believe that the universe was static and eternal that he actually changed his equations to include the famous cosmological constant he later so deeply regretted. Schroeder reflects,

Why the biggest blunder? Einstein realized that if day by day the universe was expanding, getting ever larger, then what about yesterday, a year ago, a millennium ago, and ever backward until billions of years ago there was only a point, a point that marked the beginning. Einstein could have followed his own discoveries and predicted the most important statement every made relative to man and the universe: there was a creation. And he blew it. He could not give up his opinion in favor of his facts.

Einstein was a great scientist and he went on from there, wiser.

Eternal universe - a rabbit in every hat!

The "eternal universe" is a very convenient belief, actually, because it makes certain difficult problems disappear - for example the origin of life.

Any physically possible thing will happen eventually in a universe that has always existed and always will exist. Perhaps life could originate by pure chance, for example, given enough time. But if we put a date on the beginning of the universe, what happens? Now we must reckon with probabilities. How probable is it that a given event happened by chance?

To see how unlikely a chance origin of life is in our universe, with a finite beginning in time 13.7 billion years ago, see Chapter 8 of The Design of Life.

The universe has a hot date?

Putting a date on the universe is just what Georges Lemaitre did. The Belgian priest (1894–1966) was an Einstein fan, and he proposed in 1927 that Einstein's theories would work much better if we just accepted that the universe began as a single explosive point and has been spreading out from there ever since. It is now between 10 and 20 billion years old, not forever old. (It wasn't possible for Lemaitre to be more specific about the time span then.)

Lemaitre's theory was dubbed the "Big Bang"by famous astronomer Fred Hoyle, who hated the idea.

Many other scientists were displeased as well. Arthur Eddington said, "Philosophically, the notion of a beginning to the present order is repugnant to me. I should like to find a genuine loophole."

Indeed, the idea that the universe has a beginning took some time to catch on. According to Schroeder, in a 1959 survey, two thirds of leading U.S. astronomers still believed that the universe was eternal. It had always existed. It did not have a beginning.

Of course, today, the Big Bang is taken for granted, because it has been confirmed by many studies of the universe.

As a result, some problems, like the origin of life, have become much more serious.

Open mind? ... or critical thinking?

It is often said that scientists need to keep an open mind. That is true, but it isn't enough. G. K. Chesterton famously noted,

Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

If all we have is an open mind, we will believe anything we hear. What a scientist needs is critical thinking - the ability to examine assumptions as well as accumulate information.

At 18 metres high with leaves five metres in diameter,T. spectabilis  is the biggest palm ever found on the Island of Madagascar. But botanists (scientists who study plants) wonder, how did the palm come to be on Madagascar at all?

The palm also has an unusual trait for a tree: It waits many decades – perhaps a century -to flower and then self-destructs in the process.

Another frond on the palm family tree

Palm trees are found today on every continent except Antarctica. So far, botanists have classified 2600 palms species into 202 genera. The Arecaceae or Palmae family is divided into six sub-families, which are sub-divided into tribes, then into genera, and finally species.

So botanists were not surprised to find a new species, T. spectabilis, on Madagascar in 2007. Ninety percent of Madagascar's 10,000 plant species are found nowhere else on earth. And, of Madagascar’s more than 170 palm species, only six are found elsewhere.

It is the palm’s appearance and behaviour that surprises botanists.

Madagascar Palm looks exactly like Coryphya Palms, and yet …

T. spectabilis looks like a Sri Lankan palm belonging to genus Corypha of Tribe Corypheae.

"I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw the images posted on the web. The palm appeared superficially like the  Talipot Palm of Sri Lanka , but that had never been recorded for Madagascar," says John Dransfield, co-author of Palms of Madagascar.

But despite their similarities, lab results show that T. spectabilis is not part of the Corypheae tribe.

After analysing samples of the Madagascar palm, researchers at the Royal Botanic Gardens' Jordell Laboratory in Kew, U.K., created a new genus, Tahina, within the Chuniophoeniceae tribe. T. Spectabilis is the only species within the new Tahina genus. No other member of the Tribe Chuniophoeniceae has ever been found in Madgascar.

Previously known Chuniophoeniceae genera are: Nannorrhops found in Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan; Kerriodoxa found in Southern Thailand; and Chuniophoenix in Vietnam, Southern China and Hainan.

How did a tree with relatives in Asia wind up on an island of the coast of Africa?

Tree flowers spectacularly but only once and then dies

Like the Talipot Palm (C. umbraculifera), T. spectabilis, grows to gigantic heights and creates a flowering pyramid of branches - known as an inflorescence - at maturity.

>This gigantic inflorescence contains hundreds of tiny flowers, which are fertilized by birds and insects, then mature into fruit.

But such spectacular flowering uses up all of a palm tree's resources (nutrient stores). So T. spectabilis and C. umbraculifera (Talipot) palms bloom only once. As their fruit matures, they die.

Palm Raises More Questions For Botanists

While scientists puzzle over how a member of the Chuniophoeniceae Tribe found its way to Madagascar, they are also asking why a gigantic palm species, with such spectacular flowering and fruiting, went undetected for so long?

The tiny population of T. spectabilis (less than 100 live on the Island of Madagascar) may be one explanation.

Dransfield has another theory. He thinks T. spectabilis may have been undetected by researchers because it lives longer than other self-destructive palms, such as C. umbraculifera, which matures at 30 to 80 years.

Dransfield thinks T. spectabilis may take 100 years or longer to mature. In that case, no one may have noticed it in its spectacular flowering phase. If so, botanists may need decades to truly understand this new genus and its place on the Tree of Life.

That understanding may challenge current theories about plant speciation and the complexity of life on earth.

-30-

Links

Madagascar Palm Discovery

BBC News

Science News, Kew, News Release

Corypha/Talipott Palm

Coryphya:

 

 

What should scientists do when they encounter evidence of the history of life that does not fit their expectations?

Physicist Gerald Schroeder recounts a remarkable example of a scientist who faced just this problem: Charles Doolittle Walcott, secretary (director) of the famed science centre, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

He stumbled on the Cambrian explosion fossils in the Burgess Shale in British Columbia, Canada.

As Schroeder tells it, paleontologist Walcott was combining a summer holiday with a field trip in the mountains of eastern British Columbia in 1909, on a ridge that connects Mount Wapta with Mount Field, at 5000 feet elevation.

Walcott noticed something unusual, and stopped to investigate. It was unusual. It was a fossil of a crustacean that was over five hundred million years old.

He did not have a problem figuring out how the fossil got there. At one time, the area was part of an ocean shelf in a warm climate.

His problem was accepting that this fossil would be there:  As Schroeder tells it, 

Some 550 million years ago, at the start of the Cambrian, the only life on Earth was the most simple of forms, one-celled bacteria, algae, protozoans, and some pancake-shaped life of uncertain definition known as Ediacaran fossils. There was no way evolution could have advanced life from one-celled protozoans to the complexity of this crustacean in the twenty or so million years of the Cambrian. There had simply not been the time for that development. Well into the 1970s, evolutionary theory assumed that in excess of 100 million years were needed for the basic body plans of advanced life to evolve from the simplicity of pre-Cambrian life. (p. 36)

Perhaps this was a fluke? No, it was no fluke.  Walcott found more and more fossils. He shipped over sixty thousand back to the Smithsonian. He had found the equivalent of Noah's Ark. He found every animal phylum, or - as Schroeder puts it - the "basic anatomies" of all animal life forms today.

Cause for rejoicing? No, because there was a problem. The problem was that the find obviously did not support Darwin's theory of evolution:

"Eyes and gills, jointed limbs and intestines, sponges and worms and insects and fish, all had appeared simultaneously. There had not been a gradual evolution of simple phyla such as sponges into the more complex phyla of worms and then on to other life forms such as insects. According to these fossils, at the most fundamental level of animal life, the phylum or basic body plan, the dogma of classical Darwinian evolution, that the simple had evolved into the more complex, that invertebrates had evolved into vertebrates over one hundred to two hundred million year was fantasy, not fact.  (pages 36-37)"

So the reigning theory was probably false.  Walcott, remember, was the director of the Smithsonian Institution. And he had just discovered something very inconvenient for the Institution. So what did he do?

Well, he mentioned his spectacular find in Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, a publication read by few people. And then he put them in drawers and left them there. They did not receive the attention they deserved for eighty years.

Many people have tried to understand and explain why Walcott ignored the significance of his Cambrian fossils, but the most likely reason is that the fossils were not what he had expected to see. He ignored them in order to preserve a belief system.

Today, scientists call this problem the file drawer effect. Scientists may leave in the drawer discoveries that do not support current theories or their own theories.

Even today, much research on the Cambrian explosion is dedicated to showing that it never really happened - because it does not support the idea that Darwin’s theory of natural selection acting on random mutations is the cause of major development in life forms.

Major developments in science usually happen when people are willing to look further than the current theories.

For more, see pp. 34-39 in The Science of God by Gerald L. Schroeder (New York: Free Press, 1997).

For another example of a sudden explosion of life forms, see The Avalon explosion: The dawn of life reveals another intricate puzzle.

In 2006 scientists claimed to have recreated the path of evolution by breeding a hybrid butterfly from two South American species, H. Cydno (black wings with white and yellow markings) and H Melpomene, (black wings with red, yellow and orange markings). Hybrids are created by breeding two existing species that can produce live offspring together.

As reported by Ker Than in LiveScience (June 14, 2006), the new lab hybrid </a> has the same markings as a wild South American butterfly,  H. Heurippa, long thought to be a hybrid itself. These three species can meet up in the wild (= they are not reproductively isolated), but H. heurippa butterflies prefer to mate with their own. Therefore, little crossbreeding occurs in natural environments.

Scientists said their laboratory hybrid showed that they had recreated the first steps in the evolution of Heurippa. The original research was reported in Nature, July 15, 2006.

Can hybridization retrace the course of evolution?

The researchers’ idea of trying to determine the course of evolution by breeding back to an earlier, perhaps extinct, species is not new. In the 1920s, German zoologists Lutz and Heinz Heck thought they could do that. Their Heck cattle were an attempt to reconstitute the extinct predecessor of domestic cattle, the aurochs. Their Heck horses were an attempt to retrieve the genetic inheritance of the wild Europeantarpan.

The Hecks used a combination of modern breeds in order to create what they believed to be living tarpans and aurochs. They bred Koniks, Icelandic Ponies, Swedish Gotlands, Polish primitive horses, and wild Przewalski horses to create their tarpans.

Their <