"That large animals require a luxuriant vegetation, has been a general assumption which has passed from one work to another; but I do not hesitate to say that is is completely false." Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle
It has been expressed to me by several colleagues and I'm sure I've read this that Darwin was not a guy to rock the boat an that part of his hesitation to publish the Origin of Species was that he didn't want to offend. The more I read Darwin the more I realize that isn't the case. Here he's essentially calling out the scientific community at the time and he's just getting started as a scientist. But he does this throughout the Voyage. Darwin has an iconoclast from the very beginning of his career.
But it makes me chuckle when I hear creationist, antivaxers, and other anti-science people allege that scientists are under some sort of pressure to toe the line.
But would you not acknowledge that many scientists have been subject to professional ridicule for challenging scientific consensus on subjects (to name a few) ranging from heliocentrism, heavier than air flight, plate tectonics, and endosymbiosis? It is sobering how many seminal papers faced repeated rejections.
ReplyDeleteDo you know the venues that the ridicule takes place? Rejection is usually a silent process. In the past. A packet would arrive with your manuscript and a letter from the editor would accompany it. Rejections would usually take the form "Dear Jeff, thank you for considering [name of journal], however [some form of rejection]. I've only seen published ridicule once in a letter in Science from Ernst Mayr reviewing a paleo paper and suggesting the author reread a basic anatomy text (ouch). But for Darwin, I don't see him being very worried about attack - it just doesn't in his character - not as I have come to understand him.
ReplyDeleteSeveral different issues here:
ReplyDelete1. Yes, of course, rejection is usually a silent process, but the initial (and occasionally repeated) rejection of many important papers illustrates that failure to "toe the line" is problematic. Note that Peter Higg's paper "Broken Symmetries and the Masses of Gauge Bosons" was rejected by Physics Letters as having "no obvious relevance to physics". Closer to your field, Lynn Margulis' paper on "The Origin of Mitosing Eukaryotic Cells" was rejected by over a dozen different journals.
2. Ridicule, primarily of the polite professional variety, is apparent in just about every comment, and comment response to articles in Nature (and most every scientific journal which publishes these). The historical examples are legion, with perhaps the most notorious and well documented being the reaction to Alfred Wegener's ideas on continental drift - to the extent that conferences were held by his colleagues for the sole purpose of denigrating his work.
3.Yes, Charles Darwin had a thick skin, but that does not mean that his own scientific community (in addition to the more well known examples from the religious community) exempting him from ridicule. Note for example his letter, written on May 18, 1860: (http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-2809)
I do not know whether you ever see various Reviews, but the attacks have been falling thick & heavy on my now case-hardened hide.— Sedgwick & Clarke opened regular battery on me lately at Cambridge Phil. Socy. & dear old Henslow defended me in grand style, saying that my investigations were perfectly legitimate.
The Sedgwick he references is of course the famous geologist Adam Sedgwick, his former mentor!
For something like symbiosis, I would love to see the process. I'm wondering what the letters looked like and how the reviewers justified their rejections. I mean, you just can't say "this is wrong". I don't doubt that there are some that apply the pressure to the bleeding theory in hopes of recovery but I always wonder if LM's rejections letters looked like this "Interesting theory but a horribly written manuscript without supporting examples". Next rejection "Interesting theory and slightly improved manuscript, needs updated sources and the bibliography is missing." I'm just resistant to say that rejections were "I don't like their theory, therefore reject it." I would have liked to seen the confidential comments to the editor compared to the comments to the author.
ReplyDeleteAs for Darwin, I'm sure he expected it and probably reveled in it. It was his gem and his to show off. The ultimate test of an idea is to have it attacked and "prove its mettle" (Popper).
This was nothing like natural selection or endosymbiosis but I essentially called out the ornithologists working in South America (particularly the ones from N. America) and this was accepted with little comment. My feather growth paper was rejected 3 times from the same journal and the last one came with the comment "the stake remains in the heart of this MS."