(December 19, 2014 at 12:40 pm)Alex K Wrote: It is true that skepticism towards specific claims can be exaggerated out of prejudice. In the end though, I wonder - if they had had low enough standards back then to immediately accept Wegeners idea (of course, not knowing like we do in hindsight that Wegener was right), how many other false ideas would have crept in and muddied the science completely? Maybe Wegener was an unfortunate victim of a necessary precaution. Of course, maybe it was simply sociology and politics which hindered the deserved acceptance - lard knows I've seen how the scientific communities are prone to all kinds of human weaknesses such as following trends or being jealous of new ideas or overly conservative at times.
Indeed. And when you consider Popper's hypothesis about the acceptance of scientific claims -- that the old guard often dismisses claims and marshals countervailing evidence in order to protect the theory they grew up learning, and that theories often don't find acceptance until that old guard dies off, you can see the skepticism can be both a brake and an engine.
No human endeavor is perfect, and that includes the scientific method. That doesn't change the fact that it is by far the most accurate method of interrogating the Universe. But there's a happy medium with skepticism that, violated, leads to blindness.
Of course this was only a very bare-bones look at science, aimed at people who seem to utterly misunderstand it.