Is This What Science Has Become?

From a lecture by Michael Crichton:

Probably every schoolchild notices that South America and Africa seem to fit together rather snugly, and Alfred Wegener proposed, in 1912, that the continents had in fact drifted apart. The consensus sneered at continental drift for fifty years. The theory was most vigorously denied by the great names of geology-until 1961, when it began to seem as if the sea floors were spreading. The result: it took the consensus fifty years to acknowledge what any schoolchild sees.

And shall we go on? The examples can be multiplied endlessly. Jenner and smallpox, Pasteur and germ theory. Saccharine, margarine, repressed memory, fiber and colon cancer, hormone replacement therapy…the list of consensus errors goes on and on.

Comments

[CT]

While I agree with the overall point of his lecture (the need to separate policy from scientific endeavor), I think Crichton is using the "hindsight is 20/20" argument... Of course these early observations seem obvious to us now, but that's not necessarily the case when such theories are first proposed. For instance, there were several other proposed reasons for the continental question, including theories that we know dismiss as quackery (like the lost continent of Atlantis originally occupying that ocean space, etc.).