Pushing Ahead Without Moving Ahead
Tenure of Outdated Ideas in Science

You can't stop progress, as they say, and the same can be said for the exponential growth of scientific knowledge that has developed in the past few centuries. With every new find comes the potential for a dozen new ones, and with each decade we seem to double our knowledge base. The problem? How do the scattered array of researchers and scientists world-wide communicate with each other? And who has the last word as far as "the latest scientific research"? As a result, the new ideas remain largely unacknowledged, undiscussed, and are treated as if they simply did not exist.

Science is, in more ways than one, similar to a religion. It has a key ritual (scientific method), it has primary places of practice, and it even has legacies formed around iconic scientists. Scientists even have their own brand of excommunication, too, whereby when someone challenges the prevailing theories or circumvents purely scholarly inquiry, he is painted as a less-than-credible extremist or popularizer, and accused of offering ideas with mere hope of raising a few brows.

This leads to a pretty slow trickle-down of new scientific ideas to the general public. While science pushes ahead, the general populace often remains stuck in decades-old deductions. Oftentimes, I find myself watching a documentary on, say, Stone Henge. I hear all of the opposing views on the composition of the stone, the usage of the site, etc., and I wonder..."Why don't they all just get together and figure it out?" Well, in a sense, that's unrealistic talk. It's never that easy, we all know that. However, in many cases, new research that seriously challenges old ideas will be intentionally ignored. In other cases, it is given a less than complete browse and discarded with a "Let's agree to disagree..."

Take, for example, the current scientific debate on the topic of Tyrannosaurus Rex. For years we have been under the general impression that T-Rex was the grand carnivore of the dinosaur world. Yet, relatively new research offers a startling number of compelling arguments which suggests that this massive reptile was most likely a scavenger. Although the ideas are not being ignored by the scientific community, it will take decades for mainstream archaelogy to bring the issue to the forefront where the common misconception can actually be addressed. This illustrates, at least, the snail's pace at which established scientific ideas reform themselves in mainstream society.

In a book I recently read titled "The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue", author Merritt Ruhlen painstakingly presents the reader with progressively more detailed levels of research in the scientific field of linguistics, all of which point to the possibility that language emerged from a single place. Ruhlen suggests that the original "spark" of language occurred in Africa, and that every language since then is essentially a development of that linguistic genesis. The evidence he offers begins by speaking in very simple terms, and Ruhlen continues to delve deeper and deeper from there, employing thick and tedious series of findings. The work is truly impressive.

The interesting note, and the reason that this book applies to the topic of "tenured" scientific ideas: Ruhlen mentions in numerous instances that the research he offers, although plainly accurate knowledge, is expressly ignored by modern linguistic professors and researchers. To the mainstream scientific community, the idea of all language emerging from a singular source sounds purely philosophical and untestable. However, Ruhlen goes on to show that it is not only testable and ripe for further research, but that the current body of evidence supporting the theory employs the same basic techniques of linguistic analysis that have been used for decades. It is ignored, Ruhlen claims, because such wildly new ideas coming to the forefront would trivialize the dusty information possessed by rutted, over-comfortable men of authority in the scientific community.

So, remember that what the ordinary person knows as the "latest" in science, is probably already outdated by years and years already. In some cases, certain ideas have been proven incorrect years ago, but only by a few scientists on the fringe of the scientific community are willing to pay any mind to ideas that might render their knowledge obsolete.