Wegener and Continental Drift Theory - 0 views
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Survival of the fittest" gave an ethical dimension to the no-holds barred capitalism of the late nineteenth century.
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ppropriated elements of evolution by natural selection to justify the ruthless business practices of his time
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Darwin, was the ultimate insider
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Erasmus, was an early student of evolution and his half-cousin, Francis Galton, was a noted statistician who was considered the father of eugenics.
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o worries about money
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connections in the scientific world
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philosopher, Herbert Spencer.
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famous biologist, Thomas Huxle
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But fact and reason alone cannot explain the different reactions to new hypotheses and theories we see in the examples above.
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faith that future scientists will address the shortcomings in the initial theories.
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When the facts don't neatly fit the theory, scientists have faith that time, discovery and the hard work of others will eventually prove the theory to be true. Theories are not always neat equations where all variables are explained, accounted for and even understood. We see this with both Darwin and Wegener.
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Being German wasn't Wegener's only problem; the arguments he used to support his hypothesis crossed into disciplines that were not his specialty.
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Darwin's theory quickly came to dominate. Within 5 years, Oxford University was using a biology textbook that discussed biology in the context of evolution by natural selection.
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At Oxford, evolution by natural selection had gone from hypothesis to a priori
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A priori means that something is accepted as true, knowledge that is known without having to investigate it. We use reason and deduction to know that X is true, so it is a priori.
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Wegener did not have an explanation for how continental drift could have occurred
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little challenge until the 1960's.
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he drew from the fields of geology, geography, biology and paleontolog
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coal deposits, commonly associated with tropical climates, would be found near the North Pole and why the plains of Africa would show evidence of glaciation.
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A radical new view on their discipline could be a threat to their own authority.
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"If we are to believe in Wegener's hypothesis we must forget everything which has been learned in the past 70 years and start all over again."
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The authorities in the various disciplines attacked him as an interloper that did not fully grasp their own subject.
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The reactions by the leading authorities in the different disciplines was so strong and so negative that serious discussion of the concept stopped
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The world had to wait until the 1960's for a wide discussion of the Continental Drift Theory to be restarted.
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Alfred Wegener is one modern scientist amongst many that demonstrate that new ideas threaten the establishment, regardless of the century.
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ontinental Drift Theory through the first few decades of the twentieth century.
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continents had once been joined, and over time had drifted apart.