Why are "scientists" so narrow minded? Discuss.?

Question

Whenever evidence comes up that rejects canonical scientific beleifs, scientists push it under the rug. Things that go against the grain are branded "Psudosciences" and discredited without proof. It unscientific. Science is there to study and learn from evidence, not reject it. Science says there can be no way that an undiscovered primate could lurk in the woods, yet folklore has been seeing these things since the dawn of ure. Its all in mythology. s claim to have telekinetic abilities to influence physical objests. Scientists reject this, yet studys show that humans can influence what direction a ball falls with their thoughts. Even in Archeology things have been obscured. Gigantic bones have been found all over the world and in every mythology system, yet we reject it. Scientific techniques show the Sphinx was built somewhere around 7000 bc, but since this goes against canonical science, it doesnt exist. Scientists are very unscientific. Debate.

Answer 1

You must realize that many scientists stake their life work on one thoery or another. If it is shot down, there goes 35 years of their life.
Science, like any field, is full of false theoroes but there must be overwhelming evidence to disprove an accepted thoery.
Especially with thikng pertaining to history, since none of lived 7,000 years ago, there will always be depbate about how thinkgs worked back then, and without a time machine we will never be able to figure it out acuratly.

Answer 2

I frankly, don't understand your commentary. Scientists are constantly checking their results, by continual gathering and testing of data. That continuous questioning is how new material is learned - for example, the connection between dinosaurs and modern-day birds is an idea that was met with initial disagreement, but examining the data shows that it is a likely connection.

In every discipline, there are graduate students and lesser-known scientists, trying to find that new discovery that overturns all that we believe. Then, like Einstein, Feynman and Hawking, it their ideas can explain the existing data, and predict new data, then they get famous.

However, scientists are very narrow-minded in one respect: they demand evidence. And the standard of evidence gets higher as time goes on. Take this claim: "Knee surgery helps with future knee pain due to arthritis." You may think that giving people surgery is sufficient. But people who have a "placebo surgery", where they get anesthesia and stitches, but no changes to their knees, also show improvement. So the experiments have to be carefully designed to take this into account. But I digress. Point by point, as I see it.

"scientists push it under the rug"

Couldn't be farther from the truth. Scientists have a long history of changing their ideas about the universe ever since the scientific method was discovered during the Renaissance. That is why we use Einstein's theory of light instead of Newtons, and are giving a try to string theory to improve on Einstein's work.

"Science says there can be no way that an undiscovered primate could lurk in the woods"

Major discoveries require major proof. Folklore is not evidence. Despite exhaustive searching for decades, we have found no physical evidence, bones, bodies, hair, (or even scat!) from those assumed 'primates in the forest'. That lack of evidence is stronger than folklore. Therefore, for now, scientists reject. Do you have some bigfoot hair? Bring it. That's all I say.

"Scientists reject this, yet studys show that humans can influence what direction a ball falls with their thoughts"

Again, bring it on. The James Randi Educational Foundation will award $1 Million in cool, hard cash to anyone that can demonstrate this ability. If your claim is true, there are a lot of people out there who don't even want to demonstrate this ability as a benefit for charity. That's not a nice thing to say about a group of people.

"Gigantic bones have been found all over the world and in every mythology system, yet we reject it."

I'm misunderstanding something here. Every child of the 80's and 90's grew up memorizing their dinosaurs. I have debated folks whose Mythology/Theology was that dinosaurs didn't exist (as they would say, 'It isn't in the Bible', which is a fallacy for another answer.) But there are thousands of scientists that are really into big bones in the ground.

"Scientific techniques show the Sphinx was built somewhere around 7000 bc, but since this goes against canonical science, it doesnt exist."

Just to play the devil's advocate here, what about all the evidence that it wasn't built until 2500 BC? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Sphinx_of_Giza) what about the 7000 BC evidence overwhelms the large body of evidence that formed the 'canonical' conclusion?

Hope this helps clarify.

Answer 3

You've been listening to those people desperate to believe.

Scientists don't reject evidence, they reject belief when there is LACK of evidence. The burden of proof is on those who would prove their theory, not the scientists to prove them wrong.

Sweep things under the rug? Is that why we keep hearing about them?

Pseudo-science is when ideas are decided on and THEN they look for evidence. That is NOT scientific method.
Science doesn't deal in absolutes. Bigfoot might exist, but the people who study it have to produce better evidence, as much of it has proven false.
The same is said for the Sphinx theory (which has NOT been proven).
Telekinesis proven? My mother worked with Rhine University when they had a major conference here in California. Sorry, it is not proven.

Gigantic bones? I don't know. I'll have to check. I also know of a few other oddities. At the same time, science isn't based on oddities with no other evidence. That would be VERY unscientific, hence oddities don't decide the course of scientific investigation. They are set aside waiting for better evidence.

That's all science does with such things.

However, professional skeptics can be just as foolish as pseudo-science believers can, and just as incapable of seeing the other sides evidence with any objectivity.

People, do both. But take a course in scientific method and hopefully a formal logic class before you "belief"...
...in either direction.

Answer 4

Science does have rules as to what is considered evidence. Ithas to be reproducible, it has to be verifiable. Psedoscience is what scientists call rash genealizations or hypotheses based on dubious sources or unverifiable results. Folklore descrribed drragons for eons, and yet science was able to give us a picture of the dinosaur. Telekinesis has and is still tested over and over again, so far, it never occurs in a lab. To distinguish coincidence or some other factor from telekinesis, the scientists must eliminate all other possible causes of movement, when that occurs, no telekinesis. You sound like the kind of perveyor of the very pseudoscience that causes such trouble when the media take you seriously. There is no cannon in science, only what evidence shows.

Answer 5

Scientists establish a 'framework' (called a theory)and then note whether something falls 'inside' or 'outside' that framework. If enough evidence fits within the framework, it is accepted as scientific fact, and whatever falls outside is called 'unexplained phenomena.'

Everything that you mention as being rejected by scientists is simply unexplained. Since science cannot explain it, it is a mystery or as-yet unknown phenomena. The fanciful mythology religous, or folklore stories don't meet with scientific method, nor do they constitute a 'framework' in scientific terms.

So, until we start falling UP the stairs instead of down, and until aerodynamics sends planes backwards instead of forwards, I'm going with the scientists.

Answer 6

Because no one likes to know that what they believe is wrong or fallible

Newton for instance... HATED to be proved wrong or incorrect. and of course... there are always people waiting in the wings to try and destroy or discredit you for being doing or saying something they deem less than their own opinion or intelligence.... It is the delicate counterbalance of humanity, human nature so to speak. and how things get done basically...

Which is actually how Newton's Optics was written... So without the grumblers and the nay Sayers... No one would ever be challenged to either defend their stance or better themselves as a result.

Newton locked himself away in manic bouts of written frenzy and experimentation... not eating sleeping or speaking for days on end, weeks even, to discredit what he deemed his enemies attempts to discredit him... Volia! Optics was born of this very kind of attempt.

Super Intelligence often is synonomous with arrogance.

The super intelligent are often like the super famous. Everything they do comes under a magnifying glass and science is not perfect. Most of it... even when proved, is often incomplete and requires tinkering for it to become complete.

People believed Newton emphatically for centuries until Einstein. People believed Einstein emphatically until Hawking...

Someone will always be waiting in the wings to elaborate or discredit what came before.

It takes a long time to figure out that everything in creation comes right back down to what they consider a "Big Bang." it is ironic that those of us who have a lesser knowledge, understand that the "Big Bang." Was the voice of the intelligence (The intelligence science is still looking for by the way...) who created the universe and everything... His name is The Great I am. Otherwise know as ... God.

Answer 7

What does any "canon" have to do with science. When the bubonic plague hit Jerusalem they said, "God is angry." Yet science has proved it to be a plague. When you had great rain storms that flooded villages they said, "God is angry." Yet science has proved it to be hot and cold air masses to be colliding. When Galileo said earth was not the center of the Universe he was forced to retract it or die. Now we know, through science, it is not the center of the Universe. You can not use "canonization" as a tool for science when it is only based on a belief and not factual evidence.

Answer 8

Science cannot explain why your thought patterns defenestrate from normal rational thinking beings.
But I doubt if they would dismiss your existence!

Answer 9

Please don't discredit a group of well-doers just because there are a few "radical" scientists out there. It's not fair to the sane ones who actually are open minded.

Answer 10

You're right: Scientists insist on reproducibility.

If you don't require consistancy or reproducibility,
its amazing what you can come up with.

Please give specific examples...