It's All About the Evidence

From Dispatches from the Culture Wars, a Dover Trial update:

He [Steve Fuller] suggested that perhaps scientists should have an "affirmative action" plan to help emerging ideas compete against the "dominant paradigms" of mainstream science.

Response?

If Fuller is right, then why did quantum mechanics not need an affirmative action program to replace the dominant paradigm? Or big bang cosmology? Or plate tectonics? Those are all ideas that were highly controversial and initially rejected by most scientists in those fields because they upset the applecart. Yet they managed to change the consense and our understanding. Why? Because instead of whining about how unfair it is that the "Copernican priesthood" or the "defenders of Einsteinian orthodoxy" won't take them seriously, they put in the work necessary to establish those ideas as valid. They didn't put acceptance before demonstration, they did the difficult theoretical and experimental work necessary to put their ideas on a solid empirical footing. Cries of persecution do not validate an idea; rigorous and difficult scientific research does.

Dave S. comments:

There is an affirmative action plan in science .... if you want your minority view to prevail, then formulate a testable affirmative case and do the tests.

Gosh that's like, you know, hard work. You mean you actually have to make up testable hypotheses that flow from your theory and test them yourself and defend them to a skeptical audience. No way anyone could do that. If they could, why they should get like a Nobel Prize or something.

It is so unfair that only well supported ideas are accepted

Heh. To paraphrase, "Show me the evidence!"