The April meeting was devoted to a talk on distinguishing pseudo-scientific claims from new science knowledge. This is a problem for which no clear and simple method has been found, and the speaker quoted Martin Gardner to the effect that skeptics should concern themselves "only with theories so close to 'almost certainly false' that there is no reasonable doubt about their worthlessness." (Fads and Fallacies p. 7) The speaker also emphasized this is his advice to this and any other group of skeptics. As laypersons we have no call or competence to intervene in scientific debate.
To illustrate his thesis about the difficult choice between crackpot idea and great new insight, the speaker chose three scholars, whose theories have been rejected by their peers in this century, Alfred Wegener, Elaine Morgan, and Harlen Bretz. Each of them had the honor of at least one conference chiefly devoted to examining and rejecting their theories.
Alfred Wegener (1880-1930) first propounded his theory that the earth's continents move in a professional paper in 1912, which he followed with a book on Continental Displacement in 1915. After this was translated from the German in 1922, the lack of a force or energy for moving the continents led to rejection of the theory by the geological profession. A major conference to consider Wegener's ideas, sponsored by the American Society of Petroleum Geologists, resulted in a devastating critique in their proceedings. A later writer, Hughes, quoted the president of the American Philosophical Society as exclaiming the very idea was "utter damned rot", and a British geologist as saying anyone who "valued his reputation for scientific sanity" would never dare support such a theory. He also quoted an American expert: "If we believe this hypothesis, we must forget everything we have learned in the past seventy years and start all over again," while another thought the theory "mere geopoetry".
It was not until the sixties that more research and better knowledge of sea floor topography persuaded younger scientists that there was something to Wegener's ideas. Today, under the name plate tectonics, it is the accepted geophysical paradigm that continents do move, and Wegener is considered the pioneer of this insight. Yet, as recently as 1982 Radner and Radner wrote about Wegener as a borderline case of unreason, mainly because Wegener's earth science background was in meteorology rather than geology.
Elaine Morgan is a writer and researcher for documentary television in Britain. In 1972 she published a book, The Descent of Woman, which defended the idea that humans in the course of evolution had undergone a phase in which near shore fishing and diving played a major role. Dubbed the Aquatic Ape Theory, she thought it might admirably explain how we lost our body hair, and how we acquired our upright walk, why as the only of all primates we have a layer of subcutaneous fat and why some of our sweat glands secrete waxy sebum. Criticism from the profession, further reading and thought have led her to modify many of her hypotheses in subsequent books.
In 1990 a conference in the Netherlands was devoted entirely to her theories with mixed results. The experts in general find other theories more attractive. One reviewer of the conference volume concluded: "The final chapter... and the epilogue ... conclude that there is little evidence in support of the AAT and that the evidence in support of the traditional Savannah Theory is much more compelling." A more devastating assessment comes from Lowenstein and Zihlman: "In summary, the Aquatic Ape Theory does not hold water, anatomically, bio-chemically, behaviorally, or archaeologically. With a similar combination of imagination, a grab bag of unrelated "facts" and a popular literary style, one could make an equally convincing case that our ancestors evolved in the air - as von Dänikin has more or less done in his cult book Chariots of the Gods."
Harlen Bretz wrote his first paper on the channelled scablands of eastern Washington State a year after the Scopes trial. In this region the professional geologist and professor at the University of Chicago found potholes the size of Riverfront Stadium, dry waterfalls larger than Niagara, wave riffles of two meters amplitude and corresponding wave length, and sandbanks the size of large hills. Nothing but an exceedingly large flood could have carved these features into the landscape, and Bretz had no source for this water. Many of Bretz' peers could not accept his flood interpretation. Richard Foster Flint, the author of the most highly regarded textbook on American geomorphology was especially unconvinced. James Gilluly of the USGS was another prominent doubter. Bretz vindication came in 1940, when younger investigators identified an glacial ice dam which had blocked ice age Lake Missoula in present western Montana. Lake Pend Oreille in northern Idaho is the remnant of this ice lobe. Repeated rapid melting and breakdown of this blockage allowed the whole of dammed Lake Missoula to wash over the scablands carving the present landscape. The Lake Missoula floods are today considered an established fact. This research was perhaps the first which indicated that nature does not always work only gradually but sometimes proceeds by catastrophes.
Gilluly eventually was able to visit the landscapes in question himself, and has been quoted as admitting: "How could anyone have been so wrong?" And in the old USGS Pick and Hammer Club this doggerel appeared.
A glacier once 'neath its collar got hot
And out o'er the scablands a mighty flood shot.
Now truly, Gilluly, t'will fool ye,
For Bretz has been there and he says there is not
A shadow of doubt what occurred on that spot.
'Tis true, it has Jim Gilluly's goat got.
But speaks he not truly, Gilluly?
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