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Originally Posted by David I suspect it will, but like previous scientific changes of heart, it will only happen because a lot of people bang on about it and get scoffed at! |
And because a bunch of old farts die and young upstarts pay more attention. That's the way human endeavors work.
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Rupert Sheldrake (who is hopefully recovering from his ordeal) and others are needed to pick away at the orthodox scientific position, and ask questions such as just how it is that dogs seem to know when their owners are coming home, or just how it is that pigeons can be blindfolded, or even anaesthetised, and released several hundred miles away, but still find their way home. It needs Rupert to point out that even if pigeons have a magnetic sense, that is not enough to guide them home from an unknown place (a compass only helps if you know what direction home is).
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Not if you use the Earth's magnetic field as an inclination compass.
http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/reprint/199/1/29.pdf SpringerLink - Journal Article Quote:
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My sense is that physicists are far more ready to discuss radical ideas - if anything, they are hailed for their imagination, even if the idea doesn't turn out. However, in the biological sciences I sense that there is a different atmosphere. Possibly the physicist Roger Penrose encountered the different culture head on when he wrote his books about consciousness (without even a word about ?). Even the idea that some DNA that does not code for proteins, but for RNA that has a direct catalytic role was considered heresy, because there was a 'dogma' that genes code for proteins, full stop!!
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Yeah, it was considered heresy for about five minutes. Then, amazingly, someone noticed RNAs floating about that are not translated. Voila! the 28 March issue of
Science: Science/AAAS | Table of Contents: 28 March 2008; 319 (5871)
Science is not the hegemonic closed-minded enterprise that you make it out to be. It's just a human endeavor with all the associated foibles. Hey, at least it's not politics.
~~ Paul