Evolutionary psychology had to fight like hell and was being systematically ostracized in the early days; Bayesian statistics had to fight like hell; Judea Pearl and company are still fighting to reintroduce the concept of causality into mainstream statistics; for years, AI types denied the blatant evidence coming in from neurology that the brain’s representation of visual imagery involved actual shape modeling in the visual cortex, rather than just propositional logic; Leo Szilard had a hell of a time getting skeptics like Fermi to pay attention to the possibility of a fission chain reaction; and apparently other fields have this problem too, because Max Planck was moved to say, “Science progresses funeral by funeral.”

Now these are selectively salient examples, and I’m sure there are plenty of times when a new idea was taken up without a fuss. But the idea that science is always or even reliably fast on its feet is simply absurd, from a historical perspective.

Science, to work, relies on individuals arriving at correct conclusions ahead of the general community, and their persuading others. It’s hard to see how the community could be smarter than its smartest individuals. It would be a heartwarming thought for emergence mystics, but I just don’t see how it could be true in real life. The most impressive AI thinkers I know (e.g. Judea Pearl) soar above the general community like zeppelins.

I too would like to hear the strongest example a critic of mainstream science could come up with of a good theory that took a long time to be accepted. Just use your judgment as to what constitutes “good” and “long”. Let’s hear about science at its worst, air the dirty laundry.

Good point. For the purposes of my offer of $5.00, I specified that my father does.

What took a century? A “timely fashion” in the face of unambiguous evidence would generally be anything from a few years to, at most, a generation. You often need hindsight to determine when it was that the evidence became unambiguous, but when the evidence is there, it gets accepted.

I’ll Paypal you $5.00 if you can come up with a counterexample that satisfies my father.

“Timely fashion” ranges from a year to a century. Science gets there eventually. It is not designed to get there fast.

There are no cases of a scientific theory backed by solid evidence that failed to gain acceptance in the scientific community in a timely fashion. “Continental drift” is often cited as a theory that took a long time to be accepted, but continental drift, as it was originally proposed, is complete nonsense! It included a mechanism by which continents could move that was completely impractical and contradicted known facts of geology. It was many years later that the modern theory of plate tectonics presented a model of moving continents that was consistent with the facts.

Many correct theories do begin as minority opinions, but when they have evidence to support them, they don’t remain minority opinions. If a theory is old and does not have widespread support, it’s almost always because the weight of the evidence is against it. It’s easy to present a logical, persuasive argument for almost anything. All you have to do is lie about the facts, and you can lead a previously uninformed audience to draw any conclusions you want them to. Makers of “documentaries” about pseudoscientific topics such as UFOs use this technique regularly.

Your friend may one day be vindicated, but the odds are against him and there’s no reason to agree with him today.