17, September 2025

Don’t shoot the messenger.

It is well established that knowledge advances as new ideas get proposed and adopted. However new ideas are often rejected initially, and the proponents are often mocked or ridiculed, often at great personal cost.

Why do we so often reject new ideas?

We evolved to be skeptical of change for a number of reasons. In the Stone Age life was precarious and change often meant risk and danger. Culturally we often hold views that are deeply embedded and slow to change. Scientists are deeply committed to the current paradigm. Often new ideas are opposed by vested interests who actively oppose them. Think how the tobacco industry opposed smoking bans by lobbying politicians and trying to cast doubt on the research, among other things. Sometimes bureaucratic inertia plays a role. Taken together, these factors slow down our acceptance of new ideas.

However, skepticism is often a good thing. It encourages critical thinking and protects us from misinformation, scams and attempts at manipulation.

Some examples.

Scurvy. It took the British navy 50 years to adopt citrus fruits to prevent scurvy. Trials in 1747 by James Lind, a naval surgeon, clearly proved that oranges and lemons prevented scurvy, which was a serious disease affecting sailors on long voyages, that we now know was caused by a lack of vitamin C, also found in limes. This led to the term “limeys” for Brits. Several factors slowed adoption – the initial experiments were poorly communicated, there was no theory at the time to explain the results, and the navy was a large bureaucratic organization, slow to change. It became standard practice in the early 1800’s.

Plate tectonics. Alfred Wegener proposed continental drift in 1912, but it was not widely accepted until the 1960’s. Wegener was an outsider – a meteorologist, not a geologist -and there was no theory explaining how the continents could move at the time. Empirical evidence, showing sea floor spreading, to support the idea was not available until the 1950’s. Geologists at the time were committed to other ideas that did not support continental movement. Wegener died in 1930, well before his idea was widely accepted. Today he is recognized as the father of continental drift.

Heliocentrism. In 1633 Galileo proposed the idea that the earth moves round the sun. His work was based on earlier ideas from Nicolas Copernicus but carried extra weight as he used the newly invented telescope to view the moon, Jupiter and Venus. However, this idea contradicted the geocentric view of the Catholic church. For this he was prosecuted by the Inquisition as a heretic, forced to recant his findings, and sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life. His ideas became widely accepted in the 1700’s, helped by the explanation provided by Newton’s laws of motion.

Natural selection. Charles Darwin proposed the idea of natural selection in his book The Origin of Species in 1859. Reaction was mixed, with some strong supporters and some strongly opposed. The strongest reaction came from religious groups who saw the theory as contradicting the biblical creation story. There was no theoretical basis for the idea as knowledge of genetics did not come until much later. It took until the 1930’s for natural selection to become widely accepted.

The cause of stomach ulcers. Up until the 1980’s stomach ulcers were believed to be caused by stress, spicy food, smoking, and alcohol. Two Australian doctors- Barry Marshall and Robin Warren proposed that they were caused by bacteria. This idea was rejected by the medical mainstream, but eventually that changed when Marshall drank some of the bacteria – Helicobacter pylori – developed a stomach ulcer and cured himself with an antibiotic. Marshall and Warren were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology in 2005.

The big picture.

This pattern of initial rejection and hostility followed by a period of further exploration sometimes leading to eventual widespread acceptance is fairly typical. In his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” Thomas Kuhn provides many examples and explores the dynamics of the process in more detail. He points out that rejecting radical ideas is completely rational based on prevailing understanding. His insight was that adoption of new ideas is a social process, not a scientific one.

Some possible novel ideas.

There are always new radical ideas being proposed, some of which might turn out to be true, but are currently controversial. Here is a short list:

  • The idea that plants may have some cognitive ability, similar to intelligence.
  • The idea that viruses are a significant cause of dementia.
  • Cold fusion. Once discredited but still being researched.
  • Whether neurons in the brain can regenerate.
  • Modified theories of gravity. These are alternative explanations that do not require dark matter to explain celestial motions.

Conclusion.

Looking at how important ideas were initially rejected in the past should make us a little more open minded when we hear new ideas, however weird they may seem.

 

Peter Josty