Scientists, or rather people as scientists are people, are and were not being willfully ignorant, they were often trying to fit the data to match the expected outcome. Stephen J Gould had a grand time telling of such misadventures in science. ^_^ For example, Gregor Mendel's peas could not have bred as true as expected. It's thought that he just rejected the exceptions as errors and thus got perfect results. Those perfect results didn't hold up to Barbara McClintock's research on maize and she eventually opted to quit publishing research on "jumping genes" as it went against what the scientific community at large expected and it was a risk to her career.
Eventually assumptions change, but not necessarily because the tools are that much better. Usually it's because some other area of study has undermined the basic assumption of how things work, and in that new light, the old data gets re-evaluated and the conclusion updated.
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Date: 2015-02-11 01:34 pm (UTC)Eventually assumptions change, but not necessarily because the tools are that much better. Usually it's because some other area of study has undermined the basic assumption of how things work, and in that new light, the old data gets re-evaluated and the conclusion updated.