The history of science is replete with examples, from plate tectonics to prions, of heretical ideas that received a poor reception from the scientific establishment when they were first proposed. The apparent resistance to new ideas has earned scientists a fair bit of criticism. But some recent publications have indicated both that it is possible for fringe ideas to get a hearing from mainstream science, and that their proponents may end up wishing they didn't.

Fringe ideas that go against mainstream scientific thought are effectively a constant in most areas of science, and there are a number of examples where the ideas have moved from the fringes to the mainstream. The classic example here is Alfred Wegener, who is celebrated for his development of the ideas we now know as plate tectonics, a phenomenally successful scientific theory. At the time, however, his ideas were ridiculed. "Reaction to Wegener's theory was almost uniformly hostile, and often exceptionally harsh and scathing," as the Berkeley site notes.

Many have used that as a cautionary tale, a warning that the conservatism of the scientific community might interfere with achieving its goal of understanding the natural world. But, as we noted, fringe ideas, often dozens of them for every successful area of science, are a constant. Inevitably, the majority of them will necessarily wind up being not only wrong, but uselessly so. This forces the scientific community into a balancing act; in the words of Richard Feynman, scientists have to "Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out."

From open minds to falling brains

But, despite the ostensible conservatism of the scientific community, it's pretty shocking how often ideas from the fringes wind up getting published. A great example of this is last week's publication of a paper that discussed attempts to use Newtonian mechanics to explain a Universe that, as most scientists have concluded, is driven by relativity and dark matter.

MOND theories, as the neo-Newtonian ideas are termed, is definitely on the fringes of mainstream thought, given that they can't explain a wealth of observations that are consistent with dark matter, and don't currently handle relativistic effects very well (and we know that relativity works with everything from black hole binaries to GPS satellites). Still, people continue to do work on MOND (and continue to get published), in part because, relativity's accuracy notwithstanding, we don't currently have a satisfying theory of gravity. And the people working on MOND theories at least seem to be making a serious attempt to come to grips with real-world data.

But it's possible to go further on the fringes (and rack up a higher crackpot index score) without leaving the scientific literature. A paper was recently published by the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science that was so far out on the fringes, we labeled it Weird Science. Its author, Donald I. Williamson, argued that separate larval and adult stages of insects didn't arise due to different selective pressures during these stages; instead, he suggests the modern species are the product of the hybridization of a velvet worm (the caterpillar) and a flying insect (the butterfly). The idea is at least vaguely scientific in the sense that the paper was able to make some testable predictions.

As we mentioned at the time, however, there was enough data to indicate it was wrong right from the start. And, in fact, a follow up paper has already been published showing that some of the predictions made in the original publication could be tested—and shown to be false—using public databases of biological information. In fact, the authors of the second paper have apparently been publishing papers showing that Williamson's hybridization ideas are incompatible with data for a few decades, apparently without making much of an impression on Williamson.

All this seems to suggest that this is a case where Williamson has abandoned the scientific fringes and simply stopped paying attention to reality.

Ignoring reality is a remarkably frequent problem as one heads deeper into the fringes. For example, there's a retired geologist named Nils Axel M�rner who apparently thinks, despite copious evidence to the contrary, that ocean levels aren't rising in any significant way. Similarly, Peter Duesberg attempted to raise doubts about the HIV/AIDS connection by claiming that HIV did not satisfy Koch's postulates. In doing so, he completely ignored that there are exceptions to these postulates, like asymptomatic disease carriers, that were recognized by Koch himself.

Heretics and public perception

Fringe ideas do play an essential role in science; they bring new ideas and perspectives to unsolved problems and, in rare cases, end up finding a permanent home in the mainstream. But it's important to remember that there will always be far more fringe ideas than there will ever be space in the mainstream. By necessity, the majority of heretical ideas will be wrong, and most of them won't ever be useful in their failure. If the scientific community reacts as if new ideas are probably wrong, it's because they are. This negative response is exacerbated by the fact that a lot of people on the fringes wind up being crackpots, unconstrained by either the scientific method or reality.

All of that is important to recognize, because fringe ideas seem to have a lasting popularity with the public. There's a certain appeal to the narrative of the lone genius bucking the system that resonates, even within the scientific community. And, in many cases, the fringe ideas are popular outside of the scientific community because the public isn't comfortable with mainstream scientific thought for social (evolution) or political (climate change) reasons—or simply because they can't come to grips with the strange worlds of relativity and quantum mechanics.

You can see this in the discussion of the recent MOND article, where, for every person who discussed the copious data that has led most scientists to conclude there must be dark matter, you'd find someone voicing the nagging suspicion that it's all little more than an accounting trick.

Still, the MOND work provides a useful guide to the sort of fringe science that should be accorded some respect. Even if their models perform poorly when confronted with real-world data (especially when compared with alternatives) the people working in the area are at least trying to revise their ideas to come to grips with reality. In contrast, Williamson appears to maintain his ideas despite repeated intrusions by reality.