My little dispute with John Hiemstra and others over the nature of a small deposit on Caldey Island is quite fun, and it reminds me that disputation and controversy lie right at the heart of science. One might even say that it provides the lifeblood of science....... and it is inevitable and necessary because, as Karl Popper pointed out long ago, science can only advance through a process of falsification. If scientists concentrate on hypothesis confirmation everything stagnates -- and working hypotheses are replaced by ruling hypotheses. We end up with "assumptive" and potentially corrupt research. Now where have we heard that before?
I have another little dispute with James Scourse on the extent of glacier ice across the Isles of Scilly. That's OK too -- and I hope James might agree with me that by testing ideas and scrutinizing evidence more closely, we will all get closer to the truth.
When I sit down and think about it, I recall scores of disputes in my own field of glacial geomorphology, some resolved and others not. Right at the beginning of my career I had a dispute with Prof Fred Shotton over the age of the glacial deposits in Western Britain. On that, I was right and he was wrong. The dispute over the position of the Devensian ice edge in West Wales has involved scores of researchers over the years, and it still rolls on. Right now, there is a somewhat acrimonious dispute (not involving me!) relating to the age of the last glacial ice to have affected Lundy Island:
How many scientific controversies are represented by the lines on this map?
Not so long ago there was another big row about the glaciation of Dartmoor. Going back fifty years or more, Eddie and Sybil Watson had an ongoing dispute with virtually everybody else about the nature of the pseudo-stratified deposits along the Ceredigion coast. There have been big arguments about the nature and age of the deposits covered by peat in the Somerset Levels. That involved Prof Clarence Kidson and others. In Scotland Prof Brian Sissons was notoriously disputatious, and argued fiercely with everybody about everything, verbally and in print! Intense scrutiny was everything to him, and he scared the living daylights out of many a PhD student -- but he was not always right, and taught people to assemble their evidence properly and to interpret it carefully. Prof Dai Bowen had a huge row with Prof Danny McCarroll and many others about the use of amino acid dating techniques, and the consequences of "over-interpreting" the results from an inadequately understood new technology. The old ideas about matching erosion surfaces in the landscape, espoused by Professors Wooldridge and Linton and other senior professors were disputed, bit by bit, by younger geomorphologists, and were eventually abandoned on the grounds that they were far too simplistic and were not properly supported by field evidence. I could go on a great length........
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This is an interesting extract from a recent article:
Source:
Why do scientists disagree? Explaining and improving measures of the perceived causes of scientific disputes. By Nathan F. Dieckmann, Branden B. Johnson
Plosone
Published: February 7, 2019
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0211269
Here is another short extract from Wikipedia:
This brings me, inevitably, to the dispute over the transport of the bluestones, which I am happy to acknowledge and play my part in, but which is ignored or denied by Mike Parker Pearson and his colleagues. Are we involved in a scientific controversy, or are we not? Well, if we say, for the sake of argument, that archaeologists are not scientists but storytellers, it might be argued that they are NOT involved in a scientific dispute!
But of course there is a scientific dispute going on, and it has been running for almost exactly a century. HH Thomas was a geologist, and so was Geoffrey Kellaway, and although they (as far as I know) never met, they certainly disputed the glacial and human transport hypotheses, as did other scientists including Olwen Williams-Thorpe and her team, James Scourse and Christopher Green. More recently Rob Ixer, a professional geologist, has been very happy to dispute many points relating to his petrology and provenancing research, and also the glacial and human transport theses, on the pages of this blog, but not in published articles. In those, whether writing with Richard Bevins as a specialist geologist or as a part of a team of specialists from many disciplines, he has studiously maintained the pretence that his ideas are universally accepted and that there are no disputes in progress. Because he is a scientist and I am a scientist, this is a proper scientific controversy, and for it to go unacknowledged strays very close to the realm of scientific malpractice -- as I have said many times before.
To a degree, I suppose we can partly forgive MPP and his archaeology colleagues because they are not scientists and do not fully understand what I am talking about...........
8 comments:
If archaeologists are NOT scientists, may they instead be categorised as social scientists? Social scientists include sociologists.
There are scientific aspects to archaeology. A good example of seeing these aspects is in Julian Richards' currently repeating TV episodes of: "Stories From the Dark Earth: Meet the Ancestors Revisited".
I have seen a couple of these again recently and they are still available via the BBC site. I recommend them, some won't be available very long.
In each episode, Julian returns to some of the most important digs he filmed previously "to discover how science,conservation and history have changed our understanding of entire eras of ancient history". The 3 updating episodes, now around 5 to 7 years old, are on the Stone Age, the Iron Age, and the First Anglo Saxons.
As regards science, Julian visits, for example, the Science Site at Durham University to speak to specialists in various disciplines and to be shown how their findings have advanced knowledge.
As Arpad Pusztai said many years ago, we as a society keep on saying "science" when we mean "technology." A scientist deserves that title only if he works in a scientific way and thinks as a scientist should -- he does NOT deserve that title simply because he uses sophisticated gadgets in his research. Some archaeologists may deserve to be called scientists too -- but the ones whose work I am familiar with should be referred to as storytellers who occasionally play with elaborate toys in an attempt to convince us that their stories are true.
Be interested to have your responses to the J.Richards episode on the Neolithic case studies, i.e. episode on the Stone Age I referred to in my last comment. In it, he consults scientists about a number of issues. I think it is available to watch, via the BBC site, BUT only for a few more days.
I have just again watched the 2013 Neolithic episode of the Julian Richards' "Meet The Ancestors Revisited" hour - long programme. I was very impressed with the considered way the programme - makers communicated to the viewers the great advances in scientific understaning over the pREVIOUS 10 to 15 years. Examples of these include isotope analysis, bone analysis, DNA analysis and environmental studies of hundreds of thousands of snails in the environment (this last at the vicinity of the Dorset cursus monument).
At one point he said "how much can we say with certainty from anaysis, and how much is informed speculation?"
And Julian said at the end of the programme: "Exploring the Neolithic period of over 5,000 years ago can be incredibly challenging. But when the results do come, the rewards can be fantastic. So much has changed in the last 10 years. Just think how much will have changed in the next 10 years".
As regards archaeologists and "gadgets" and a proper scientific thought process, I have recently come across this in a book whose subject is the wisdom found in an altogether different place than geomorphology or archaeology.
"Undoubtedly we live in an information age - its technologies abound and at a click of a button, we can be linked to the almost limitless resources of knowledge of the Internet, virtually wherever we are..........But how smart are we? It is said that a single copy of the New York Times contains more information than would have been available to someone living in 16th century Eurpoe. But are we any WISER for this torrent of information?
AND....
"Today in our scientifically - oriented, technologically - driven and instant - communication world, the value of Wisdom is all too often drowned out or seen to be anachronistic.....The science fiction writer Isaac Asimov observed: 'The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.' The word itself conjures up another age - of bearded men ruminating long and hard on some moral issue."
So I would say that geomorphologists and archaeologists both have to display Wisdom in the way they interpret what scientific techniques provide as "evidence". Archaeologists may indeed call such interpretations "stories", but only insofar as their interpretations involve considered thoughtful wise speculations on events that may be, e.g. in the Neolithic 5,000 years ago - and they may each well need to offer ALTERNATIVES, as Brian and I would argue is the case where two valid schools of thought are involved, as in the Glacial versus Human Transport schism. There should be polite "jaw jaw" going on between the proponents of each point of view.
Agree, Tony -- but this needs to be two-way traffic. Nobody can argue that I, as a geomorphologist, have ignored the considered opinions of certain geologists and certain archaeologists. I have given them a vast amount of space. But they seem to have decided that geomorphologists have nothing to say of any importance, so they have adopted the tactic of refusing to engage and ignoring all of the points raised. If nothing else, the situation is completely bizarre.........
Came across this interesting quote from Mahatma Gandhi: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win." I think we can understand what he is saying if we understand that those who ignore inconvenient evidence or points of view are indicating, through their attitude, that they feel threatened and vulnerable because of the weakness of their own position. If your position really is a strong one, you do not ignore the opposition -- you acknowledge it and deal with it.
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