The examples you provided don’t actually support the “one funeral at a time” narrative in your title. Take Barbara McClintock’s jumping genes or Barry Marshall’s H. pylori discovery—in both cases, many scientists changed their views based on compelling evidence while very much alive. There are plenty of other examples of this. For example, the acceptance of prions as disease agents, the role of microbiomes in health, dark energy, and mitochondria’s bacterial origins all show how consensus can shift rapidly once a sufficient amount of evidence has accumulated. Scientists change their minds all. the. time.
This is not to say that there are not fads or incorrect beliefs in science—of course there are. And sometimes it can takes years or decades for them to be overwhelmed. But the “funeral” framing in particular is not only historically inaccurate but also promotes a harmful view that death is necessary for progress. What we actually see in these examples is that scientific views change when sufficient evidence accumulates and a sufficient number of people are convinced, regardless of generational turnover. Suggesting we need scientists to die rather than be convinced by evidence is both incorrect and ethically fraught. I am saddened to see it here and therefore strong downvoted this post.
I think you might be taking the quotation a bit too literally—we are of course not literally advocating for the death of scientists, but rather highlighting that many of the largest historical scientific innovations have been systematically rejected by one’s contemporaries in their field.
Agree that scientists change their minds and can be convinced by sufficient evidence, especially within specific paradigms. I think the thornier problem that Kuhn and others have pointed out is that the introduction of new paradigms into a field are very challenging to evaluate for those who are already steeped in an existing paradigm, which tends to cause these people to reject, ridicule, etc those with strong intuitions for new paradigms, even when they demonstrate themselves in hindsight to be more powerful or explanatory than existing ones.
The examples you provided don’t actually support the “one funeral at a time” narrative in your title. Take Barbara McClintock’s jumping genes or Barry Marshall’s H. pylori discovery—in both cases, many scientists changed their views based on compelling evidence while very much alive. There are plenty of other examples of this. For example, the acceptance of prions as disease agents, the role of microbiomes in health, dark energy, and mitochondria’s bacterial origins all show how consensus can shift rapidly once a sufficient amount of evidence has accumulated. Scientists change their minds all. the. time.
This is not to say that there are not fads or incorrect beliefs in science—of course there are. And sometimes it can takes years or decades for them to be overwhelmed. But the “funeral” framing in particular is not only historically inaccurate but also promotes a harmful view that death is necessary for progress. What we actually see in these examples is that scientific views change when sufficient evidence accumulates and a sufficient number of people are convinced, regardless of generational turnover. Suggesting we need scientists to die rather than be convinced by evidence is both incorrect and ethically fraught. I am saddened to see it here and therefore strong downvoted this post.
I think you might be taking the quotation a bit too literally—we are of course not literally advocating for the death of scientists, but rather highlighting that many of the largest historical scientific innovations have been systematically rejected by one’s contemporaries in their field.
Agree that scientists change their minds and can be convinced by sufficient evidence, especially within specific paradigms. I think the thornier problem that Kuhn and others have pointed out is that the introduction of new paradigms into a field are very challenging to evaluate for those who are already steeped in an existing paradigm, which tends to cause these people to reject, ridicule, etc those with strong intuitions for new paradigms, even when they demonstrate themselves in hindsight to be more powerful or explanatory than existing ones.