Broca's Brain - Carl Sagan [47]
Vigorous criticism of new ideas is a commonplace in science. While the style of the critique may vary with the character of the critic, overly polite criticism benefits neither the proponents of new ideas nor the scientific enterprise. Any substantive objection is permissible and encouraged; the only exception being that ad hominem attacks on the personality or motives of the author are excluded. It does not matter what reason the proponent has for advancing his ideas or what prompts his opponents to criticize them: all that matters is whether the ideas are right or wrong, promising or retrogressive.
For example, here is a summary—of a type that is unusual but not extremely rare—of a paper submitted to the scientific journal Icarus, by a qualified referee: “It is the opinion of this reviewer that this paper is absolutely unacceptable for publication in Icarus. It is based on no sound scientific research, and at best it is incompetent speculation. The author has not stated his assumptions; the conclusions are unclear, ambiguous and without basis; credit is not given to related work; the figures and tables are unclearly labeled; and the author is obviously unfamiliar with the most basic scientific literature …” The referee then goes on to justify his remarks in detail. The paper was rejected for publication. Such rejections are commonly recognized as a boon to science as well as a favor to the author. Most scientists are accustomed to receiving (somewhat milder) referees’ criticisms every time they submit a paper to a scientific journal. Almost always the criticisms are helpful. Often a paper revised to take these critiques into account is subsequently accepted for publication. As another example of forthright criticism in the planetary science literature, the interested reader might wish to consult “Comments on The Jupiter Effect” by J. Meeus (1975)* and the commentary on it in Icarus.
Vigorous criticism is more constructive in science than in some other areas of human endeavor because in science there are adequate standards of validity that can be agreed upon by competent practitioners the world over. The objective of such criticism is not to suppress but rather to encourage the advance of new ideas: those that survive a firm skeptical scrutiny have a fighting chance of being right, or at least useful.
EMOTIONS IN THE scientific community have run very high on the issue of Immanuel Velikovsky’s work, especially his first book, Worlds in Collision, published in 1950. I know that some scientists were irked because Velikovsky was compared to Einstein, Newton, Darwin and Freud by New York literati and an editor of Harper’s, but this pique arises from the frailty of human nature rather than the judgment of the scientist. The two together often inhabit the same individual. Others were dismayed at the use of Indian, Chinese, Aztec, Assyrian or Biblical texts to argue for extremely heterodox views in celestial mechanics. Also, I suspect, not many physicists or celestial mechanicians are comfortably fluent in such languages or are familiar with such texts.
My own view is that no matter how unorthodox the reasoning process or how unpalatable the conclusions, there is no excuse for any attempt to suppress new ideas—least of all by scientists. Therefore I was very pleased that the AAAS held a discussion on Worlds in Collision, in which Velikovsky took part.
In reading the critical literature in advance, I was surprised at how little of it there is and how rarely it approaches the central points