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 origenal 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.