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Paddling Against the Tide
Urantia Book readers with a scientific bent may have noticed a Murphy's Law type of phenomenon in media reviewing of topical science. Basically it boils down to "don't buck the system," and has the effect that, regardless of what a set of experimental results might indicate, a way has to be found to make them conform to whatever the current line might be.
A nice example is to be found in the Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and reads:
"A team of astronomers from the California Institute of Technology has discovered what appears to be a full-fledged spiral galaxy that existed when the universe was only 10% of its current age. If so, the finding would contradict accepted theories of galaxy formation. Researchers are therefore looking for alternative explanations for the observation."
You can bet your boots that when you see statements of that sort, the problem lies not at the level of the bench scientist but with some person or body charged with the raising of funds to support the laboratory work. Good science says, "collect the available data, formulate the simplest testable hypothesis to explain the data, then test it."
And so a Hubble telescope gets built--but only after a 1000 fund-raising speeches are made and a dozen or so bronze plaques testify to the names of those who gave the most money or shouted the loudest. Comes the crunch when Hubble's first picture blows the current theory!! How do the laboratory administrators explain this to the chairman of the Senate committee who managed to divert funds from the "Guide Dogs for the Blind" program for the price of having his name appended to the new laboratory wing? We don't have the space to push this line far but with a bit of thought, Urantia Book readers may begin to appreciate that it sometimes takes a long time to change the current paradigm.
Another nice example is the one about Africa being the cradle of mankind. Whatever might happen in the future, the evidence that gave rise to that fable has long since been outdated. But the fable lingers on.
A minor amount of historical research will turn up the origins of the fable--a competition for funds that developed, perhaps unintentionally by the researchers, into holding the record for "the oldest man." In reality, this was the record for the oldest fossil from which Homo Sapiens may or may not have developed. That tiny fragment of bone was worth 10,000 x its weight in gold bullion for prizing money out of rich tycoons, or their widows, all intent on having the family name brought ostentatiously into the public eye for their philanthropic support of worthy causes. And so the myth became entrenched. Now hear this:
"In 1994, Carl Swisher and Garnis Curtis, then at the Institute of Human Origins in Berkeley, Calif., first cast serious doubt on the chronology of the conventional theory when they reported that the remains of Homo erectus specimens found earlier in Java, Indonesia, were about 1.8 million years old. Because that is 600,000 years older than comparable African H. erectus remains, Swisher and Curtis took their find to support the idea that this upright-walking hominid evolved in Asia rather than Africa."
The establishment countered this claim by throwing doubt on the dating techniques. But that fell through when the dating was confirmed by a different group using entirely different technology. In the meantime, hominid fossils plus their tools, dated at least 780,000 years old, have turned up at Atapuerca, Spain, a 1.8 million year tooth fragment has come to light in southern Spain, and a jaw bone of roughly the same age was found at Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia. I thought that the establishment reply to this had a touch of class. It came from a member of the American Museum of Natural History, New York:
"The general trend of recent finds supports a relatively early departure from Africa."
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