Re: pseudoscience and fossils

Phil Nicholls (pn8886@csc.albany.edu)
16 Jan 1995 04:07:06 GMT

In article <3fcl5d$oq5@newsbf02.news.aol.com>,
Pat Dooley <patdooley@aol.com> wrote:
>Those of you dragged Velikovsky into the debate should also recognise
>that the crackpots are right occasionally. Peter Wegener's theory
>of continental drift was treated with derision by the professionals,
>the geologists. He couldn't get published in the peer-reviewed journals
>but he was vindicated many decades after his initial proposal. Of course,
>he was a meteorologist and obviously not qualified to propose a
>geological theory.

Wegener's theory was initially pubished in a peer-reviewed scientific
journal and the debate took place in scientific journals.

>Perhaps Sir Alister Hardy's theory will eventually be accepted, even
>though he was a zoologist rather than an anthropologist.

I wouldn't hold my breath.

>Of course, I 'm still impressed by the time it took the anthropologists
>to spot Piltdown as a fake, and they certainly had to do a lot of
>rearrange of their time scales when accurate dating methods and
>genetically based dating methods came in.
>
>Pat D

Pat, you are beginning to sound more and more like a creationist.
The primary proponents of Piltdown were anatomists, by the way.

-- 

Philip "Chris"  Nicholls               	  Department of Anthropology

Institute for Hydrohominoid Studies       SUNY  Albany

University of Ediacara			  pn8886@cnsunix.albany.edu

"Semper Alouatta"