Academic debate

[philmophlegm]

A posting by louisedennis and a subsequent reply by ladyofastolat on loa's thread here http://ladyofastolat.livejournal.com/135044.html?view=1531780#t1531780 together with a book of Bunn's that I'm reading and another book I've read in the past got me thinking...



This is an academic question. I am not an academic, but I occasionally read academic and semi-academic material in a number of different subjects (some sciences, some arts).

There are people on my friends list who are or were academics. There are other people on my friends list who are just clever. I want your help with an interesting question.

Can anyone think of any issue, in any academic subject, where academic debate and proper reasoning has been somewhat stifled because:

a) the accepted wisdom is so all-pervading that to question it would invite derision ("What do you mean 'The Earth isn't flat'? Don't be daft") or worse ("The Earth isn't flat? Burn the heretic!")

b) funding and career progression is available to academics who accept a particular wisdom and not to academics who question it ("The Earth isn't flat, you say. Would you like to reconsider the conclusions of your thesis and accept this grant from the Flat Earth Society?")

c) politicians and special interest groups have considerable political capital invested in the accepted wisdom and certainly don't want any scientists rocking the boat ("But if it turns out that the Earth isn't flat, then people won't simply believe everything we tell them in future.") ?

Comments

[tovaglia.livejournal.com]

a) and b)
Suppressor T cells.
In the 1970s, suppressor T cells were identified: lymphocytes (blood cells) that actually downregulate the immune response. Subsequently, much of this research turned out to have methodological problems and by the time I was first learning immunology, the words "suppressor T cells" were usally suffixed by "ha ha ha". You certainly would never get funding to study them, because all the reviewers would be too busy rolling around on the floor laughing at you.

The twist comes in the 1990s when it turned out that despite the methodological problems the suppressor T cell people had been right all the time. However, in order to get any funding, researchers had to rename them "regulatory T cells". For the last 5 years they have been a very hot topic in immunology research.

People still say "ha ha ha" after suppressor T cells are mentioned, but it's now more of a rueful laugh.

[purplecat]

The Aquatic Ape. This from Bill. The Aquatic Ape theory runs that at some point in our evolution mankind came down from the trees and spent a few millenia being aquatic. Its a theory that gained perhaps more credance than it deserved because, according to Bill, simply getting involved in refuting the theory subjected you to widespread ridicule in academia. Bill contents himself by saying that when it was first proposed there were gaps in the fossil record for humans which are no longer present (there is no longer, apparently, a missing link) therefore it seems unlikely on many levels.

In Artificial Intelligence we have what my PhD supervisor referred to as a Boom and Bust cycle which may be related to your point. It goes something along the lines of:

A. I. gets talked up (in the first cycle this was by AI researchers but most of them, having been burned, now leave that to media pundits),

AI fails to deliver.

AI is widely deried as hokey, funding dries up.

AI is re-invented possibly with a different name (e.g., expert systems, neural networks, agents, semantic web)

--

on a minor level funding is "faddy" (in some ways this is justified you want there to be priorities and to encourage research in particular areas) and encourages general bandwagonning

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Excellent. That was exactly the sort of example I was looking for. Anyone else?

[jane-somebody.livejournal.com]

Biomedical research into ME. Because (a) 'everyone' knows ME is 'all in the mind'. This seems to be due largely, in UK at any rate, to work of v. eminent psychologist in London (whose name, ironically, escapes me atm due to ME brainfog) and in despite of recent promising research that suggests interesting physical factors to follow up. Thus (b) even though the WHO and the Chief Medical Officer here have accepted ME as a neurological disorder, the MRC have up till now funded several psychology-based trials and investigations of 'treatment' for ME but no physical-based research. And (c) the 'psychology cohort' of eminent chap and his coterie have a lot of status resting on recieved wisdom here not being questioned, and are in a position of sufficient power and influence that it does appear to be stifling or at least hampering progress in other lines of inquiry.

Of course, it wasn't that long ago that, for instance, Multiple Sclerosis was considered to be 'all in the mind'... Any illness whose aetiology is not yet sufficiently understood seems liable to be dismissed as somehow not 'real'.