God & the Fairy Tree

Your misunderstanding of the nature of the processes of science shows.The workings of scientific discovery are, indeed, very conservative. This is a form of safety that stops wasting resources by running off down too many blind alleys. It also delays the overturning of older and incorrect paradigms, as you point out.However, the conservatism is more strength than weakness. There is no race to learn everything in the shortest time. There is instead a desire to build slowly and surely on firm foundations. The conservatism over existing ideas comes from the fact that they were once the new paradigm and had to break through the wall of carefulness. This makes them a stronger foundation to build upon and makes it reasonable to be resistant to throwing them away too quickly.The jigsaw of knowledge about the natural world that we are building consists of many interlocking and carefully placed pieces. As more are added the degree of confidence that we have them correctly placed increases. Since each one had to be carefully scrutinized before it was placed any attempt to move it requires even more careful scrutiny.One may observe that those that think the paradigm is "reactionary" do not understand the existing paradigm, do not know how it came to be accepted, are not willing to do the hard work necessary to break out of it and throw all sorts of accusations at those who are doing the actual hard work. We find that over the last couple of centuries it has been those willing to understand the current views, willing to work hard and who are thick skinned as well are the ones who change the paradigm. In other words they are the insiders in the fields.Edited by NosyNed, : typo