Nobel Prizes are currently being doled out, which reminded me of the blog post here from one year ago, and worth repeating:
" A couple days ago Larry Marshall and Robin Warren won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discovery almost 25 years ago that a bacterium helicobacter pylori was the cause of most stomach ulcers and gastritis. At the time (when it was widely believed ulcers were caused by over-acidity) peers called the contention "preposterous," since bacteria obviously couldn't survive in stomach acid. The findings and discoverers were shunned and denigrated, and it took many years for Marshall and Warren to prove themselves right and the skeptics wrong. Today researchers are looking at what role microbes may play in many other inflammatory ailments, no longer scoffing at this one-time un-establishment notion. Medicine is a field full of instances of entrenched 'accepted knowledge' being overturned in time. So too... field biology."No matter how many people voice a given dogma (in our case Ivory-bill extinction), it doesn't make it so, especially when so little evidence exists to support it. However, in time, regardless of how many are voicing the dogma, they may all appear foolish if the evidence becomes clearcut in favor of a long-held minority view. And at that point the credibility and competency of the dogma-worshippers becomes open to question on additional matters...
Speaking of Ivory-bills, Laura Erickson reports that a talk on the Florida Ivorybill find will be given today over the lunch hour at the conference in Veracruz. Don't expect the talk to have anything new that hasn't already been released, but a chance to gauge some of the reaction to it.
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