[Coral-List] Corals Persist But Bioerosion Rises in Low-pH Waters

[Alevizon, William Stephen]

Doug:


Re: “There are lots of things out there that people believe in that don't have scientific evidence to support them.” - Can’t argue with that, keeping in mind that historically this would include many hypotheses for which widely accepted, and supposedly supporting, “scientific evidence” turned out to be erroneous interpretations of observations or data, or just plain bad data.


Re: “it is a mistake to conclude from the fact that quite a few major scientific discoveries and theories have been doubted when first proposed, that anything that is doubted must be right.” - I can’t argue with that bit of logic.


That said, I fail to see any connection between either of your two above statements (which seem to neatly summarize your post) and my previous comment regarding Darwin. Absolutely nothing in my referred post suggested support for the admittedly absurd notion that, “anything that is doubted must be right.”


I would certainly hope we could agree that in many important instances, the size of the early cheering section for a given hypothesis has proven a poor indicator of whether or not that hypothesis was later falsified.


Cheers to you too.


Bill

William S. Alevizon

Research Associate

Dept. of Biology

College of Charleston

58 Coming St.

Charleston,  S.C. 29424

USA