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The point I was trying to point out to Harry T was that a scientist can be as dogmatic as any fundamentalist religionist.
I'll use a medical example, instead. In the late 19990's years ago, a medical researcher, working in Alzheimer research, Decided that maybe Alzheimer's wasn't cause by the plaques in people's brains; that the plaques were only the body's way of trying to cope with the real cause. He gave a paper at a major convention. Half the entire group of his peer scientist got up and walked out during the presentation. (The only thing worse for a scientist is to be thrown out of science for plagiarism or data falsification.)
Some of the walked out scientists were interviewed about the walk-out. The comments were in the order of - how could he ignore proven science, obviously didn't understand the subject, ect.
10 years later, after all the drug trials blocking plaque had completed and the disease progression hadn't been stopped and in some cases made worse. Only then did they admit there might be something to the researcher's ideas. Note, they didn't try to test them, the test only ended up coming out as a byproduct of their own ideas.
Why? Because the Alzheimer's research world knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that those plaques caused Alzheimer's. How did they know? They were there! <Bleep> it!
They had mistaken correlation with causality.
That's the problem with science today. Too much Dogma and too little "Hmm. that's an interesting experiment. I wonder what would actually happen..."
Too much finding the "right" subject for a grant (right being what gets funded, not what might actual advance knowledge). Too much getting published in the "right" journals, too much making certain you don't make the more senior scientists look bad (who will vote on your tenure). Too much "playing the game" to get ahead (or even stay in the game). Too much following the straight and narrow to have a wild breakthrough...
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