> "Galileo and Darwin are famous examples of this phenomenon,"
Famous, yes, but there can also be incorrect assumptions in that. Galileo, for example. A lot of people assume his heliocentric model was correct and was only rejected because heliocentrism was considered heretical because it contradicted the ruling assumption of geocentrism. But the Vatican at the time was seriously considering a number of models including some heliocentric models. One of the reasons Galileo's model was rejected, was because it contradicted observations. Planets didn't quite move in the way he predicted, and that's because Galileo clung to the incorrect assumptions that orbits had to be circular.
Of course his core idea of heliocentrism was less wrong than geocentric models, but at the same time it's an example of how addressing one incorrect assumption can lead you into another incorrect assumption. And that also lead to a lot of resistance to your idea, even if the core of your idea is correct.
As for Darwin, a lot of people at the time already assumed that something like evolution had to be going on, and that many animals had common ancestors. They just didn't know how it worked. Even while Darwin was working on his theory, Alfred Russel Wallace was working on the exact same idea. So in that case, the idea was actually obvious to anyone paying attention, and Darwin happened to be the one to get there first. But if he hadn't published about it, Wallace would most likely have done so.
I believe Darwin shelved his findings for years specifically because he didn’t want the hassle of picking the fight he ended up picking, and only published when he found out that Wallace was about to do so himself.
Darwin did not “shelf” his findings, in the sense of stopping work. He just spent decades gathering additional mountains of evidence because he was worried that opponents would spring up and he wanted to make sure everything was watertight.
Then despite his overwhelming evidence, exactly what he feared still happened (and still happens today)
I didn't mean to imply he stopped working on it entirely, but he definitely put off publishing as long as he could because he was (reasonably) worried about what would happen afterwards.
Galileo being right or wrong is not really pertinent for PG's argument. See this piece of his text appearing as a html comment: "When you suppress heresy, you silence not just your opponents but also everyone who contradicts you unintentionally. And because ideas are so interconnected, you're almost certainly silencing more people than you realize. "
Another reason why heliocentism was rejected is the lack of observable star parallax which it implies. No one had an idea stars could possibly be SO far away... and it took another 200 years to detect parallax and further 30 years to measure it first.
That too. Several objections to Galileo's model were based on real observations, which means science. There were sound scientific reasons to reject his model despite the fact that the core of it was a vast improvement. It's an interesting scientific contradiction.
Then they should have just published their own objections. This in no way justifies the persecution of Galileo, which was basically akin to the Soviet persecution of Sakharov -- like him he was under house arrest and forbidden to interact with the scientific community at large.
In a way the same is true for Galileo: he was only really prosecuted after writing a book in which he called the pope (who was up til that point friendly and open to his views) a fool.
Bad lesson from this (completely valid) analogy: by 1970s, Communism has become a full-blown religion, with it's pseudo-scientific roots being thoroughly debunked, but politicians resting on them stubbornly refusing to give way.
That's not even a bad lesson: it is possible to interpret Communism as a radical Christian sect, which, having done away with God altogether, tries to build Heaven on earth. This way, its core beliefs do make sense...or rather, they're internally consistent.
(And I wish you'd stop this nonsense of implying that Galileo had his own special heliocentric model. He didn't; he was advocating the model of Copernicus.)
However, the aberration of starlight was detected in the early 1700s. Although no one had thought to predict its appearance, people quickly realized it only made sense if the Earth was in motion, and was impossible to produce in a geocentric model.
(And, of course, heliocentric elliptical orbits of Kepler explained planetary motion much better than any geocentric system.)
Darwin did excellent work in a number of areas and is a real hero. But I disagree with "the lion's share of the credit" because I don't think there's a finite quantity of "credit" that needs to be shared out.
Ok I know the Darwin stuff, but the Galileo stuff goes against the traditional story by quite a bit - given that going through google to find the truth nowadays is a chore, do you have some authoritative links?
That is goes against the traditional story is part of the point. Traditional stories are often wrong, even if they go against even older, wronger traditional stories.
I can't find the original articles I got this from, but googling a bit got me this very easy to read summary of events[0], albeit in very popular and informal language. But it corresponds with what I read elsewhere, and even goes into a bit more detail in a few places.
(Potential downside of this article in the eyes of some is that it was written by a Christian, who could be believed to have an agenda to defend the church. The previous articles I read were written by an atheist. I'll see if I can find them.)
(edit:)
The author of the original articles has a pretty thorough and well-sourced answer on Quora[1].
GP is taking into account the larger picture and discussion of Galileo's ideas. The Inquisition was sicced on Galileo and the justification was that his ideas contradicted the Bible. But the actual prosecution was also motivated by Galileo's obstreperousness. Guy was difficult and he challenged the Church's authority in weird ways (not always intentionally). In particular, he was seen to have attacked one of his main supporters, who happened to be the Pope.
Exactly. Galileo was originally on very good terms with the pope. Then the pope asked him to write a book comparing heliocentric and geocentric ideas from a neutral perspective. Galileo instead wrote a book ridiculing geocentrism, and had some things the pope said repeated by a character called "Simplico" ("Fool"). He insulted the pope, and that's where the trouble really started.
Well to be honest if antivaxer asked a doctor to compare vaccines to essential oils you would probably do the same, or flat earther asked you to compare theory of flat earth vs cube earth vs geoid earth.
Although one could expect trouble when that patron was basically the most powerful person at that time.
The big difference in your comparison is that vaccines and the roundness of the Earth are very well established with overwhelming evidence supporting them. The heliocentric solar system was not well established at that time. That's what the whole discussion was about.
Copernicus' book had been published in 1543. Galileo was convicted of heresy in 1633. That would be like someone in 2043 being convicted of heresy for saying that DNA has a double helical structure.
Parallax, predicted by the heliocentric model, was only observed in 1806. Until then, its apparent absence was a strong argument against heliocentrism. (We just didn't know that stars are so far away.)
DNA structure is not a very good analogue because here we already had the X-ray image, and the question was to find a molecular structure that matched the data.
Also, the discovery of DNA fulfilled a prediction by Darwin's theory of evolution: that there had to be a mechanism by which traits were passed on to the next generation. It's something that made sense within the paradigm of the time, and it fit the observations.
Heliocentrism made sense on some level, but not on another, and it didn't fit the observations of the time. Only when Kepler made a model that fit observations, and Newton's theory of gravity explained why it had to be that way, did heliocentrism made scientific sense and was geocentrism obviously wrong.
It is not about evidence, it is about sure you are about your argument, and as it was stated below - Galileo wasn't the first one to propose heliocentricism.
But at the time, without robust mathematical concepts of inertia, forces, etc there were some reasonable arguments against heliocentrism. Plus, Galileo ignored Kepler's elliptical orbits, which are closer to reality.
I think it's more fair to say that he contradicted their "interpretation" of the bible at the time. Even Catholic church doesn't maintain those old beliefs any more.
> He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.
Ecclesiastes 1:5 (NIV):
> The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.
A literal interpretation of the bible has the earth standing still while the sun moves. Of course you can interpret any text any way you like, and if somebody wants to make a contrived argument that Moby Dick was really about a shark rather than a whale then there's nothing I can do to convince them otherwise, but the text seems quite clear.
True, but the catholic church did not base their worldview purely on a literal reading of the bible. This was the case for protestants ("sola scriptura"), but the catholic church often favored allegorical readings and did not consider the bible the only authority on truth.
> if somebody wants to make a contrived argument that Moby Dick was really about a shark rather than a whale then there's nothing I can do to convince them otherwise, but the text seems quite clear.
Some have even gone so far as to claim that the stuff in the book didn't actually happen but the book can be read as an allegory of something or other!
As the people you are arguing against are 16th century clergy, you can't really convince them of anything - they are long dead. The best one can do is try to understand how they were thinking.
Most protestants aren't a fan of an excessively literal interpretation either. Modern biblical literalism, where an overly literal interpretation trumps even common sense and observation, is a fairly recent invention (late 18th century, I think), and I, as a Christian, consider it the largest threat to Christianity today. And a heresy, I suppose; it doesn't do justice to what the bible is actually trying to tell us, and focuses only on superficial, nonsensical interpretations that often end up contradictory.
Why wouldn't they be? The Church has always been interested in being correct more than being dogmatically rigid. Took a lot to switch, but they had to change with the times somewhat lest people stop believing.
Can't remember the source, but the Vatican basically told Galileo that they were pretty convinced of heliocentrism, but if he could please stop shooting his mouth off until they got a transition plan in place, that'd be great.
He didn't, so they put him on lifetime house arrest to try to mitigate the damage he could do.
So he didn't get heresy'd for opposing the Church's position, but for undermining it's ability to assert influence and control.
In government and business you can implement policy even if it doesn't align with your personal beliefs, it's called chain of command. No one cares if you're a true believer as long as the work gets done. How many churches will admit to functioning like that.
The Catholic Church from the year 0 to 1800 did lots of that. They had meetings to draft the Bible. What should be included. What should be excluded.
The cool Pope we have now is rolling back tons of rules because it's necessary for the survival of the institution, not because he necessarily thinks they're just. His opinion doesn't matter, only God's.
As we see from the parent here, plenty of other scientists were starting to come to the same opinion, many of them with patronage from the Church, but they had the sense about them to realize that they needed to be 100% certain before the Church would be okay with changing doctrine. And they weren't 100% certain yet.
High switching costs that Galileo couldn't fathom. A stereotypical head in the clouds scientist.
I read a series of articles by a historian about it. The common view most people have about the issue apparently comes from Voltaire and is riddled with misrepresentations in order to make some points Voltaire wanted to make.
History is often much more complicated than suits us.
Assuming the presentation is reasonable, I am actually not convinced that mental habits that would have us agree quicker with Copernicus would actually make us right more often in general. I think often the first people to be right about something will be right for the wrong reasons. It's an interesting thing to chew on.
Galileo was told not to spread his theory because the Church knew that the general public would have a hard time understanding that Galileo's theory didn't contradict Church teachings even though it would seem to to the untrained mind, so they wanted to wait until they could figure out how to make sure that it didn't lead to mass confusion.
That would be difficult, since it isn't true. The Church had banned Copernicus's book and the general concept of heliocentrism in 1616, which was a full 16 years before they went after Galileo for promoting heliocentrism.
Famous, yes, but there can also be incorrect assumptions in that. Galileo, for example. A lot of people assume his heliocentric model was correct and was only rejected because heliocentrism was considered heretical because it contradicted the ruling assumption of geocentrism. But the Vatican at the time was seriously considering a number of models including some heliocentric models. One of the reasons Galileo's model was rejected, was because it contradicted observations. Planets didn't quite move in the way he predicted, and that's because Galileo clung to the incorrect assumptions that orbits had to be circular.
Of course his core idea of heliocentrism was less wrong than geocentric models, but at the same time it's an example of how addressing one incorrect assumption can lead you into another incorrect assumption. And that also lead to a lot of resistance to your idea, even if the core of your idea is correct.
As for Darwin, a lot of people at the time already assumed that something like evolution had to be going on, and that many animals had common ancestors. They just didn't know how it worked. Even while Darwin was working on his theory, Alfred Russel Wallace was working on the exact same idea. So in that case, the idea was actually obvious to anyone paying attention, and Darwin happened to be the one to get there first. But if he hadn't published about it, Wallace would most likely have done so.