Such anecdotes, even if apocryphal, illustrate a rather wide spread and troubling tendency in academic thinking that can be summarized as "if the facts contradict the theory, it is the facts that must give." I guess this kind of thinking goes back to Plato. If this kind of argument "proves" the impossibility of a flight of an insect or a spaceship or "predicts" a revolution that fails to materialize, it is mostly comical, but if it is used to,say, determine the "moral worth" of a human being and on that basis deny people access to education and decent life - it is criminal. Unfortunately, this is the modus operandi of the testing-credentialing complex aka higher edumacation in Amerika.
Wojtek
On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 11:26 AM, // ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> wrote:
> On Feb 9, 2012, at 11:14 AM, Carrol Cox wrote:
>> Comic Interlude
>>>
>>> "Or that wonderful little joke that I have posted before: "Scientists have
>>> proven beyond doubt that the bumblebee does not have the necessary wingspan
>>> to fly. The bumblebee does not know this and keeps flying anyway.".
>>> -ravi
>>>
>>
>> I first encountered d this anecdote in the early 1940s in the pages of the
>> Reader's Digest, and it has been endlessly repeated since then.
>> Unfortunately, if I remember correctly, its premise (that aerodynamics
>> failed to explain the flight of the bumblebee) has also, I think, been
>> debunked. No doubt science often does err in this way; the flight of the
>> bumblebee just happens NOT to be an actual illustration of such error.
>>
>
> Oh I have always taken it to be a joke, not a factual claim (that bumblebees cannot, per science, fly). I didn’t know that at some time this was presented as a fact, unsurprisingly in the Readers Digest!
>
> —ravi
>
>
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-- Wojtek http://wsokol.blogspot.com/