Personality conflict in the dinosaur extinction debate

While ostensibly about what killed the dinosaurs, you'd be better off looking elsewhere for that. This one is really much more focused on the personalities, hence it's going in Philosophy of Science.

Whatever you think about Keller, her biography is amazing. If it's ever published in full I'd buy it without hesitation. Put it like this : if it included the phrase, "... and then I was kidnapped by pirates", nothing would be amiss.

I must confess to a bias against Keller though. A long time ago I read Richard Muller's "Nemesis", which includes a lot about the development and reception of the impact theory. Best philosophy of science book I ever read.
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2016/05/nemesis.html

There is a popular view of academia as somewhere where there are stuffy old professors who are constantly trying to stifle the ideas of the young whippersnappers who are in turn trying to steal their jobs and overthrow the dogmatic establishment. I've worked in three different institutions in three different countries and talked to people from God-knows how many others, and this just isn't true. It's easy to play the victim because the idea of a entrenched idea has a certain narrative plausibility. Of course old people don't like changing their minds, that's what old people are like, isn't it ? All those lucrative grants, no-one's going to want to the rock the boat, right ?

Wrong. It's the tenured professors who have the most freedom and correspondingly crazy ideas of all. Mad as hatters, some of 'em. If anything it's the younger generation (I include myself in that demographic) who are more reluctant to change because they haven't witnessed established ideas being overturned, and haven't had the time to explore the existing ideas in full.

That is not to say that the popular narrative version never happens or that young people never have any good ideas, because that is equally stupid. What I've witnessed is simply more of a full spectrum than the popular version suggests. Sure, you may get the odd dogmatic older idiot here and there. And yes, you get the occasional plucky young underdog. But the plucky underdog can be and is usually wrong, and sometimes an undeservedly arrogant SOB. The dogmatic professor can be adept at letting all sides express their opinions, even ones he thinks are nonsense, while the underdog tries to shout out dissent. The contrarians, who actually tend to be much older in my experience, can be ferociously intelligent but also wilfully ignorant. People can be underhand, political, and outright abusive. And yet, most of the time - the vast majority I would say - they're just trying to get on with the job as honestly as they can. The model of competitive collaborations is hardly perfect - you won't get a perfect institution for trying to get subjective humans to reach an objective conclusion, not ever - but it's by and large enormously successful at preventing groupthink and other routes to a false consensus.
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2015/10/false-consensus.html

Rant almost over. The only other point I would make is that the history of science is awash with cases where the established view was overturned very rapidly. Scientists tend to get excited only when you have both good evidence and a plausible mechanism to explain it. If you don't have that they'll be stubborn as hell, and for good reason : there are huge numbers of competing crackpot fringe theories out there. I really wish people with crazy ideas would understand two things : how many other people with crazy ideas there were, and that the mainstream idea is attacked just as viciously as the rest. That is, in fact, the principle reason people believe in it over the swarming multitude of alternatives.
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2015/06/consensus-and-conspiracy.html

Righto, time for some quotes from the article :

These theories fell by the wayside when, in 1980, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Luis Alvarez and three colleagues from UC Berkeley announced a discovery in the journal Science. They had found iridium—a hard, silver-gray element that lurks in the bowels of planets, including ours—deposited all over the world at approximately the same time that, according to the fossil record, creatures were dying en masse. Mystery solved: An asteroid had crashed into the Earth, spewing iridium and pulverized rock dust around the globe and wiping out most life forms.

Muller's book describes how initially they were convinced it was a supernova until they realised there was a fault in the experimental procedure.

News articles described scientists rallying around Alvarez’s theory in record time, especially after the so-called impacter camp delivered, in 1991, the geologic equivalent of DNA evidence: the “Crater of Doom,” a 111-mile -wide cavity near the Mexican town of Chicxulub, on the Yucatán Peninsula. Researchers identified it as the spot where the fatal asteroid had punched the Earth. Textbooks and natural-history museums raced to add updates identifying the asteroid as the killer.

Maybe after the impact crater, but I was never taught it as anything like a "fact" in school or in any books I read. Which was quite a lot, that being prime, "small boy with interest in dinosaurs" era for me.

Impacters’ case-closed confidence belies decades of vicious infighting, with the two sides trading accusations of slander, sabotage, threats, discrimination, spurious data, and attempts to torpedo careers. “I’ve never come across anything that’s been so acrimonious,” Kerr says. “I’m almost speechless because of it.” Keller keeps a running list of insults that other scientists have hurled at her, either behind her back or to her face. She says she’s been called a “bitch” and “the most dangerous woman in the world,” who “should be stoned and burned at the stake.”

I personally know at least one academic who claimed he wanted to shoot a rival, but I think he was joking... well, probably only half-joking.

Ad hominem attacks had by then long characterized the mass-extinction controversy, which came to be known as the “dinosaur wars.” Alvarez had set the tone. His numerous scientific exploits—winning the Nobel Prize in Physics, flying alongside the crew that bombed Hiroshima, “X-raying” Egypt’s pyramids in search of secret chambers—had earned him renown far beyond academia, and he had wielded his star power to mock, malign, and discredit opponents who dared to contradict him. In The New York Times, Alvarez branded one skeptic “not a very good scientist,” chided dissenters for “publishing scientific nonsense,” suggested ignoring another scientist’s work because of his “general incompetence,” and wrote off the entire discipline of paleontology when specialists protested that the fossil record contradicted his theory. “I don’t like to say bad things about paleontologists, but they’re really not very good scientists,” Alvarez told The Times. “They’re more like stamp collectors.”

To be fair, Muller's book also has several criticisms of Alvarez. It also gives credit where credit is due, which is often.

But not by everyone. “Normally, when people get attacked and given a hard time, they leave the field,” Keller told me. “For me, it’s just the opposite. The more people attack me, the more I want to find out what’s the real story behind it.” As Keller has steadily accumulated evidence to undermine the asteroid hypothesis, the animosity between her and the impacters has only intensified. Her critics have no qualms about attacking her in the press: Various scientists told me, on the record, that they consider her “fringe,” “unethical,” “particularly dishonest,” and “a gadfly.” Keller, not to be outdone, called one impacter a “crybaby,” another a “bully,” and a third “the Drumpf of science.” Put them in a room together, and “it may be World War III,” Andrew Kerr says.

My problem is that having looked at the evidence from contrarians in my own field, I've ended up concluding that most of their ideas are utterly wrong and founded on little (or in some cases zero) evidence. I mean senior professors here, not outside cranks.

The greatest area of consensus between the volcanists and the impacters seems to be on what insults to sling. Both sides accuse the other of ignoring data. Keller says that her pro-impact colleagues “will not listen or discuss evidence that is contrary to what they believe”; Alan Hildebrand, a prominent impacter, says Keller “doesn’t look at all the evidence.” Each side dismisses the other as unscientific: “It’s not science. It sometimes seems to border on religious fervor, basically,” says Keller, whose work Smit calls “barely scientific.” Both sides contend that the other is so stubborn, the debate will be resolved only when the opposition croaks. “You don’t convince the old people about a new idea. You wait for them to die,” jokes Courtillot, the volcanism advocate, paraphrasing Max Planck. Smit agrees: “You just have to let them get extinct.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/dinosaur-extinction-debate/565769/