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The article of Garnier in micro paleontology is in the midst of a small storm as anonymous accusation arose and spread throughout the Internet that his research was unreliable.
Well I’m not a paleontologist and can’t determine whether the fossils were found in locality or are taken from Tunisia and hope that this discussion would be settled by the scientific community and not by blogers that might be interested in the discussion but don’t have the professional knowledge and background to settle the discussion.
I can bring Garnier’s article as I got it from him here.
In this context I came across this post discussing scientists that open blogs and giving them an advice
How do you protect yourself from the scrutiny of the blogosphere? Vigorously communicate your views, and adopt with professional standards of data archiving, reporting and openness. In a world where a freelance web journalist can walk around with at cell phone camera instantly relaying stories back to a web site with thousands of hits an hour, perhaps a new breed of freelance scientist will emerge, replicating experiments, falsifying theories and reporting the results in real time. Or perhaps Open Science, where data are posted and contributors analyze it for free. Why change? The second wave of the Internet now called [tag]Web 2.0 promises to have even more profound effects on our societal structures than the first — and academe will not be immune.
In our context no one really knows what happened and why a prof. of paleontology was attacked on the Internet in this way, the claim of one colleague shouldn’t be enough for such a strong attack because my experience from my scholar years in the University reminds me to be careful, people would attack each other research if only to have a better position and the ego wars are more intense than one tends to think.
Can you really determine where did this come from?
or this?
The other side to th story is the ability to raise arguments that someone wants to make knowingfully well that the readers can’t possibly verify or repute them as is the case with the creationist.
Basically this kind of stuff is what Creationists are very good at. Tossing out a completely bogus argument knowing full well that most of their audience wont have either the background knowlege to know it is bogus or the time to verify if the argument is bogus. Add on top of that, the desire to believe these bogus arguments because they fit with the preconcieved views of many in their audience and they can get away with guite a bit of nonsense.
