ABOUT CONSERVATIVE NATURE OF PEOPLE OR WHY WE DON´T LIKE NEW THINGS


Yes, it is true that people do not like change and you can get proof of it everywhere around, in any area, from children´s behavior to science.

For example, look at the life of Afred Wegener, (1880-1930), a German climatologist and geophysicist, who in 1915 published an expanded version of his 1912 book The Origin of Continents and Oceans. This work was one of the first to suggest continental drift and plate tectonics. He suggested that a supercontinent, he called Pangaea, had existed in the past, then broke up starting 200 million years ago, and the pieces of it "drifted" to their present positions. He cited the fit of South America and Africa, as proof, ancient climate similarities, fossil evidence (such as the fern Glossopteris and Mesosaurus), and similarity of rock structures. The book was translated to English in 1924, when it aroused hostile criticism. The proposal remained controversial until the 60-ies (Eric Weisstein, March 11, 1996). *

In the article "The Meteorologist Who Started a Revolution" (by Patrick Hughes)** you can find several examples of a hostile reception of Alfred Wegener´s ideas by scientific community.

"Utter, damned rot!" said the president of the prestigious American Philosophical Society. "If we are to believe [this] hypothesis, we must forget everything we have learned in the last 70 years and start all over again," said another American scientist.

Anyone who "valued his reputation for scientific sanity" would never dare support such a theory, said a British geologist.

Thus most in the scientific community ridicule the concept that would have revolutionized the earth sciences and reviled the man who dared to propose it, a German meteorological pioneer and polar explorer, Alfred Wegener. Science historians compare his story with the tribulations of Galileo.

"It only took 60+ years for the Academy of Sciences who drummed him out of the Academy for his crazy theory of tectonic plates to realize he was right" (Ozzie Gontang.)***

This attitude continues to be a topic for discussions up to date. It goes into every area of life where new ideas arise. The freshest example could be found on a recent TV show "American Inventor" where Joe Sparks, Pose Tech coach Level 2 from Toledo, Ohio, presented his invention, an "EzRun" belt, which allows a runner to learn good running technique faster and easier. A video clip of this show is on our website. Not surprisingly, looking back to history, he got a negative reception from American inventors, who are supposed to be the ones supporting inventions.

Well, human history continues in the same way as always, human nature doesn´t change, it resists to anything new, innovative, and going against the establishment. The question is: should it always be this way or should we try to manage it somehow on our way to the future? So far nobody invented anything to help us overcome this "tradition". Sometimes innovators devoted their whole lives to struggle for their ideas to be accepted and they did not always succeed. The main problem is that people do not want to change their present state of the mind, because it safe, secure, and stable.

Is it supposed to be this way, because there is no other way around? It is a good question. Obviously, we can´t just ask people be open-minded. It will not work. So far, not too many things were invented with a full support of society. Even the most obvious things, such as cars and computers had been first accepted negatively. And those came at the time when people needed these inventions as a next logical step towards the progress. So there is always a gap between what people need and what they understand about it. There should be some kind of common sense, maturity of the mind in people to be able to mentally accept these things positively.

So, the society as a whole should be ready for these things to be accepted. But how does it actually happen is not known yet. There are lots of attempts to find this out, but we don´t have any answer yet. We know one thing for sure that it is about people´s perception, which changes the state of mind. No doubt, we can teach people to perceive new things in a different way. So education could be a solution. Then we need to develop an educational system based on people´s needs, even if they don´t know about them yet.

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_{* Alfred Wegener, by Eric Weisstein, http://pangaea.org/wegener.htm
** The Meteorologist Who Started a Revolution, by Patrick Hughes, http://pangaea.org/wegener.htm
*** Ozzie Gontang, Ph.D., Pose Method Certified Running Coach Level I, San Diego, CA.}