Von Frisch's beautiful but incomplete hypothesis fell the first time it was
seriously challenged. That was 30 years ago. But it is such a beautiful
hypothesis that it fails to go away. Also there is the issue of his
prestige in the scientific community. That carries a lot of clout. I have
spoken with Adrian Wenner (who demonstrated in the early 70's the von
Frisch's explanation was flawed) on the problems he has had in getting an
audience. His work was largely ignored by the scientific community because
it seemed to disparage a venerated scientific figure. Things were so bad
that he pretty much has focused on issues of philosophy of science for a
while (pretty terrible fate!), and still writes a lot on the subject.
I believe that left to itself the scientific community (i.e. those actually
doing research and publishing the results in peer-reviewed journals) is
self-corrective. However the problem arises because the community is made
up of human beings. These creatures have a remarkable avidity for spinning
dogma into the data. And it is this spun dogma that largely occupies the
historical parts of the textbooks of science, and thus trains the minds of
science students, and thus interferes with the objectivity that all
scientists should seek.
Art
http://biology.swau.edu