When facts falsify hypotheses facts are wrong

Thomas Huxley, the friend and supporter of Darwin said that when ugly facts are in contrasts with good ideas good isead must succomb. As a mattert, history of science shows that m many cases exaclty the opposite happens. Think of Wallace's continental drift. A bounty of facts supported his theory, and yet it was forgotten since it seemed impossible that continents could move. In ecology this is even more frequente. Consider for instance this paper in the top (and very fine) hournal !Ecological monographs" ; In shotr it says that the idea that phylogenetic distance is proportional to ecological distance is not supported by fact. But since this is counterinutivive, the facts have to be biased.

Of course not only the facts are not biased in this and other cases, but also the intuition is a very poor guide to science. It would suffice to consider orcas and shark. They occupy more or less the same niche, and yet they are hugely apart phylogenetically. Or birds and pterosaurs: it is simply the process of convergence. Of course the hidden reason for so shallow a paper is the idea (that I exposed in previous post) that you should explain ecology with evolution (which is the opposite of Darwinism) or otherwise the explanations are false. But poor reasoning, provided it is in agreement with conventional wisdom, is highly appreciated among scientist, who, often, are very conformist.