The perennial challenge of anomalies at the frontiers of science^{[ † ]}

Abstract

The history of science is full of rejections of novel discoveries that challenged the dominant paradigm. The reasons for rejection on the part of the scientific community are discussed. Nonetheless, scientific anomalies are crucial to promoting continuous scientific innovation and breakthroughs. The most challenging anomalies are recognized only after a reasoned explanation has been offered and accepted. Many of these anomalies come from the ‘frontier sciences’, areas of scientific inquiry that are not yet mainstream. The extraordinary obstacles that frontier scientists face are elaborated. In the light of this, strategies are offered toward progress, particularly for research in homoeopathy and low dose bio-effects.

Several frontier areas of research in biology and medicine relate to the subtler features of life that seem to defy explanation by conventional molecular mechanism. Frontier scientists working in the areas of consciousness studies, epigenetic inheritance, certain topics in bio-electromagnetics, and homoeopathy and other low dose bio-effects offer science the gift of new questions that go beyond the dominant paradigm of mechanical reductionism. Often regarded as isolated anomalies by the mainstream, the results of their investigations taken collectively show need for a larger paradigm to accommodate them. Biology appears to entering a crisis. Whereas conventional science maintains that biological information is stored and transferred via biomolecular structures such as DNA, the novel frontier findings suggest that other informational signals not attributable to discrete chemical structures may elicit biological effects. These signals may be interacting with a more subtle bioregulatory system that is a property of the whole organism, such as its endogenous electromagnetic field.