David Reich: uncertainty

Transcript context

…What is counterintuitive or unexpected or hard to accept about this alternative model? What is the hesitation that people have for adopting this? I don’t know. Nobody’s thinking about this model right now. It just seems obviously a very natural model to me. The reason I ask is that Aristarchus, the ancient Greek, had the heliocentric theory because he had deduced how far the Earth is from the sun and noticed other things. But it was not adopted, because his fellow Athenians were like, “Look, if we believe that the Earth revolves around the sun, for it to be the case that we don’t see relative movement of the stars to the Earth, the only possible explanation is that the stars are so far away that it is just incomprehensible and implausible.” So the heliocentric theory was dismissed. What I’m trying to ask is, what is the equivalent here of “for this to work, the stars have to be so far away that it’s inconceivable,” where actually the stars are so far away? Maybe we should adopt the implausible implication that this theory gives us.…

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