This week (or maybe it was last week, but it was this month, anyway), I was in the lab with two coworkers and I was talking about a hypothesis of mine about the reason why birds bob their heads. I thought that it was to give them depth perception, because the fields of view from their two eyes don't overlap very much and so they shouldn't have depth perception while their head is stationary. One of my coworkers said no, it's because there's a tendon connecting their legs to their head, so the head has to move when the legs do. The other guy believed him because he's older and more senior than I am. I suggested that the reason why there would be a tendon to do what he claimed it did could be because the resulting head bobbing gives depth perception, but no one seemed to care or believe me. I tried to argue that other animals with eyes on the sides of their heads, such as deer, also seem to bob their heads a bit while walking. They still weren't buying it.
So, I looked it up. Biologists think that birds bob their heads for image stabilization or for depth perception through motion parallax, or probably both. So, my hypothesis is reasonable and probably correct. Furthermore, a bird will not bob its head if it walks on a treadmill, and it will bob its head if carried forward without being allowed to move its legs. So the head motion is not linked to the feet at all; it's triggered by visual stimulus.
By the time I had reached the conclusion that the tendon hypothesis was bullshit, one of my coworkers had left and it was only the guy who had suggested the tendon with me, and not the guy who believed him over me. He told me he made it up as a joke, just to see if the other guy would believe it.
What's the lesson? Some people care more about who's right than what's right. Or if they aren't sure what's right, they at least fall back on trying to determine who's right. Sure the guy thought about it a little bit, but in the end he didn't know what to think so he trusted the older person over me, even though he was being deceived.
Science, of course, should never be about who's right, but only what's right. People can't own facts. Unfortunately, we sometimes have to choose to trust someone because it would take too long to verify every single bit of knowledge ourselves, but we should always prefer to use reason to determine what is right instead of simply listening to an authority who we trust to be right.
