Talk:Don Z. Zimmerman

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Journalistic buzz words about Darwin's theory need to go

Zimmerman did not refute Darwin's theory. This is just some journalist trying to write a catchy title, and our "did you know" editor falling for it. Darwin lived in the 1800s, formulated his theory before he even saw a reef, and did not suggest it would cover every situation.

Really, this whole concept of refuting theories should go unless someone can pull it from a reliable source. This is titillation, not wiki.

184.69.174.194 (talk) 04:43, 5 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

In fact I had a read of the source text, and it admits it doesn't know what it is talking about. Zimmerman did not refute Darwin's theory, he seems to have tried to add to it and broaden it, as so often happens in science. Only a journalist would call this "refuting" a theory, as "conflict journalism" often does.

To get this right, we'd have to go back to the paper by Zimmerman, which people are welcome to do. Meanwhile, "refute" is the wrong word, and not supportable. 184.69.174.194 (talk) 04:54, 5 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Darwin definitely saw coral reefs on his circumnavigation voyage in the Beagle. If you can give me a reference to the Zimmerman's paper I can update the article.

Hawkeye7 (discuss) 05:42, 5 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The reason that I added the "better source needed" tag was because AdderUser added a link - "Zimmerman's Competing Theory of Reef Formation" - to the "See also" section of the article The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, linking back to this article (as well as a comment to that article's Talk page).

I tried searching online, but couldn't find anything published by Zimmerman, beyond finding that he had been doing his research at Scripps. It's possible that, being wartime, his paper may have been classified by the military, rather than published openly in the academic press, which raises the question of how widely his theory was known, and how influential it was. Without seeing the paper, it's also impossible to gauge if his model can be said to be a "competing" theory to Darwin's, or merely a refinement. Bahudhara (talk) 00:29, 6 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm the one who added the "See also" to The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs after reading the article about Zimmerman. I didn't want to overdo it, so I left it as a "See also" (although calling it a COMPETING theory might have overdone it!). I specifically did not want to say that Zimmerman proved Darwin wrong because there was not a lot of proof of that here. I do think that a cross-reference (See also) to Zimmerman could be helpful and should remain. Do you think the "competing" should be deleted or modified? "Competing" does not mean wrong. It could just mean that Theory-Version-17 works better than Theory-Version-11 in a particular instance. I will take one further guess that Zimmerman's "published paper" might be a post-war declassified document published in some military report rather than in a peer reviewed journal. AdderUser (talk) 04:26, 6 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]