New raw data is rarely important to scientists : far more important is what is the most currently socially profitable spin to put on this new raw data.
In their individual activities in their own small personal areas of interest,the collectivity of scientists were adding greatly to the Modern Era's overwhelming sense of sensory overload from a plentitude of new facts and sensations.
Life on Earth and Earth itself was much older than thought - from thousands of years to billions.
Ditto the Universe - billions of years old, trillions upon trillions of other suns like ours, other planets like ours.
An outwardly expanding and growing Universe - perhaps expanding and growing forever.
Ever more species being discovered, every more elements, compounds - ever more and more.
With no end in sight.
If scientists kept up with this, they'd soon be as popular as lions at a lambing.
And this was the first generation of wannabe professional scientists - a generation hoping to be well paid and well pensioned for a lifetime of scientific work.
No more amateurs scientists free to say and do as they pleased.
Professional scientists sang to the public for their supper - what they the public wanted , the scientists gave them.
So plentitude of new facts , beings and objects on one hand.
But on the other - the meat cleaver of plenticide.
It took many forms (Social Darwinism being only the best known) but the bottom line was most of this plenticide was living mistakes, living fossils - early tentative working outs on the way to a few pure perfect forms.
Plato would rescue us from Aristotle .....
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