So Darwin said that the appendix in humans, is a vestigial organ, which I believe current research has proven to be incorrect.
This thread is about such scientific theories that we learnt as kids (say the 80s) which have been proven wrong. Understand that the evolution of science works to correct itself as new data is available and older laws/theories are modified (like Newton’s law becomes a special case of Relativity at lower speeds).
So what are some of these theories that have done a U-turn instead of being a special case of a broader theory ? I can think of some examples and welcome other posts:
Appendix is a vestigial organ
Eating fats will make you fat
Glass is a supercooled liquid evidenced by the old glass at European churches which get thicker in the bottom due to slow flow of glass
Trees in the forest compete for light and bigger trees smother out smaller trees. Trees don’t cooperate with each other.
Another one of my favorite pet peeve is the misrepresentation of the solar system in school books (at least when I was growing up). It’s very hard to show the solar system to scale on textbook pages especially if Pluto is included.
When Linnaeus first described his system, he named only two kingdoms – animals and plants. In school we were taught that fungi was a third. Today it’s up to five with something called protists and monera.
Pluto isn’t a planet, we never learned about Ceres. The asteroids are all over the place, not just in the Asteroid belt. Today, there are getting to 800000 named asteroids, with 10000 or so crossing Earth’s orbit.
Trees compete AND cooperate. Depending on many complex factors.
Eating fats WILL make you fat, if you eat more calories than you burn. But it’s a complex subject. Much like trees.
Also, a significant minority of ulcers have no bacterial cause.
In ninth grade Earth Science I did a paper on what was believed to be the cause of mountain building back then. IIRC heavy deposits in the ocean pushed up mountains on the shore kind of like a seesaw.
Also, large dinosaurs like the Brontosaurus were thought to spend all their time in water because they were too heavy to walk on land.
There was some thought that lunar craters were formed by volcanic action, though meteor strikes were also a cause.
I don’t know that these were actual scientific theories so much as wives tales. The demonization of fats, I think, was a propaganda campaign funded by the sugar industry. The glass thing was just something someone said, and everybody else agreed it sounded good.
It’s important we get the context right when we talk about “Science had it wrong!” stories. Often, science didn’t get it wrong, just some random people said “this is probably the scientific explanation”, and it was neither correct nor scientifically researched.
Science does get things wrong occasionally, but that’s part of the process. Science is allowed to self-correct, unlike other systems of belief.
Those are concerning as to the overall confidence in science that is currently being done, but I think it’s also a useful feature that science can say “here are some places where we are going wrong, here’s how it is happening.”
IIUC, the latest systems based on DNA and other biochemical information combines animals and fungi into a single kingdom but still ends with eight major kingdoms: Bacteria: Archaeota: Excavata: Euglena, etc. Rhizaria: Foraminifers, etc. Chromalveolata: Diatoms, Brown & Golden Algae, Ciliates, etc. Archaeplastida: Green Plants, Green & Red Algae, Glaucocystids, etc. Amoebozoa: Slime molds, Amoebozoids Opisthokonta: Animals, Fungi, Trichoplax adhaerens
The final six in this list form the Eukaryota Empire.
Reclassifying Pluto as a minor planet changed nothing we knew about that object. It was just a change in classification, done for bureaucratic reasons. (I know I’m running the risk of restarting the Pluto Wars here. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen.)
There’s only so many things you can teach in limited school time, so it’s not surprising you didn’t learn every fact about the Solar System. And they sometimes intentionally simplify things taught in the lower grades, mostly to make them easier to teach amd learn. Ceres was discovered in 1800; various asteroids that are not in the main belt had been known about well before you were in school. You not learning these facts in school is a matter of both simplification and lack of time to teach everything.
David Halliday was a physicist from the University of Pittsburgh and also worked at MITs Radiation lab. Robert Resnick was a science
Educator from U of Pittsburgh and RPI.
Both were aware receiving Physics textbook authors and yet : Halliday & Resnick’s freshman physics text (4th edition, 1992) claimed that glass flows in windows (at the beginning of the chapter on fluids).
Can you please explain what you mean by someone said something … ?