I am a huge fan of science myself but it gets painful to watch science play out in the media and elsewhere sometimes. This thread is about science that once claimed that something obvious to a layperson wasn’t true yet some time later we get to hear scientists bask in the glory again and proclaim the formerly obvious is new grand discovery.
I know I have heard countless examples of this my whole life. Exercise and nutrition science seems notoriously prone to it for example. However, I can’t remember many right now and that is why I started this thread.
The best example I have right now is that when I was young (in the 1970’s), Pandas were regarded quite obviously to be bears (that is where the Panda Bear thing came from). Some time after that, scientists had a battle and the dominant ones proclaimed that Pandas (the black and white ones) were actually more closely related to raccoons. Teachers and other smart-asses used this new found knowledge to trick kids, make them feel stupid, and tell them about science versus assumptions. Fast forward to good DNA analysis techniques: BREAKING NEWS — Through genetic analysis, scientists have discovered that Pandas are closely related to other bears.
Anyone else know of some painful scientific reversals back to the obvious?
Well I just mentioined in another thread that maggots and leeches, for many years have been the symbol of backward medical thinking, are now cutting edge medicine.
I’d say with the nutrition “Facts” you would have to be careful. “Nutrition” touted out in the general public or media isn’t always what science “says” it is. Some things have remained facts for many years, only to be ignored because the media plays on some crackpot doctors books/theories or what have you.
It is possible, many other so called facts are dismissed by scientists, but are still printed in school text books, portrayed on the media, and shown in popular culture and TV.
Don’t confuse the two. Just because the media says “scientists think such and such” at one particular given time, doesn’t mean that it is accepted as a whole by the body of science.
I think it should have been getting pretty obvious to bright and interested lay people by the early 1900’s that the Earth was more than a few million years old, based for example on how slowly the Grand Canyon changes and yet how big it has gotten.
However William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, Baron of Largs, insisted that basic and indisputable physics demonstrated the earth could be no more than just a few million years old, based on how hot it still was inside (they didn’t know about radioactivity generating heat), and mocked and scorned other scientists like geologists and paleontologists who disagreed.
Confusion between the 2 different animals that use the same name. The Giant Pandas, the large, black and white ones that look like bears, *are * essentially bears. The Lesser or Red Pandas, the small, reddish ones with tails, that look like raccoons, *are * essentially raccoons.
Plenty of things. Starting with the atom being the smallest particle. All sorts of medical things (ADHD turns out not to be just a kids’ disease; most mental ailments are due to physical factors rather than domineering mothers; hormone therapy for menopause not so grand). There could be 29 dimensions or more. If you watch Discovery channel or read journals like New Scientist you’ll find that things are being discovered every day which adds to science - often in a way that disproves previous theories.
That’s why I find this whole ‘scientific evidence is everything’ philosophy hilarious - science has proven is that few things are absolute and that our current knowledge will be as likely to change as the knowledge we had in past has.
That was my first thought as well. That and coffee.
It’s cyclic, and every four years the cycles will match so that for one week, early in May, coffee, egg whites and the yolks are all good for you. I’m at IHOP for that week.
That’s support for the philosophy that “evidence is everything”, not a refutation of it. It’s because of the evidence that scientists change their minds on things that were once thought true.
Really, though, this thread should be called “Obvious things that science reporters once said aren’t true that are true again”. Scientists almost never speak in absolutes. A scientist might say something like “recent studies show results consistent with a small correlation between consumption of peanut oil and a decrease in the incidence of certain kinds of cancer in laboratory rats”. These statements generally have enough qualifiers that they can’t fail to be true: It’s not saying anything about what peanut oil actually does; it’s saying what the studies suggest that peanut oil might do. But a science writer will pick that up, and re-write it as “Scientists prove peanut oil cures cancer!”. No, scientists have proven no such thing, nor did they ever claim to. But that’s what the public hears.
I grant you that’s a better wording. What I mean to say is that things which were proven by evidence before can be disproven by new evidence so that nothing we know now ought be considered sacrosanct. It is also erroneous to think we have reached the apex of all knowledge at this point in human development.
I don’t know, I don’t think it seemed very obvious to any layperson that Pluto wasn’t a planet. Hell, I still think it should be. It’s kind of mean to just go demoting planets like that.
I can think of two but as Epimetheus pointed out I’m not sure either of these are true findings of the scientific community but rather the prevailing wisdom embraced by the populace.
The idea that you must completely rid your diet of fat if you want to lose weight.
It wasn’t that long ago when nursing your baby on formula was viewed as far superior to breastfeeding.
Originally, the panda was called the “particolor bear.” Then an smaller critter called the “panda” locally (known today as the lesser or red panda) was found to have some physiological similarities (skull, and “thumb”) to the particolor bear, leading scientists to believe that they were closely related to each other. This led to the renaming of the panda to the “red” or “lesser panda,” and the particolor bear to the “giant panda.”
By extension, the red panda was thought to be most closely related to your basic coon. Hence, the giant panda would be more closely related to coons than to bears.
Now it’s known that giant pandas are actually members of the bear family, albeit different enough that they form a separate branch from the other bears. And the similarites with the red panda are just examples of convergence.
I think it has been posted before that there is still a little question about the red panda’s closest relatives, with some thinking it might be mustelids (the weasel family), and others thinking it might be procyonids (coons and such).
The thing is, I feel bad for Pluto. How will it ever be able to show its face among the (other) planets again? It’s an outcast now. No friends, it won’t be able to get any dates (surely its reputation precedes it)… it kind of reminds me of the recent pitting of a sorority house somewhere that kicked out a bunch of girls who they deemed weren’t pretty enough. Pluto needs love too… it’s just wrong.
It has plenty of friends. It has ceased to be the least and coldest of planets and is now the oldest, best known and second largest (for now) Kuiper Object. There are far far more Kuiper objects then planets and by default it is their leader.
