The EDGE website has selected contributors providing examples of wrong scientific beliefs that were held for long periods. Several of the contributors are psychologists. The child development psychologist Alison Gopnik has an interesting contribution, including that there is evidence “that many once popular and evidence-resistant scientific belief systems are also developed spontaneously by many children.”
See: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/thaler10/thaler10_index.html Scroll down to the contributions, under DISCOVER. I noticed one erroneous statement in the contributions: Cesar A. Hidalgo at the MIT Media Lab writes that the advanced age of the world required by Darwin’s work “was heavily refuted [sic] by scientists, particularly by Lord Kelvin, who made calculations of the rate at which earth must have cooled down and concluded that this could have only happened in a few thousand years... he did not know about the radioactive decay taking place at the earth's core...” In fact Darwin biographies report that Lord Kelvin’s calculations led him to conclude the earth could not be older than 100 million years, a trifle longer than the few thousand stated by Hildago. (Wikipedia has it that a later calculation by Kelvin gave between 20 and 40 million years.) Hildalgo is making his own contribution to erroneous beliefs when he states that the age of the earth was thought to be only a few thousand years old until Charles Lyell’s work (around 1830) provided estimates of many millions of years. In fact the geologist James Hutton, on whose work Lyell built, had already proposed enormous stretches of time to account for the world’s geology, and others before him had estimated the age of the earth as at least a million years. Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London allenester...@compuserve.com http://www.esterson.org --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@jab.org. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=7417 or send a blank email to leave-7417-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
