Has there ever been anything originally dismissed as pseudoscience that was later proven to be legit?
Has there ever been anything originally dismissed as pseudoscience that was later proven to be legit?
There is a tendency for real doctors with backing from Academia or whoever's in charge of deciding how you science to just plain getting it wrong and not realizing it for a long time.
Homeopathy is a good example of this, as it appeared to get great results when it was created during the Bubonic Plague and had such staying power to the point that in the 1800's it was considered a legitimate and mainstream field of medical practice.
Now today we know Homeopathy is nonsense... Remembers New Age Healing is still a thing Okay, those of us with sense know homeopathy is garbage. With the only reason it was getting such wonderful results was because the state of medicine for a long period of time in human history was so god awful that not getting any treatment at all was actually the smarter idea. Since Homeopathy is basically just "No medicine at all", that's exactly what was happening with its success.
Incidentally this is also why the Christian Science movement (Which was neither Christian nor Science) had so many people behind it, people were genuinely living longer from it because it required people to stop smoking at a time when no one knew smoking killed you.
Anyhow. With that in mind, I want to know if there's a case where the exact opposite happened.
Where Scientists got together on a subject, said "Wow, only an idiot would believe this. This clearly does not work, can not work, and is totally impossible."
Only for someone to turn around, throw down research proving that there was no pseudo in this proposed pseudoscience with their finest "Ya know I had to do it 'em" face.
The closest I can think of is how people believed that Germ Theory, the idea that tiny invisible creatures were making us all sick, were the ramblings of a mad man. But that was more a refusal to look at evidence, not having evidence that said "No" that was replaced by better evidence that said "Disregard that, the answer is actually Yes"
Can anyone who sciences for a living instead of merely reading science articles as a hobby and understanding basically only a quarter of them at best tell me if something like that has happened?
Thank you, have a nice day.
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Epigenetics vindicates a small portion of the theory behind Lamarckism, though there’s still a lot of research to be done to understand the actual mechanisms underlying it
Lamarckism is the idea that a parent passes traits to its offsprings based on use or disuse of the trait. There is no support for this in genetics or epigenitics. Epigenitics deals with stably heritable traits based on by a mechanism other than DNA. It doesn't pertain to whether a trait is used or disused.
If you deal with famine, your children and grandchildren will be more efficient at storing energy, is that not the use of a trait?
If someone is gestaded during a famine state, their metabolism is altered. They have higher risk of hyperglycemia. That is not use of a trait and it is not something passed from parent to child. It's none of Lamarckism, genetics, or epigenitics. It's response to environment.
If a man experiences famine as a child, his children’s metabolisms will be different.
The second paper gives evidence that that is epigenitic, but it's not Lamarckism. I was wondering what view people have of Lamarckism that anything epigenitic is Lamarckism. Reading the Wiki article I found this excerpt:
Also in 2015, Adam Weiss argued that bringing back Lamarck in the context of epigenetics is misleading, commenting, "We should remember [Lamarck] for the good he contributed to science, not for things that resemble his theory only superficially.