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> > the history of science is full of cases where it didn't know as much as it claimed, > I don't think this is true at all. Name one such scientific consensus

> > the history of science is full of cases where it didn't know as much as it claimed, > I don't think this is true at all. Name one such scientific consensus that was, like climate change, the result of different sources of experimental evidence, that turned out to completely wrong. Here's one: Before the discovery of Vitamin C, it was known by the British navy that lime juice prescribed to sailors on long voyages prevented scurvy. As technologies improved, voyages became shorter, which allowed someone in the navy to start sourcing less expensive limes (which happened to have less Vitamin C). Fast forward some years, and someone does an experiment. The (new) limes don't cure scurvy! So, naturally, everyone concludes that the limes-cure-scurvy thing is an old wives' tale, which they believe to now be "debunked". It's not until Vitamin C is discovered that people actually start to figure out what's going on. (I believe this is from Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but I could be wrong. It is also documented on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy)

DCKing 11y ago
Nice. I wonder what it is about nutrition science that makes it so rife with these examples.
- adventured 11y ago
  The intersection between food, biological processes in our body, and the consequences that we try to study (disease, illness, obesity, etc) - is wildly complex. It involves very large numbers of moving pieces, that all impact each other, and of which we're still struggling to fully understand any given individual piece all by itself much less all things operating at large scale in tandem. Fortunately, empirical works wonderfully when it comes to nutrition. We know in vague terms what most foods do to us, while having a limited understanding in more complete scientific terms. We're still in maybe the second inning of understanding the human body fully (eg we're still discovering in basic terms how the immune system links to the brain [1]). [1] http://io9.com/scientists-discover-a-new-link-between-the-brain-and-th-1710560159 http://io9.com/scientists-discover-a-new-link-between-the-br...
- hodwik 11y ago
  No more so than any other science. Difference being that in nutrition you're playing with people's health, so the examples stick out.
EdwardDiego 11y ago
> it was known by the British navy that lime juice prescribed to sailors on long voyages prevented scurvy. Lemon juice. They switched to limes in the 1860s. http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm > So when the Admiralty began to replace lemon juice with an ineffective substitute in 1860, it took a long time for anyone to notice. In that year, naval authorities switched procurement from Mediterranean lemons to West Indian limes. The motives for this were mainly colonial - it was better to buy from British plantations than to continue importing lemons from Europe. Confusion in naming didn't help matters. Both "lemon" and "lime" were in use as a collective term for citrus, and though European lemons and sour limes are quite different fruits, their Latin names (citrus medica, var. limonica and citrus medica, var. acida) suggested that they were as closely related as green and red apples. Moreover, as there was a widespread belief that the antiscorbutic properties of lemons were due to their acidity, it made sense that the more acidic Caribbean limes would be even better at fighting the disease.
- wtallis 11y ago
  So in actuality, they never failed to correctly determine the scurvy-preventing capability of a given fruit when they tested it, they just spent a lot of time working under the un-tested and incorrect assumption that lemons and limes would work similarly, based on an un-tested hypothesis for the mechanism of scurvy prevention.
  - Twisell 11y ago
    Well actually it's more that they fail to take account of a missing parameter. And there is quite a lot of missing parameters in actual climatology. It's not like we are in Back to the Future's 2015 where they can accurately forecast weather.
Bud 11y ago
As a fun side note, this is the origin of the term "limeys".

DCKing 11y ago

Nice. I wonder what it is about nutrition science that makes it so rife with these examples.

adventured 11y ago
The intersection between food, biological processes in our body, and the consequences that we try to study (disease, illness, obesity, etc) - is wildly complex. It involves very large numbers of moving pieces, that all impact each other, and of which we're still struggling to fully understand any given individual piece all by itself much less all things operating at large scale in tandem. Fortunately, empirical works wonderfully when it comes to nutrition. We know in vague terms what most foods do to us, while having a limited understanding in more complete scientific terms. We're still in maybe the second inning of understanding the human body fully (eg we're still discovering in basic terms how the immune system links to the brain [1]). [1] http://io9.com/scientists-discover-a-new-link-between-the-brain-and-th-1710560159 http://io9.com/scientists-discover-a-new-link-between-the-br...
hodwik 11y ago
No more so than any other science. Difference being that in nutrition you're playing with people's health, so the examples stick out.

EdwardDiego 11y ago

> it was known by the British navy that lime juice prescribed to sailors on long voyages prevented scurvy. Lemon juice. They switched to limes in the 1860s. http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm > So when the Admiralty began to replace lemon juice with an ineffective substitute in 1860, it took a long time for anyone to notice. In that year, naval authorities switched procurement from Mediterranean lemons to West Indian limes. The motives for this were mainly colonial - it was better to buy from British plantations than to continue importing lemons from Europe. Confusion in naming didn't help matters. Both "lemon" and "lime" were in use as a collective term for citrus, and though European lemons and sour limes are quite different fruits, their Latin names (citrus medica, var. limonica and citrus medica, var. acida) suggested that they were as closely related as green and red apples. Moreover, as there was a widespread belief that the antiscorbutic properties of lemons were due to their acidity, it made sense that the more acidic Caribbean limes would be even better at fighting the disease.

wtallis 11y ago
So in actuality, they never failed to correctly determine the scurvy-preventing capability of a given fruit when they tested it, they just spent a lot of time working under the un-tested and incorrect assumption that lemons and limes would work similarly, based on an un-tested hypothesis for the mechanism of scurvy prevention.
- Twisell 11y ago
  Well actually it's more that they fail to take account of a missing parameter. And there is quite a lot of missing parameters in actual climatology. It's not like we are in Back to the Future's 2015 where they can accurately forecast weather.

Bud 11y ago

As a fun side note, this is the origin of the term "limeys".