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Always amusing and perplexing in equal measure to hear about some of the nonsense people used to believe about the natural world before the principles of scient
by tragomaskhalos 5y ago
Always amusing and perplexing in equal measure to hear about some of the nonsense people used to believe about the natural world before the principles of scientific enquiry took root.
That said, the idea of animals transmuting into a different species is at least backed by apparent precedent (caterpillar-butterfly, tadpole-frog), and non-trivial to disprove. That maggots spontaneously generate from rotting meat, or some of the 'cryptids' described by Pliny (https://medium.com/exploring-history/meet-six-of-the-beasts-in-plinys-natural-history-55753fbf9e72 https://medium.com/exploring-history/meet-six-of-the-beasts-...), err less so.
- JasonFruit 5y agoIsn't it great that we've stopped creating incorrect hypotheses to explain phenomena we don't understand? /s I look forward to seeing what we're completely, laughably wrong about today, if I live long enough. I hope it's one of the things I am right about --- but I'm not counting on it.
- memling 5y agoThere's an interesting series called the Great Ptolemaic Smackdown that charts one of the more prominent examples (i.e., the Copernican/Galilean revolution): https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown.html https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-sma...
- nn3 5y agoIt's not clear to me these theories were outside scientific enquiry: They had an observation: birds disappear in winter, that they were trying to explain. As you say there is precedent with other animals transmuting of which they had observations of. So it's not really unscientific to combine these two pieces of evidence into a theory. Certainly happens often enough today that people do these things, but end up being quite wrong.