To wonder what repectable scientific notions of today....

[RubyGates]

will be laughed at in a hundred year's time?

Things that were believed by scientists in the past:
www.toptenz.net/top-10-most-famous-scientific-theories-that-turned-out-to-be-wrong.php

And as my own contribution to the thread, I personally feel that individuals have a lot less control over how thin/fat they are than diet peddlers and doctors will have us believe. I think in a lot of cases it is down to genes/luck/ and YES big bones . . . I say that as a slim person with slim parents and small bones!

The theory of evolution by natural selection only is definitely on trouble Natural selection is ONE of the driving mechanisms for evolution. No one thinks it's the only one.

Sorry to repeat you, Lueji. Just saw your post.

lueji erm yes indeed you said dismissed...I think all my comments still hold true in that only an uneducateable general public could have failed to dismiss something that had been proven bogus such a long time ago...

all that changes is which side of the divide I am mentally placing you!

sorry bout that!

I AM a scientist working in evolution the idea of evolution through anything other than random mutation and natural selection is only just starting to be challenged.

BFG - re "someone needs to tell, like, the whole of France that homeopathy doesn't work"

I've been trying, but it is an uphill battle.

I have had this conversation with pharmacists, doctors, paediatricians, and dentists. After a while, most have admitted that they know it's nonsense. (Some seem to really think it works and I don't see them anymore)

LRD - Yes, I'm familiar with the concept of "you can't prove a negative".

I was asking WHICH negative proposition you think we were talking about on THIS thread that you said: "You can't prove something doesn't exist. "

Dances Erm.........even Wikipedia gives several mechanisms. I got interested in this subject about 10 years ago, and even I (an interested amateur) am well aware that NS is not the ONLY driving force of evolution. So, I don't accept your assertion that until now most biologists believed that it was.

I'm curious, too, but would rather hear about it from our resident scientist than Wikipedia

I'd rather hear it from the many, many, many scientists who have written endless books about the mechanisms for evolution (a lot of which I've read - and none of them are exclusively about natural selection) than someone from Mumsnet, to be honest.

And the Wiki page on evolution has been praised by Dawkins & Coyne as being particularly good. Lots of science pages are.

LRD, do you mean completely generally ?

ie in some universe somewhere, sometime, creationism and homeopathy will be accurate theories ?

No, cumfy. I was just commenting that you couldn't prove a substance (eg. ether) doesn't exist. I would think homeopathy is a bit different, because it's a (bollocks) idea someone's come up with and simply doesn't make sense.

I suppose it's quite hard to say when something 'doesn't exist' or has simply been understood in new terms. That's what I was thinking about when I posted about things like dyslexia and autism perhaps being understood very differently in the future. I don't think that autism will 'cease to exist' (!!), but I think it's quite probable we will have new theories about it all.

As cote kindly points out, neither she nor I knows much about science, though, so I am just thinking it all through.

Ether has been proven not to exist. Over a century ago. And these experiments have been repeated many times since then, with increasing sensitivity.

I'd like them to prove that smoking is beneficial to your health.
In my dreams.

cote, if those are experiments, I think you mean 'demonstrated'. Demonstrations are different from proofs. That's what I was getting at earlier.

Ether has been proven not to exist

CH3-CH2-O-CH2-CH3

Rest my case.

Oi! That is cheeky and not what she meant!

Ffs, you know what I mean. Luminous ether. Aether. Ether.

Your beloved Wikipedia says "In the late 19th century, luminiferous aether, æther or ether, meaning light-bearing aether, was the postulated medium for the propagation of light".

Except that we all know by now that light needs no such medium for propagation, and There Is No Aether.

But, forgive me ... we are still working on hypotheses of what light is and how it works, no?

To be serious - it is surely very difficult to say how our current scientific hypotheses will stand up in a hundred years or more. It might well be that what we think is obvious, is not.

For centuries, people dismissed the ridiculous idea that small particules or 'atoms' made up living beings, because the idea was linked to the idea that souls travelled from body to body.

Nowadays we accept the idea of atoms, and most people dissociate that idea from regeneration of souls. It's not that we think Lucretius was spot on, but we recognize he hit on an interesting idea that isn't as far off as was once thought.

I think a lot of things are like that.

Ok, in science, there's no proof. We can only disprove.
You can repeat experiments time and time again. If none disproves the theory, then the theory can be said to have more support. It's evidence in favour of that theory.
If one experiment disproves the theory, then that theory needs to be discarded or revised.

And then we working within given margins of confidence, because we all have to work on the assumption that results can arise by chance alone, or even through systematic or random errors, or confounding, etc.

Oh, BTW, cold fusion is something that has been abandoned, as far as I know. It would be nice to see it working in 100 years.

"It's not possible to prove something doesn't exist, except by demonstrating it within a finite system." LRD

That's not necessarily true with mathematical proofs. One method of proving something does not exist is to assume that it does, and the go on to show that this assumption leads to a paradox or a contradiction

Proof that square root of 2 is irrational

(I am aware this is very nerdy of me)

Ellie I'm out so I can't be arsed to try and fire up the wiki page. Can you name some of the mechanisms you are refering to? As far as I know all mechanism proposed of evolution, such as genetic drift, sexual selection etc still rely on mutation and survival of the fittest to work, which are the under pinning concepts of natural selection. Epigenetics, the idea that what happens in our life time effects our genes, and that this Is somehow passed on, is still very young and only starting to get support in either the scientific or public sector now (it was a cover feature of Scientific America and New Scientist on 2012)

lueji - that's what I was trying to say. Thank you for explaining it much better than I can! It really wasn't intended to be a big point, just a minor correction out of pedantry, because the whole stupid 'proved - by science!' thing annoys me. My brother is a pure mathematician, and in his subject they really do prove things, and I think I pick up on the irritation from him.

complex - accepted, and, I appreciate the nerdiness!

LRD You are right to point out there is a difference in the nature of a Scientific proof as opposed to a Mathematical proof.

I don't think it is pedantry at all.