Bunk Theories

Geosyncline theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geosyncline

This is a biggie; in the space of 10 years, the fundamental principles of Geology were completely overturned, and replaced with a new, unifying concept that explained nearly everything: Plate Tectonics. (It was like the French Revolution, except noone died and it actually worked.)

Also:

* The origin of the Moon's craters: Before the mid-1960's everyone thought they were volcanic, probably maars. Then, we started to get good telescopic pictures...

* The origin of the Moon itself: Before the Apollo samples were returned, most scientists thought the Earth and Moon formed together. Now, most think that it was formed via a Mars-sized impactor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_impact_hypothesis

* Static universe: Edwin Hubble's doppler measurements of galaxies was the first indication that the universe was not static, and indeed had a starting point...

* Uniqueness of the Sun: Before the invention of the IR telescope, the Sun was regarded as a smallish star, relatively speaking. Now, we know that the vast majority of stars are smaller than the Sun, and that the most common mass is 0.1 Msun...

And so on and so forth...

Simon ;)
Thank you. Very.
 
Eugenics is not bunk, we know for a fact that if you selectively breed a given population to get traits that you desire whilst, culling or castrating members with traits that do not desire you will change the nature of that population. Also it is to a very, very limited extent still practised. If a severely mentally disabled woman with numerous congenital defects gets pregnant, some doctors will be happy to organise an abortion and a sterilisation.

A lot of the stuff associcated with eugenics, can be shown to be bunk. But selectively breeding clearly works.
 

Stephen

Banned
Dogs are remarkably flexible in their phenotypes. People not so much.

Thats just because humans have not been selectively bred yet. If you look at wild wolves they all look very similar. But all the diferent dog breeds dispite all being almost genetically identical to wolves are obviously very diferent. Even without selective breeding, just plain natural selection has produced some quite distinctive breeds of human across the globe.
 
Every end of the world prediction known to man

Y2K bug

Neoconservatism

Infallible markets

Correlation between cubic capacity of the human skull and intelligence
 
Eugenics is not bunk, we know for a fact that if you selectively breed a given population to get traits that you desire whilst, culling or castrating members with traits that do not desire you will change the nature of that population.

Are we selectively removing nerds from the population by organizing online fora to ensure that their social life does not lead to reproduction?
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
yet ecverything outside Indochina stayed unred
An excellent point, and one that is not emphasized nearly enough. People conveniently ignore that, until the post-WWII period, these four countries were administratively one unit, governed directly by the French from Hanoi.
 
C'mon guys, how could you have forgotten this one?

Life on Mars/Venus! A very prevalent theory, before the probes landed. Theres also that Aliens would be easy to find, once we started listening. Hrrm, what else... Ah! that nuclear fission would be the fuel of the future and be inside everything, that AI would be easy. maybe these are more bad predictions then theories. Ah, well.
 
C'mon guys, how could you have forgotten this one?

Life on Mars/Venus! A very prevalent theory, before the probes landed. Theres also that Aliens would be easy to find, once we started listening. Hrrm, what else... Ah! that nuclear fission would be the fuel of the future and be inside everything, that AI would be easy. maybe these are more bad predictions then theories. Ah, well.
Most of those are more of 50's than pre-1950... But yes, life on Mars and Martiamn canals fit excellently. Also Rutherford's famous conclusion, that there's no way to extract atomic energy... Non-thermonuclear theories of stars, and James Jeans' theory of planet formation. My, when I think about it, half of astronomy and cosmology as we know them are post-1950...


Eugenics is not bunk, we know for a fact that if you selectively breed a given population to get traits that you desire whilst, culling or castrating members with traits that do not desire you will change the nature of that population. Also it is to a very, very limited extent still practised. If a severely mentally disabled woman with numerous congenital defects gets pregnant, some doctors will be happy to organise an abortion and a sterilisation.

A lot of the stuff associcated with eugenics, can be shown to be bunk. But selectively breeding clearly works.
One good principle doesn't good theory make. What eugenecists claimed, and what was disproved since then, is that intelligence and character are mostly heredatory in nature, and what tests they used indeed measured those traits. Note also that many tenets of eugenics were formed before Morgan's discovery of genes, so their idea of how exactly traits are inheritred was rather hazy. (Post-Morgan they still hadn't human gene maps, his method for mapping genes works well on fruit flies in a lab, but is slo-o-ow on humans, who don't breed as often and can't be irradiated to get more mutants...) Of course, Skinnerian view that anyone can be conditioned to be anything is equally disproven. :)

So, yes, general idea was sound, some techniques they developed (especially in statistics and personality trait theory) are good, but overall, "It was worse than a crime, it was a blunder". A very big and very scientific one. (Of course extreme right-winginess of most early XX century politics is also respionsinble. But the root of the problem was purely scientific error.)
 
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Doesn't that mean Domino Theory was partially correct. Also it should be noted that there were strong communist movements in Indonesia and other SE Asian countries.

well, Domino Theory wasn't totally unfounded if that's what you're saying. The Malaysian Communists had been effectively defeated by 1960 and were an insignificant force by the time the Vietnam War occurred.

Thailand, however, is proof that sometimes the best thing that can happen to a country is a war in a neighboring country. Because it was one of the main US bases of operations for the War in Vietnam, it was the recipient of massive US aid, which helped greatly in pacifying or crushing the half dozen or so insurgencies raging outside of it's Central Valley.
 
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