I'm being deliberately provocative in the title, but it is true that science has always found itself to be wrong about things as we go along in history. Here are a couple of perplexing facts that have come to light:
DNA not the same in every cell?
Species diversity not caused by natural selection?
Every year we get some of these contradictions of previously held truths.
Certainty.. "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
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Yeah, sometimes I think the more we know the less we know. The problem is there's some "big" thing that ties it all together and as man we can't seem to conceptualize, weigh, measure or explain what that is. I'm not even sure we have the intellectual capacity to know it if we could see it. Kind of like dark matter or the ways in which psychic information passes. I still remember when eggs were good, then eggs were bad, then eggs were good for you again, and then eggs were good if only the whites are eaten... Argh!
I'm confused. If any scientist says "I'm certain" they are not doing science. So, any good science is not saying "certainty". The tests and evidence are published and feedback occurs.
Science has gotten us closer to approximating reality. I would not say it has been "found to be wrong". Theories get tweaked, overhauled and overturned. That's the way things are supposed to work. Saying science gets things wrong is focusing on trees perhaps but forgetting the forest. We _know_ general concepts very well, say, for example, about the expanding universe, germs causing disease, populations evolve, the earth is extremely old, extinctions occur, etc. We build on those foundations. Only very rarely are they discarded whole cloth.
Might I suggest a rather readable book called "Worldviews" by Dewitt to walk one through ideas that were perfectly reasonable at the time but were shown to be false at some point.
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