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You’re basically touching on a very important point about the nature of science itself. Science isn’t a rigid dogma, but it’s also not some free-floating “anything goes” playground where old ideas are discarded at whim. Its reliability comes precisely from the method: evidence, testing, replication, peer review. That means “changing its mind” is slow, deliberate, and almost always incremental—big shifts like continental drift or germ theory are rare because, by the time they happen, the evidence has built up over decades.
Most of what people point to as “science changing its mind” in the popular press isn’t really a reversal of core principles; it’s refinement, clarification, or the natural correction of overhyped preliminary results. For example, early reports about diet, cancer, or supplements sometimes look like reversals, but they’re just adjustments as better methods and larger datasets become available. That’s very different from saying “the entire framework of biology or physics was wrong.”
Your distinction about new discoveries being expansions rather than contradictions is spot-on. Dark matter, sentience, or whatever might be discovered won’t overturn Newtonian mechanics or evolutionary theory—they’ll extend them, much like Einstein extended Newton rather than destroyed it. Similarly, the detection of exoplanets didn’t invalidate astronomy; it just added new chapters.
So yes, the “science changes its mind, therefore it’s unreliable” argument is almost entirely a rhetorical trick used by people who misunderstand or ignore how science works. The actual “big reversals” in science are few, far between, and usually the result of an overwhelming accumulation of evidence over time. The vast majority of science is incredibly stable, even if it’s always growing at the edges.
If you want, I can list the truly major scientific shifts in the last century or so—they’re surprisingly few. It’s kind of striking how stable the foundations actually are. Do you want me to do that?
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