Scientists changing their minds

 Skip to content

Chat history

You said:

It seems to me that there is an effort being made to justify attacking the well-established ideas of science (such as evolution, global warming, the absence of psychic stuff, the failure to find Sasquatch) on the sole and flimsy pretense that science sometimes changes its mind. As has been noted a few times, this sort of stuff comes mainly from people who plainly know very little real science. That made me wonder just how often science does change its mind about something important -- not what is reported in the popular press but in reality. The only one I can think of happened early in my academic life -- the adoption of continental drift, and that idea had been supported by paleontologists for a couple decades before the evidence of shifting magnetic orientation in sea-floor deposits made the conclusion inescapable, even to the geologists. It seems to me science as we have it is well grounded and not subject to much beyond some adjustment here and there. It is for sure that there are extremely important unanswered questions, such as the nature of sentience, the nature of dark matter and energy, and huge issues like this, but it is unlikely the answers will involve changes in existing science. When the answers are found, they will be pretty much new structures -- not discoveries that science is wrong somewhere but just expansions of existing knowledge.

ChatGPT said:

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?

ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info.