A scientific myth is a

myth Myth is a folklore genre consisting of narratives that play a fundamental role in a society, such as foundational tales or origin myths. Since "myth" is widely used to imply that a story is not objectively true, the identification of a narrati ...

about

science Science is a systematic endeavor that Scientific method, builds and organizes knowledge in the form of Testability, testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earli ...

, or a myth or factoid that is commonly thought to be scientific. Scientific discoveries are often presented in a mythological way with a theory being presented as a dramatic flash of insight by a heroic individual, rather than as the result of sustained experiment and reasoning. For example,

Newton's law of universal gravitation Newton's law of universal gravitation is usually stated as that every particle attracts every other particle in the universe with a force that is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distanc ...

is commonly presented as the result of an apple falling upon his head. Newton's observation of an apple falling indeed played a part in starting him thinking about the problem, but it took him about twenty years to develop the theory fully and so the story of the apple has been described as a myth. Other unscientific misconceptions include the idea that bats are blind. The extent to which it occurs and is problematic is debatable. The scientific historian Douglas Allchin suggests that mythical accounts are misleading because they present the results as handed down by

authority figure In the fields of sociology and political science, authority is the legitimate power of a person or group over other people. In a civil state, ''authority'' is practiced in ways such a judicial branch or an executive branch of government.''The N ...

s and understate the importance of error and its resolution by the

scientific method The scientific method is an Empirical evidence, empirical method for acquiring knowledge that has characterized the development of science since at least the 17th century (with notable practitioners in previous centuries; see the article hist ...

. In responding to this, Westerlund and Fairbanks agreed that romantic accounts of science tend to distort its nature but, in the case of Mendel's discovery of the rules of

inheritance Inheritance is the practice of receiving private property, titles, debts, entitlements, privileges, rights, and obligations upon the death of an individual. The rules of inheritance differ among societies and have changed over time. Offici ...

, they argue that Allchin's criticism of Mendel's role and reasoning is over-stated.

See also

References

Further reading