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An origin myth is a type of myth that explains the beginnings of a natural or social aspect of the world. One specific kind of origin myth is the creation or cosmogonic myth, which narrates the formation of the universe. However, numerous cultures have stories that take place after the initial origin. These stories aim to explain the origins of ...
Jan 1, 2016 · Few of the chapters reflect explicitly on why myths become myths, but in the superb concluding essay, Michael Gordin does this in the process of debunking the widely accepted belief that science can be easily differentiated from pseudoscience simply by determining whether a particular theory is falsifiable.
49 health 'facts' you've been told all your life that are totally wrong. Carrots give you night vision. Swimming after eating will give you cramps. You need to drink eight glasses of water a day ...
- Your fingerprints are completely unique. For more than a century, fingerprints have played a major role in forensic investigations. It all started with Scottish scientist and physician Henry Faulds who, in 1888, wrote an article asserting that each person has a wholly unique set of fingerprints.
- Rolling your tongue is a genetic trait. In 1940, geneticist Alfred Sturtevant published a paper claiming that genetics determined your ability to roll your tongue - parents who could roll their tongues were likely to have children who could as well.
- You have five senses. Children often learn that they have five senses - sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. That's a "fact" that originated in a work by the Greek philosopher Aristotle, written around 350 B.C.
- Fingernails and hair continue to grow after death. Our bodies do lots of creepy things after we die, but they don't keep growing our fingernails and hair.
A scientific myth is a myth about science, 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.
Feb 19, 2020 · The letter does not criticize any specific assertions about the origin of the outbreak, but many posts on social media have singled out the Wuhan Institute of Virology for intense scrutiny because it has a laboratory at the highest security level—biosafety level 4—and its researchers study coronaviruses from bats, including the one that is ...
Somehow a few misconceptions have seeped their way into science culture. We would like to explore some of these popular science myths and explain why they are false by using scientific facts.
