Do Vaccines Cause Autism?
The claim that vaccines cause autism is one of the most damaging medical myths of modern times. It has been investigated exhaustively and thoroughly…
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The Expanding Earth
The expanding Earth was a hypothesis, taken seriously by some scientists into the twentieth century, which claimed that the planet is steadily…
Piltdown Man
Piltdown Man was a supposed "missing link" between apes and humans, announced in 1912 from fossil fragments found in England. For decades it misled…
The Steady State Theory
The steady state theory was a model of the universe, popular in the mid twentieth century, which held that the universe has always looked roughly the…
Vitalism
Vitalism was the long held belief that living things contain a special, non physical "vital force" or "life energy" that animates them and that…
The Caloric Theory
The caloric theory was an explanation of heat, widely accepted into the early nineteenth century, which held that heat is an invisible, weightless…
Lamarckism
Lamarckism is the discredited idea that organisms can pass on to their offspring the characteristics they acquire during their lifetime. Its classic…
The Hollow Earth
The hollow Earth was the idea that our planet is not solid but hollow, perhaps containing a habitable inner world, or even inner suns and…
Perpetual Motion
Perpetual motion is the idea of a machine that runs forever without any energy source, or that produces more energy than it consumes. Inventors have…
Astrology
Astrology is the belief that the positions of the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars influence human affairs and personalities, and that they can be used…
The Bermuda Triangle
The Bermuda Triangle is a region of the Atlantic Ocean, roughly between Florida, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico, said to be the site of mysterious…
Alchemy
Alchemy was an ancient and medieval practice that sought to transform base metals such as lead into gold, to discover a universal cure for disease,…
Flat Earth
The idea that the Earth is flat is a debunked belief that the planet is a disc or a plane rather than a sphere. It has been contradicted by…
Miasma Theory
Miasma theory was the belief that diseases such as cholera and the plague were caused by "bad air," a poisonous vapor thought to rise from rotting…
Humorism: The Four Humors
Humorism, or humoral theory, was the belief that human health depends on the balance of four bodily fluids, called humors: blood, phlegm, yellow…
Phrenology
Phrenology was a popular nineteenth century practice that claimed a person's character and mental abilities could be read from the shape and bumps of…
Spontaneous Generation
Spontaneous generation was the long held belief that living organisms could arise directly from non living matter. People thought maggots formed from…
Phlogiston Theory
Phlogiston theory was an early explanation of combustion, widely accepted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It held that all flammable…
The Geocentric Model
The geocentric model was the ancient belief that the Earth sits motionless at the center of the universe, with the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars all…
The Martian Canals
The Martian canals were a network of fine, straight lines that some astronomers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries believed they…
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