Originally Posted by FishinRod
One hundred years in the future, people will laugh at what we currently believe is "settled science" about genetics.

We should never laugh at the past nor considered science settled. All that we have thus far learned has sprung from some prior misconception and those misconceptions are essential to building new knowledge. They provide the fodder for questions and doubt. Most of what we know is what we now know is false ... the rest is confined to the knowledge of the limits within which our models work well enough to be useful and predictive. At least some of what we think of a successful model are choices we would rather think about them. The model, the math, doesn't need the story we attach to it to work ... at least most of the time. We do the best we can with the difficult task of clarifying the unknown. There is a huge difference between "settled science" and what (good) scientists think about "prominent theory" and "propositional/conjectural ideas". It is only the popular community at large that needs the truth in black and white and that often mistake a proposition/conjecture/conclusion as science. Many are not comfortable with not knowing, they want something solid to believe in. If the future is anything like the past we should expect each 100 years to produce a much different landscape.


It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so - Will Rogers