popular opinion as evidence
April 11, 2014 at 8:55 pm
(This post was last modified: April 11, 2014 at 9:21 pm by Rampant.A.I..)
For a while, popular opinion was that the world was flat.
In the Middle Ages, people believed in Spontanious Generation. Rats spontaneously generated from piles of rags, maggots from meat.
People still believe hair and fingernails continue to grow after death, old windowpanes appear wavy because glass stays "liquid" and flows downward very slowly, taste zones on the tongue, that Columbus was concerned about falling off the edge of the earth, that a Brontosaurus was a type of dinosaur... The list of "facts" goes on.
The popularity of an opinion has no bearing on the truth of that opinion.
In the Middle Ages, people believed in Spontanious Generation. Rats spontaneously generated from piles of rags, maggots from meat.
People still believe hair and fingernails continue to grow after death, old windowpanes appear wavy because glass stays "liquid" and flows downward very slowly, taste zones on the tongue, that Columbus was concerned about falling off the edge of the earth, that a Brontosaurus was a type of dinosaur... The list of "facts" goes on.
The popularity of an opinion has no bearing on the truth of that opinion.
