Popular Knowledge
Pragmatic Reliance
The 24-chromosomes myth
^a4e326Sometimes the obvious can stare you in the face. Until 1955, it was agreed that human beings had twenty-four pairs of chromosomes. It was just one of those facts that everybody knew was right. They knew it was right because in 1921 a Texan named Theophilus Painter had sliced thin sections off the testicles of two black men and one white man castrated for insanity and ‘self-abuse’, fixed the slices in chemicals and examined them under the microscope. Painter tried to count the tangled mass of unpaired chromosomes he could see in the spermatocytes of the unfortunate men, and arrived at the figure of twenty-four. ‘I feel confident that this is correct,’ he said. Others later repeated his experiment in other ways. All agreed the number was twenty-four. For thirty years, nobody disputed this ‘fact’. One group of scientists abandoned their experiments on human liver cells because they could only find twenty-three pairs of chromosomes in each cell. Another researcher invented a method of separating the chromosomes, but still he thought he saw twenty-four pairs. It was not until 1955, when an Indonesian named Joe-Hin Tjio travelled from Spain to Sweden to work with Albert Levan, that the truth dawned. Tjio and Levan, using better techniques, plainly saw twenty-three pairs. They even went back and counted twenty-three pairs in photographs in books where the caption stated that there were twenty-four pairs. There are none so blind as do not wish to see.
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- Confirmation bias: we see what we expect to see
- Authority bias: Painter was respected and so was not questioned
- Paradigm inertia: once an idea becomes consensus, it becomes invisible
- The importance of tools: better staining and imaging revealed the truth
Aristotle’s teachings
‘Heavy things fall faster than light things in direct proportion to their own weight’
Aristotle’s teachings were later adopted into the doctrines of the Catholic Church. And through the Church’s power and influence Aristotelian philosophies became lodged in the common knowledge of the Western world, blindly believed and repeated. Not only did people repeat to others that which was not true, but they also ignored things that clearly happened but were not supposed to be true.
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The Church, with its unmatched authority, declares the stars don’t change. The population then falls victim to a collective delusion that was stronger than its members’ own powers of observation.
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- Blind believer (accept falsehoods) → seeing denier (ignore conflicting evidence)
- Authority & and collective belief distort empirical truth
Full/crescent moon?
Half of any month the Moon’s phase is neither crescent nor full. Did the artists paint what they saw or what they wished they had seen?
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