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All The Times We Were Wrong


3m read
·Nov 4, 2024

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If I told you right now that humans are “perfect” organisms, and that in our mothers' wombs, we first are fishes, who then develop into amphibians, and then reptiles, birds, primates, before finally becoming what we know as human, I’m sure you’d look at me like I’ve gone insane. And I have, but that’s besides the point. Just as recently as 1811, because of the works of scientist Johann Friedrich Meckel, everybody thought that was true. And this is because science is transient.

What we once hold as truth quickly fades away upon closer inspection. And looking back, we can only laugh at ourselves for the scientific “facts” we once held dear to our hearts. Some other times, these aren’t even actual scientific facts. They’re just very popular opinions that all of us have collectively agreed to be true, even though they are in fact not. These are all the times we were wrong. Not everything Meckel said was wrong, though. In fact, he was the first scientist to correctly predict that embryos have gills.

Well, slits on their necks that closely resemble gills, at least. However, unlike what he suggested, we don’t pass through a fish phase in our mothers’ wombs. These slits are most likely due to the fact that both humans and fish share a common ancestor and some DNA, and not because we’re trying to attain some kind of biological perfection. I mean, who are we kidding? We are far from perfect. But for a long time, scientists believed this to be true, well, until the late 19th century when Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution started to gain traction.

We realized that a linear series of evolution in our mothers’ womb was completely illogical. The theory of evolution is one that has been completely riddled with lots of false claims and ideas that are simply not true. In reality, evolution is a very difficult subject to research because of the limited amount of fossil information available. As a result, a lot of times, all we’re left with are hypotheses, some of which are brilliant, and others, err, not so much.

For a long time, scientists believed that all of life was aquatic, until one day, many millions of years ago, a brave fish dared to walk on land. Starting with very short periods on dry ground, the fish started spending more and more time on land and gradually, its gills got replaced with lungs, and it became amphibian. Then the amphibians became reptiles, who became birds, who became mammals. And while these scientists got the process of evolution right, that one brave fish was not the first animal to step on land.

The earth was rich with insects, funguses, and was bubbling with life before that fish ever came into the picture. Another hypothesis that we all seem to collectively get wrong is where humans come from. If I asked you right now, you most likely would tell me that we evolved from chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. But while the second half of that statement is true, the first half is completely false. We didn’t evolve from chimpanzees.

Yes, we evolved from apes. However, we did not evolve from any apes living today. We, monkeys, chimps, and gorillas, all evolved from a common ancestor, the so-called “great apes” that lived in Africa around 7 million years ago. It was around that time in the evolution chain that we split. So although chimpanzees are our closest living relatives, we’re farther apart on the family tree than a lot of us think. Our much closer relative, although now extinct, are the Neanderthals.

Modern humans split from Neanderthals just around 500,000 years ago. But even these guys certainly came with their own controversy. For a long time, scientists believed that Neanderthals and humans never lived together, with some believing that Neanderthals evolved into humans, but that’s again not true. Archaeologists have since found ancient human skeletons that prove that modern humans and Neanderthals coexisted for thousands of years. In fact, they didn’t just co-exist; they actually mated, which is why most humans living outside...

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