Real Life / Right For The Wrong Reasons

Real-life examples of people being Right for the Wrong Reasons.

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Astronomy

The Titius-Bode Law was based on the distances of the known planets from the sun, though there was a gap between Mars and Jupiter. The discovery at Uranus at about the right distance was considered proof that the law was correct, and astronomers assumed there had to be something between Mars and Jupiter; so certain were they that the hypothetical planet was even given the name Phaeton and the astronomical community began searching in earnest. In 1801, Ceres was discovered at the predicted distance. In the next few decades, plenty more was found at that distance, and the whole thing was dubbed the Asteroid Belt. As for the Titius-Bode Law, it was thrown into doubt by the 1846 discovery of Neptune (which is nowhere near where it "should" be), confounded by the discovery of Pluto (which is where the law states Neptune should be), and pretty much discredited by the Kuiper Belt.
As for Pluto, it was discovered while searching for Planet X, which was considered to be causing disturbances in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. It was later determined that Neptune and Uranus's orbits weren't being disturbed at all — but the existence of Pluto was an established fact all the same.
Speaking of Pluto, an old theory of its origins that was discredited years before the Kuiper Belt was discovered was that it was a moon of Neptune that somehow escaped. This idea was based on the many similarities that Pluto shares with Triton, Neptune's largest moon. The reasoning was that the similarities between Pluto and Triton mean that the two share similar origins. And they do, but in reverse of the original theory: Triton was once an independent (or maybe part of a binary like Pluto and Charon) dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt before it was captured by Neptune.
In the 17th century, there was a practice of publishing new discoveries with the letters scrambled, giving the writer time to get confirmation for their findings as well as establishing the priority of their work in case of someone else also getting it in the meantime. Galileo sent two such letters to Johannes Kepler (one announcing his discovery that Saturn had rings^note and the other that Venus had phases like the moon). Kepler tried to decode these and came up with totally different sentences, one claiming that Mars had two moons, and the other claiming that Jupiter had a moving red spot. Both of those claims were absolutely right, but there was no way to know that for at least another century.
Concerning the moons of Mars, the likely reason there were believed to be two is that Earth has one, Jupiter was known to have four^note, and Mars was in between. Today, of course, we know Jupiter has a lot more moons than four, but Mars indeed has two.
Ancient alchemists associated each planet or heavenly body with a metal. For the most part, those associations proved to have no scientific basis with those bodies as we know them today (e.g. there isn't very much silver on the moon, and good luck trying to mine tin from Jupiter), but they did just so happen to get one metal-and-planet association right: there is an abundance of iron oxide on Mars, giving it its reddish color.
The Pythagorean philosopher Philolaus theorized that Earth revolved around a "central fire" in the fifth century BCE. He also theorized that lunar eclipses were caused by something blocking sunlight from hitting the moon. However, those were basically the only things about his astronomical model that were correct; among other things, the "central fire" was completely different from the sun, which also revolved around it, the Earth did not spin on its axis (hence why we never saw the central fire), and that the thing which caused lunar eclipses was not the Earth, but an unseen Counter-Earth.
Both Pytheas and Posidonius correctly assumed that tides were caused by the movements of the moon. Their reasoning, however (believing that the moon was made up by Air and Fire and said tides were caused by the heat), was completely wrong.
Old theories of solar system formation suggested that planets would have formed from the outside to the inside, meaning in the case of the innermost ones that Mars would be younger than Earth and thus older than Venus, which mixed with other ideas of those times gave a Mars that was a dying world transforming into a desert planet showing Earth's future and Venus as a fertile, rainy world. We currently know Mars was much richer in water in the past and think that Earth will become a desert world in the distant future as the Sun evolves into the later stages of its life cycle. As for Venus, however.... Additionally, it does rain on Venus. The problem is, the rain evaporates 25 kilometers above the ground due to the planet's intense heat and the rain itself is sulfuric acid.
The early astronomer Tycho Brahe argued that Aristotle's interpretation of the stars was wrong, because Aristotle claimed that stars were perfect, eternal, fixed, and there could never be any new ones. Tycho disproved this by noting that his telescopic observations had revealed a star in the sky that wasn't on any existing charts and had only appeared recently. However, later astronomers took a closer look at what Tycho had seen and discovered it was actually a supernova (specifically SN 1572), not a new star. In a roundabout way, Tycho was right to assume that what he had seen proved that stars weren't eternal, but he was looking at a star dying rather than it being born. (Incidentally, this is why the terms "nova" and "supernova" exist: "nova" means "new", and they were thought to be new stars.)

Geography and Geology

Christopher Columbus wasn't the first person to realize that Earth was round; that's been known since 200 BC. He merely miscalculated its radius, and by dumb luck happened to get the circumference wrong by about the width of the Pacific Ocean, so when he ran into the Americas at about the "right" distance, he assumed he was in Asia. The actual reason that Columbus had difficulty getting funding for his expedition was that European intellectuals were aware of Earth's correct radius but weren't aware of the American continents, thus believing there was a single vast ocean that ships of the era couldn't possibly carry enough food and fresh water to cross.
Aristotle also argued that the Earth was round in On the Heavens (350 BC), a century and a half before Eratosthenes first calculated the Earth's radius. His reasoning was that there were elephants in Libya (i.e. North Africa west of Egypt) and also in India, but since there were no elephants in the Middle East, then Africa and India ought to be connected on the other side. He was thus not just unaware that Africa is not connected to Asia by the West, but also that African and Asian elephants are different species; possibly, that there were elephants in Africa south of the Sahara (or, like other Greeks of his time, he believed that Ethiopia, the only part of Sub-Saharan Africa Greece had some vague knowledge about, was part of, or laid close to India); and that (Asian) elephants had actually lived once in the Middle East, but had been driven to local extinction by 700 BC. He was also presumably unaware that Africa and India were at one point connected in the east... when they were both parts of the supercontinent Gondwana, which broke up 100 million years ago.
After Europeans mapped Africa south of the Sahara and found North and South America, it became common wisdom that there was a sixth, unknown continent, that was dubbed "Terra Australis" or Land of the South. The reasoning was that the Earth needed to be balanced, so just like South America balanced North America and Africa balanced Europe, there had to be a southern continent the size of Asia to balance it. As we know today, there was indeed a sixth continental mass, Australia (whose name is in fact derived from Terra Australis), but continents do not in fact have to balance each other. And even if we combine its surface with the rest of Oceania and the seventh continent, Antarctica, the result is still only half of Asia's landmass. Amusingly, going further back into Earth's history, the continental masses were very evenly divided between the northern and southern continents Laurasia and Gondwana.
In the mid-19th Century, fossils of prehistoric lemurs were discovered in both Madagascar and India, implying that the two landmasses, now separated by the Indian Ocean, were connected at some point. To explain this, archaeologists of the time hypothesized the existence of an Atlantis-style "Lost Continent" which they dubbed "Lemuria," that existed where the Indian Ocean is now, and was sunken by some kind of cataclysm. They almost had it right: Madagascar and India were connected once in the distant past, but are separated now due to continental drift. This separation also happened long before lemurs evolved.
Alfred Wegener coined the theory of continental drift, but was largely laughed out as a crackpot because he claimed it was because of the earth's centrifugal force (and on top of that, he way overshot on how fast it occurred). Geologists of the time correctly surmised that centrifugal force was far, far too weak to push around continents, and nobody at the time had any knowledge of plate tectonics.
Georges Cuvier was one of the most important geologists and naturalists of the 19th century and basically invented paleontology and comparative anatomy. He challenged and proved wrong with data the common views the Earth was no older than 6000 years old and that species couldn't become extinct (scholars believed that God's creation was balanced and perfect as it was). However, he did so because he also strongly opposed any idea of evolution or species changing, but needed to explain the increasing amount of fossils being discovered, being one of the largest collectors himself. Therefore he developed the theory of catastrophism: Earth must have been much more ancient and largely shaped by sudden, violent events, like floods, which periodically killed most animals leaving the survivors to repopulate the planet. Fossils represented extinct species that were created before the human era, killed by cataclysms like the deluge mentioned in various myths and literary accounts including the Bible (e.g. the tale of Noah's ark explained marine fossils found in mountains). This way, by confutating species fixism and the young Earth belief, although a creationist, he incidentally paved the way for Charles Darwin to formulate natural selection.
In the early 18th century, a Frenchman named Benoît de Maillet claimed Earth must be at least two billion years old... because by his calculations, that's how long it would take for seas to recede to the current level assuming they once covered the tallest mountains. Throughout the 19th century, most of the respected calculations were only coming to figures of tens, at the most hundreds of millions of years. Then, methods were discovered of actually measuring such things instead of calculating them, and it turned out de Maillet's estimate was the closer one to the truth.
Terror Bay in Canada's King William Island was named in 1910 after the HMS Terror, a ship that disappeared in the area during the 1840s. The remains of a camp set up by Terror's crew were found in the bay. It wasn't until 2016 that it was also found that Terror had been sunk in the bay bearing its name the entire time! Notably this didn't happen with its also missing sister ship HMS Erebus, which was not found in Erebus Bay (site of a camp set up by the Erebus crew) but way south, in Wilmot and Crampton Bay near the continent.
The entire practice of diluvial geology was based around a literal reading of the Book of Genesis and the Great Flood, and was used to predict where certain mineral deposits would be located. While most of the time it failed, when they did get it right it was often because they were finding deposits left by glaciers.

Math

The ancient Egyptian methods of multiplying and dividing two numbers turn out to be mathematically sound, but because they rely on binary calculation, which hadn't been discovered in the 17th century BC when the methods were first written about, it's doubtful that anyone knew why they worked at the time.
Fermat's Last Theorem. While Fermat claimed he had a short and elegant proof of it, no one has found it yet, and the existing proof is very complicated and elaborate and the methods required for its development weren't itself developed until well into the 20th century. It is nowadays assumed Fermat's original proof was either incomplete or wrong (or both), but the theorem is correct anyway.
The document "The Most Common Errors in Undergraduate Mathematics" has a section warning students that incorrect methods can sometimes lead to correct answers, but that doesn't justify the method. It also gives two examples:
- The first is the classic "simplify 16/64 by erasing the 6's". In most cases, you can't just delete digits like that and expect it to work, but 16/64 really can be simplified to 1/4.
- The second is a hilariously bad attempt at integration that gets every step wrong and still manages to get the right answer.^note The student expected partial credit because he had the right answer.

Medicine

The Mongols would boil their water as a sacrifice to the Water Spirits so they wouldn’t Curse them with sickness. And they were absolutely right! An amusing thought occurs that driving off germs wouldn't sound any less odd to a people constantly surrounded by nature spirits but with zero knowledge about Germ Theory. Sort of like Playing With Arbitrary Skepticism.
Science and medicine operate on the assumption that it reasons from ever incomplete premises, and newly discovered facts can prove it wrong in principle even when right in practice.
- Some view Chiropractic and things such as Acupuncture and Acupressure to be this. They have been found to be nice pain relief methods of therapy, but not for the reasons their founder(s) and early practitioners thought.
The idea that one’s specific balance of humors governs one’s personality, as well as the idea that an imbalance of humors can cause disease, wasn’t too far off from our modern concept of hormones and chemical imbalances causing physical and mental changes.
A variant of the "Evil Eye" myth holds that babies should be looked at as little as possible, and even less by strangers, or they will become sick. This actually arised from people unknowingly carrying diseases that easily thwarted the babies' undeveloped immune systems, but limiting babies' contact with other people would prevent it the same.
During the plague epidemics of Europe from the 17th to the 18th century, plague doctors used a protective garment of thick waxed- or greased-fabric overcoat, gloves, leggings, boots, and a head covering with a mask fitted with glass eyepieces and a beak filled with aromatic herbs to filter the air. People were convinced back then plague spread itself through contaminated air. As the plague spread from rats to humans via fleas, the primitive gas mask of the beak was useless in this respect - but the all-enveloping thick clothing still kept fleas away from the body and the mask kept them away from the face, increasing slightly the chances for the plague doctor to escape unharmed. On the other hand, this costume was rarely cleaned so its voluptuous layers of cloth ensured that the doctors carried bodily fluids and other filth from wherever they had visited on their robes, making them inadvertently spread the plague wherever they went. The widespread superstition at the time that the visit of a doctor was a sign of impending death wasn't far off the mark.
Nostradamus was a famous plague doctor, recommending what he called "the rose pill." Made from rosehips, it was rich in Vitamin C, which happens to be a decent immune booster. It wasn't much of a boost, especially when compared to his advancements in hygienics, but it certainly didn't hurt.
Victorians believed malaria was caused by bad (mal) air. Missionaries in Africa wrote home about the primitive superstitions of the natives, who foolishly believed malaria was caused by evil swamp spirits. Both groups were wrong, but closing your windows at night and staying out of the swamp is a very effective way to avoid mosquitoes, which are the real vector of the disease. In a way, mosquitoes can be seen as evil swamp spirits, especially if there are many of them attacking you.
- More than one ancient city mitigated their malaria problems by filling in their local wetlands. This wasn't because they knew what caused malaria, but that the seasonal nature of it and the fact that a high number of mosquitoes tended to presage outbreaks of it was not lost on them.
- The bad air (or miasma) theory of disease led to attempts to stave off illness by burning incense. This proved very effective in protecting against mosquitoes, a major disease vector, since they don't tend to be big fans of weird-smelling smoke. The main concept of miasma theory (that disease is caused by unpleasant smells generated by corpses) is also one big example of this trope — the smell itself is not the cause of disease, but rather a byproduct of the bacteria attracted to the decaying tissue.
- Florence Nightingale did a lot to improve sanitary conditions in hospitals. Although her work was based on miasma theory, better sanitation is better sanitation, and death rates fell.
- London's current sewer system was built because of cholera epidemics throughout the city in 1858. The logic was based on the flawed miasma theory, but the sewer system improved sanitation by discharging the sewage downstream of the city, effectively ending mass cholera epidemics in the city. Indeed, one final cholera epidemic in 1866, prior to the full completion of the sewer system, proved the real reason for the cholera outbreaks (cholera is a water-borne illness), but also validated the building of the sewer (the outbreak was limited to a portion of the city that hadn't yet been connected to the sewer).
- The miasma theory itself was increasingly shown to have some merit in a different manner than expected during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Doctors and scientists have noted that a mistaken assumption about how aerosol and droplet spread worked (namely, using 5 microns as the cutoff point at which a particle of particular size would not stay in the air for long and land on a surface away from its point of origin, the actual number is about 100 microns, and can vary based on the disease in question) led to flawed assumptions about how diseases like COVID-19 were likely to spread. Rather than focusing on fomite or droplet spread, respiratory illnesses like COVID-19 actually can spread via aerosols over decent distances, especially within a confined space (in contrast to open ones).
The usual explanation for heatstroke in tropical climates until the early 20th century was that solar rays cook the hapless guy's head - which drove people to invent the broad-brimmed sombreros, Stetson hats, Asian conical hats or pith helmets. In fact, heatstroke from mild to deadly forms can be triggered by any source of heat, from a hot boiler room to the depths of a mine. The protection given by the renowned pith helmet laid in keeping the heat away from the skull by its specific design (with ventilation holes and lightweight and insulative material), protecting the face from sunburns due to the broad brim and the eyes from intense sunlight.
Ancient Greek doctors believed that ailments were caused by an imbalance in the body's fluids (of which they believed there were four kinds), and thus the best treatment for an abscess was to cut it open and drain the "excess" fluid. The imbalance idea was nonsense, but cutting and draining is still standard treatment for an abscess today.
Leeches were believed to have medicinal use because they removed the bad blood from patients. Turns out they do have medicinal use as a cheap, disposable, painless, and sterile means of getting rid of blood clots and for bloodletting.
In the 18th century, the cure for scurvy was discovered in Britain to be lemons. They concluded this was because lemon juice is acidic, and the acid was basically burning the scurvy out. They had no idea that scurvy is actually a deficiency of vitamin C, which is rich in lemons and other fruits but poor in the usual diets on long voyages. This eventually resulted in the cure being "lost" in the 19th century when it was proven that acidic juice wasn't the cure — because the Royal Navy switched to the cheaper limes, which were just as sour but saw expeditions end in scurvy anyway. This was actually because limes are much poorer in vitamin C than lemons, but the change wasn't noticed, as it happened during a period when ship voyages had shortened considerably due to steam power and therefore scurvy cases had become far rarer. It wasn't until vitamins were discovered in the early 20th century that those old remedies were validated.
Ignaz Semmelweiss, a pioneer of antiseptic theories, correctly realized that disinfectant was vital for doctors, and attempted to push for mandatory hand-washing, especially after autopsies. However, his theories were largely rejected because he guessed this was because bodies were covered in "cadaverous material" and that dead bodies were somehow poisonous. Germ theory had yet to be discovered, and so most doctors dismissed his ideas, or even saw them as insulting (Charles Delucena Meigs famously rejected it for suggesting a gentleman's hands were ever not clean). This is a case where he didn't so much reach the conclusion through bad methods as he did stumble across it in testing and then had to try to come up with a reason after the fact - he knew he was right, he just didn't know why.
The gateway drug theory. Sort of. The original theory posited that the vast majority of hard drug users started with marijuana. It turns out they did, but there are some very obvious reasons for that other than marijuana's nature. Simply put, most hard drug users had also first indulged in alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, because those substances are more readily available and easier to obtain. You can probably see the problem. However, it turns out marijuana really was driving users to try harder drugs, but for very different reasons. First, when potential drug users were told drugs are bad, and then tried marijuana with minimal negative consequences, it gave them the confidence to try harder illegal drugs. Second, being able to get your hands on marijuana usually meant you were interacting with someone in possession of harder drugs (after all, they're both illegal). And finally, unregulated black market marijuana can potentially be spiked with harder drugs to get people hooked, or due to shoddy handling by people in the black market.^noteSomeone processing and preparing both harder drugs and marijuana in the same location may use the same tools to do so, cross-contaminating the products. In effect, marijuana is a gateway drug, but only because it's illegal and unregulated--in part for being a gateway drug.
- Marijuana use is also statistically associated with lower life expectancy and high rates of non drug related criminal behavior, but that’s inverse causation. Since it’s heavily stigmatized and illegal in some states, people who are law abiding and care about their reputation would be likely to avoid it. In countries like Saudi Arabia where alcohol has the same connotations, alcohol users have the same profile.
It's believed that this waylaid Samuel Hahnemann, the inventor of homeopathy. His actual science was complete quackery, but it turned out he was right about them being more effective than the methods of the era. Patients under him tended to survive because it was much better (or at least, less blatantly harmful) to have someone drink lots of water with a few molecules of something poisonous in it and then take a rest, than to stick them with leeches or cut off their limbs. It wasn't so much that he was correct as it was that his methods weren't worse than nothing.
ECT, or Electro-Convulsive Therapy was invented by a doctor who noticed that his epilepsy patients never showed any symptoms of depression, and concluded that epilepsy provided some protection against depression. From there, he figured that inducing seizures with carefully-applied electrical shocks to the brain might cure depression. As it turns out, all of his premises were flawed. People with epilepsy suffer from depression at roughly the same rate as the general population. However, that doesn't change the fact that ECT can be an effective treatment for severe depression.
In the Victorian age, doctors found that sending patients to the beach who got sick during damp weather worked, and they concluded that damp weather was bad for you and the beach was good for you. In reality, the reason they got sick was because the water in the air caused the arsenic that was in the walls at the time to seep out, and they got better because they were away from the arsenic.
The ancient Egyptians discovered that honey could treat sore throats, but thought it was because malevolent entities hated it. In reality, honey can treat sore throats, but it's actually because A.) If the sore throat is due to an infection, the honey's antimicrobial properties can fight the infection, and B.) Even if it's not caused by an infection, honey coats the inner lining of one's throat, which can relieve pain.
You may have read that the common claim that spinach are rich in iron is an Urban Legend, originated when someone mistakenly added a zero when writing down the result of chemical analysis. However, the "added a zero" story is itself a rumor with no evidence to back it up. So, is spinach a good source of iron after all? No. While spinach is decently rich in iron (for a vegetable), the form of this iron and the presence of other chemicals make it hard for your body to absorb it.
- Related to the above: many think that Popeye was given spinach as a Power-Up Food to promote it as an iron-rich food. Popeye comics did have a goal of promoting spinach, but for its vitamin A content, not iron.
In the 1800's Sylvester Graham reasoned that foods like bleached flour, sugar, and the like were bad for folks, particularly adolescents, which inspired him to invent the Graham Cracker which (at the time) was a bland and hard to chew biscuit made of unbleached wheat flour, wheat bran and coarsely ground germ which went along with his so-called "Graham Diet." He believed this was healthier because he believed those other foods drove people to masturbate which he was convinced caused negative health effects, but in reality his biscuits were healthier because bleached flour at the time often contained chalk or alum as filler, and was often bleached with chlorine.
The bark of the White Willow has been used as a pain reliever for thousands of years well before anybody knew why it worked. Today, we know it contains Salicin, an ingredient in modern Aspirin.
The Beef Bandage does work but it was the coldness of the steak causing the healing of the wound or black eye, not the meat itself.
During plagues like The Black Death, the richest citizens would flee the cities and towns, escaping to their private residences in the countryside in hope that the fresher air would protect them from the plague. This is because it was widely believed at the time of the Black Death that plagues were caused by "corrupted air". This fleeing did protect them to some degree, since contagions spread slower in less-densely populated regions.

Paleontology

Andrewsarchus, an extinct Cenozoic mammal known only from a fossil skull, was believed to be part of an extinct group of wolflike ungulates, the mesonychids, which in turn were believed to be the last land ancestors, or close land relatives of whales. It was later found that whales are more related to hippos than mesonychids, and also that Andrewsarchus was not actually a mesonychid. However, it turned out that Andrewsarchus was a relative of hippos, and as a result, a land relative of whales, after all.
When studying dinosaur fossils from Mongolia for the first time, paleontologists attributed the fossil nests to the most common dinosaur in the area, the vegetarian Protoceratops. Right above one nest, a theropod skeleton was found, and was interpreted as a nest raider surprised by a sandstorm while feeding on the eggs. It was accordingly named Oviraptor ("Egg thief"). Later, embryos of Oviraptor rather than Protoceratops were found in the nests, revealing that the so-called thief was actually a dutiful parent who died protecting its offspring from the elements. Poor Oviraptor became the poster child of the unfairness of biological naming systems. But even later, another nest was discovered with both Oviraptor and either immature or embryonic troodontid dinosaurs inside. One possible explanation is that Oviraptor actually raided troodontid nests, bringing their chicks or eggs to its own nests to eat them comfortably there.
A similar thing happened to Coelophysis, which was long fingered for the first known instance of cannibalism in dinosaurs when a paleontologist discovered what appeared to be bones of a juvenile in the stomach of two fossils at Ghost Ranch. Decades later, it was discovered in the two identified specimens, one had no Coelophysis bones in its stomach, while the other had some bones but hadn't actually eaten them (apparently, the bones got pressed into its belly when the flood that buried it hit). Not long after this came out, analysis of vomit and feces suggested that some of the Coelophysis at Ghost Ranch had indeed eaten juveniles, and other instances of cannibalism have been spotted in later species of dinosaur. But the two original suspects? Most likely innocent.
Early reconstructions of pterosaurs assumed them to be relatives of bats or marsupials, and showed them as appropriately covered in fur. Later on, they were labeled correctly as reptiles, but most modern reconstructions believe that they did indeed have fur-like coverings. This means that some 19th-century illustrations are more accurate than completely scaly 20th-century ones.

Zoology

For hundreds if not thousands of years, popular wisdom dictated the person who happens to be in the path of a brown bear should lie down motionless and play dead, supposedly because bears avoid eating corpses. This is wrong: bears can and will eat carrion if hungry enough (and may actually prefer decaying meat) and can easily tell the difference between living and dead. What's actually happening is that the bear tries to examine the human and decide if they are dangerous and should be killed or not. Bears (except polar bears) don't prey on humans, and only attack humans in self-defense, when they feel threatened. The one who lies down, does not move, and does not fight back is usually left alone. Certain Native American tribes got closer to what's actually going on with the same technique that includes an apology to the bear often to the effect of "I did not mean to disturb you brother/sister."
Anyone who believes horses are native to the Americas because the Great Plains tribes had them. Domestic horses were introduced by Europeans and then adopted by the Native Americans. The domestic horse's wild ancestor, however, did evolve in North America and colonized Eurasia from there, but became extinct in the Americas at the end of the Pleistocene and was never domesticated there.
A commonly-heard insult against toy dogs, and Chihuahuas in particular, is the claim that they're more like rats than dogs. Take a close look at a Chihuahua and a rat side by side, and it's hard to spot a single characteristic they have in common that's not universal for all mammals. However, the way some Chihuahua-owners stereotypically handle their dogs, carrying them in handbags or held against their own bodies, is exactly how well-socialized pet rats, which crave close contact with their humans and enjoy the enclosed feeling of riding in a bag, prefer to be handled.
- The other oft-heard insult is that Chihuahuas are a modern mutant breed created by genetic experimentation to satisfy modern consumerism. While factually wrong, as the breed evolved independently of Old World breeds over centuries, they were selectively bred. This was the primitive way to achieve the needed genetic traits (in all domestic breeds of pets and farm animals).
The tendency to refer to apes like gorillas and chimpanzees as monkeys. Because genetic testing has revealed that Old World monkeys like baboons and macaques are more closely related to the apes than they are to new New World monkeys like howlers or capuchins. Due to this, apes are now classified as a subgroup of monkeys and it's therefore scientifically accurate to refer to them as such. This includes humans, so all incidences of somebody being called a monkey are also technically correct.
Elephant shrews were originally named because they have a long nose similar to an elephant trunk. In the 1990s, however, it was discovered that the ancestors of the elephant shrews, which evolved in Africa, also produced lineages that include animals as disparate as hyraxes, manatees, and, yes, elephants. This means that elephant shrews are, genetically-speaking, closer to elephants than they are to shrews.
The two species of warthog are Phacochoerus africanus, which is widespread in Subsaharan Africa, and P. aethiopicus, which is exclusive to Ethiopia and neighboring countries. However, the name P. aethiopicus was actually first given to a warthog population in South Africa that was hunted to extinction in 1871, and it wasn't discovered that the Ethiopian animals were the same species until the 1990s. In this case the name aethiopicus was originally given in its Antiquity sense of belonging to any place in Subsaharan Africa, not the modern country of Ethiopia only.

Psychology

The discovery of the Bystander Syndrome in psychology after the murder of Kitty Genovese. The popular story that people still know goes that thirty-eight people watched by and did nothing, not even call the police, as she was stabbed to death for half an hour in their yard. This prompted research into the psychological phenomena that could cause people to behave like that, which are still recognized as real. However, in this case, the story as it was was apparently nothing but lousy newspaper reporting, and the witnesses had in fact a) not been able to see what was really happening and b) called the police anyway.
In 2015, an attention-getting study was done, showing that a simple, 10-minute conversation with a stranger who turned out to be gay could measurably change people's opinions on gay rights. It made quite a stir, until it was discovered that the grad student running the study apparently made up all the data, and the study was retracted. The same group that discovered this fraud did a study of their own, and found that the original conclusions were actually correct, if somewhat less dramatic than originally claimed, and for a different reason: the stranger didn't have to be gay, they just had to seem open-minded and "help" the interviewee come to the conclusion on their own (i.e. it's not empathy driving the change in opinion, it's people thinking they changed their minds on their own).
Vedic scriptures prescribed ghee to schizophrenic people because it was believed to have healing properties since it came from cows, which are sacred in Hindu culture. Ghee is high in Vitamin D, which helps with psychosis.

Other

The phlogiston theory, popular in the 18th century, asserted that burning was a result of combustible materials containing a substance, called phlogiston, that was released into the air during combustion and then absorbed by growing plants (the latter explaining why air did not spontaneously combust). As it turned out, burning actually involves absorbing a substance from the air (oxygen), but burning organic materials do in fact release a substance into the air that is absorbed by growing plants (carbon dioxide).
Union General Sickles at Gettysburg, in a completely unsound tactical maneuver, scooted his unit forward after the first day of battle, leaving a gap in the Union line and leaving his force unsupported. Predictably, it was completely ravaged by the Confederate assault and quickly ceased to be an effective fighting force. However, its unexpected positioning out in the front of the main defense line threw off the (already problematic) timing of the CSA advance as several units took a much wider path to get around Sickles, or else used up time going through him.
The common explanation for not quoting the horsepower of Top Fuel and Funny Cars dragster engines is "they are too powerful for a dynamometer". In practice, there are marine dynamometers able to measure tens of thousands of horsepower. But a Top Fuel engine lacks a cooling system and other features can't run at maximum horsepower for more than 10 seconds, so it can't perform a full multi-minute dyno run, whatever dynamometer is used. So it's much more accurate to say they are "too powerful to last long enough for a dynamometer", which doesn't imply that the power ratings are off the scale, but sounds much less impressive.
Nearly every culture that has developed a calendar has also developed some form of astrology. Western astrology sticks to the idea that the planets are responsible for things, and tries to adjust for new astronomical discoveries, while Eastern astrology long ago divorced itself from the concept of literal stars and instead speaks of energies and natural cycles, using stars as merely time-markers and metaphor. Either way, science has determined that birth month has a surprising influence on your prospects for mental and physical health with, for example, April being a peak month for autism while October is a peak month for respiratory illness. Both are predicted in most astrological systems, and science does not quite have a solid theory as to why yet, but odds are it has nothing to do with elemental energy or astronomical bodies without even gravitational influence on Earth.
- The likely influencing factors are availability of food and sunlight over the preceding 40 weeks.
- The general idea that the birthdate influences one's chance at career in life is generally considered as ridiculous, but it was noticed that for succeeding at professional sports, one had to be born in January, February or March, while November and December yielded the smallest amount of pro athletes. The reason turned to be that most of the pro sport scouts evaluate their prospects at an annual rate - in other words, a kid born on January 1 in a given year will be assessed with the same standards as kid born on December 31 of the same year, and since sometimes 4, 5, or 6-year-olds are assessed, that nearly-an-entire-year difference is more an abyss than a gap.
The famous Thompson submachine gun (Tommy gun) is designed around the Blish principle, a theory that dissimilar metals will form greater resistance until significant pressure is applied. Turns out the Blish principle doesn't really exist, but the gun's "Blish lock" ended up functioning as an excellent rate of fire reducer. This delayed the action enough to make the gun controllable and allows gas to leave the barrel rather than being vented into the shooter's face.
The first pseudo-attempt at building a chess-playing machine was a contraption called The Turk, which turned out to be an (admittedly well-designed) hoax. Some people who watched it play concluded that there was a human chess master making moves inside the machine (which there was) because its occasional losses were not consistent with a machine's perfect performance. They were right the machine was a hoax, but wrong that its failure to play perfectly is what gave it away. It would take over two centuries before computing power reached the point where a machine could consistently defeat a skilled human player, and even today computers don't play "perfectly" (i.e. Chess is not yet a "solved game" - the perfect move in response to every conceivable situation has not yet been found).
In Ancient Rome, the blood of a sacrificed animal would be added to concrete mixture. They believed this made it stronger. As it turns out, they were right. It wasn't due to divine favor, however - the blood aerated the concrete, making it more durable.
In 2008, a forum user predicted that the A Song of Ice and Fire character Hodor's name came from the phrase "Hold the door", which he repeated until he snapped, leaving "Hodor" the only thing he could say. In 2016, Game of Thrones would prove this theory right, but the origin of the phrase is wrong — the user claimed that it came from him constantly telling someone to hold the door for him, since he's always carrying something or someone else. The actual reason is far more poignant than that.
The oft-repeated claim that the Inuit have a ludicrously high number of words for snow might actually be true... depending on how you define what a word is. The Inuit languages are polysynthetic agglutinizing languages, meaning that words are "grown" by adding affixes to them to add more detail and meaning, as opposed to languages like English that use additional words such as adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions to form phrases that describe the same thing. This means that while they have only four base words for snow, they'll add affixes to the ends of those words to further describe the snow. Of course, the idea that they have hundreds of words for snow simply because they live in the Arctic is false.
Many people erroneously refer to the monster as Frankenstein, as a result of many reasons like Pop-Cultural Osmosis, derivative works referring to it as such, and simply assuming the name on the cover must refer to the monster, when in fact the doctor's name is Victor Frankenstein while the monster goes unnamed. However as the creature is the creation of the doctor, referring to it as "Frankenstein" is technically correct as it could reasonably inherit the surname "Frankenstein" the same way the doctor's son or daughter would.
It's been suggested that Vikings in ancient times, while forging their weapons, added the bones of fierce animals and deceased warriors to the molten iron, under the belief that the being's spirit would make the weapon stronger. The weapons did become stronger than plain iron, but not for any magical reasons. Rather, the carbon in the bones fused with the iron and created a primitive steel.
A common Ninja Pirate Robot Zombie combination is mashing together ninja and samurai. This is usually borne simply out of the fact that they're both Japanese and both tend to be seen as cool, even though, by most standards, they would be considered on opposite ends of the spectrum: a noble and honorable high-ranking warrior versus a master of dishonorable tactics and secretive techniques. However, in real life, there are indeed cases of samurai acting as ninja. Bushido took many forms over the years and often meant little more than "do your job well and obey your daimyo", which meant a stealthy assassination was hardly against the rules if the daimyo's orders demanded it, and "ninjutsu", far from the quasi-mystical feats ascribed to it by popular culture, more or less meant training in fitness and various assassination methods (disguise, poison use, explosives, etc). If a samurai needed to kill someone stealthily, they could and would train to do so and carry it out.
Witchcraft used to be a crime carrying a death penalty. The Biblical word for a witch, φαρμακείωα (pharmakeia), can actually mean also a "medicine maker". Some witches' brews were outright poisons. While ensorcelling and bespelling someone won't cause anyone's death, having him drink a toxic concoction certainly does. So effectively the φαρμακείωα certainly commits a murder (which is a capital crime!) but it is because of the poison, not the hocus-pocus chanting and bespelling.
The image of a witch saying a magic incantation while stirring her cauldron has some basis in reality. People in ancient times often recited popular prayers and songs while cooking (either food or medicine), and while spirituality was certainly part of it, the more practical reason was to time how long the food/potion was on the fire, not unlike the modern advice to sing "Happy Birthday" to yourself while washing your hands to ensure that you're doing it for 20 seconds. They thought if they didn't recite the prayer/song/etc., then their brew would fail for not receiving divine blessing, when in actuality it was over- or undercooked from not being properly timed.
A definition of "knowledge" is "justified true belief", To say that you know "X" means that: 1. You believe that "X" is true 2. "X" really is true ("X" can't be knowledge if it's false) 3. And that your "belief" is justified with reasonable evidence (lucky guesses aren't knowledge). However there is something called a "Gettier case" where the "justification" is only right by coincidence. For example, if you "know" that it's "11:30" because you looked at a clock and it says "11:30" and it's actually "11:30", but you didn't know that the clock was actually broken and it only says "11:30" by coincidence. Then would that count as "knowing" that it's "11:30"?
During WWII, a German spy told his superiors what he had discovered while investigating the rate of U.S. tank production. Feeling that the rate of production was too incredibly high to be true, High Command recalled the spy believing he had been discovered and was being fed false info. He was indeed being fed false info, only much LOWER than the real tank production numbers, which were mind boggling.
Salt is believed to purify things and ward off evil spirits in various traditions, superstitions, and religions around the world. This likely stems from the role that salt plays in preventing meat from spoiling,^note and the fact that salt water can be useful for disinfecting surface cuts. Since there was no way for people of the time to know about Germ Theory or what was going on at a microscopic level, the idea of salt having purifying powers against evil spirits was born.
Pre-Darwin, there was a theory that high exposure to sunlight literally caused Africans to have darker skin, like how burning food makes it turn dark. Shakespeare mentions it in The Merchant of Venice and Othello, and Olado Equiano, a former slave, wrote of it in his autobiography. Obviously this is not true, but dark skin is caused by high amount of melanin, which is selective in populations that have high sun exposure because it's a very effective UV repellant.

Right For The Wrong Reasons / Real Life

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