"Nevertheless, It Still Moves" - Galileo

 The trouble with believing in science is that they keep changing it, and it's not always a linear process. I don't know if science ever taught that the Earth was flat, but I'm pretty sure that it once taught that the Earth is stationary and that the Sun, the Moon, and the stars all revolve around the Earth. Then Copernicus decided that, no, the Earth revolves around the Sun. Some time later, another scientist must have decided that the Copernicus was wrong because, when Galileo came along teaching that Copernicus was right after all, he had a hard time selling the concept. Most of his opposition came from the Catholic Church but, in those days, there was not such a clear distinction between science and religion as there is today, and I'm pretty sure that many of the scientists in Galileo's time sided with the church on the issue. Well, that's not exactly true because the word "scientist" was not in common use at the time, so Galileo and his colleagues were probably known as "philosophers", as were the theologians of the church. Anyway, Galileo eventually backed down because they made him an offer that he couldn't refuse, not if he wanted to avoid death by torture. Years later, somebody asked him why he hadn't stuck to his guns and become a martyr for his beliefs. Referring to the Earth, Galileo said, "Nevertheless, it still moves."

Until the early 20th Century, science taught that racism was cool. They used to believe that the White race was the most highly evolved, that the Yellow race represented a more primitive step in the evolutionary process, and that the Black race was the least evolved of all. Even after most of the scientific community trashed that idea, there were some well respected scientists in Nazi Germany who still believed it. If they had won the war, they well might have imposed their beliefs on the rest of the world's scientists and we would have learned it at old Gage Park. Therefore, it was the force of arms that finally defeated scientific racism, not the eloquence of reason.

When we were kids, the scientific community classified homosexuality as a sickness. Before that, it had been considered a crime in most jurisdictions worldwide. Sometime in the 1970s, the American Medical Association announced that homosexuality was no longer a sickness, and they shifted their efforts from trying to cure it to trying to help people learn to live with it. I don't know what kind of scientific evidence or logical reasoning went into the AMAs decision, but it was generally accepted by the scientific community at large. Now, if some new evidence came to light, causing the AMA to reverse course and revert to their earlier position, would you support them?