Newton's apple and other myths about science

Medieval and early modern science

That there was no scientific activity between Greek antiquity and the scientific revolution / Michael H. Shank

That before Columbus geographers and other educated people thought the earth was flat / Lesley B. Cormack

That the copernican revolution demoted the status of the Earth / Michael N. Keas

That alchemy and astrology were superstitious pursuits that did not contribute to science and scientific understanding / Lawrence M. Principe

That Galileo publicly refuted Aristotle's conclusions about motion by repeated experiments made from the Campanile of Pisa / John L. Heilbron

That the apple fell and Newton invented the law of gravity, thus removing God from the cosmos / Patricia Fara

Nineteenth century

That Friedrich Wohler's synthesis of urea in 1828 destroyed vitalism and gave rise to organic chemistry / Peter J. Ramberg

That William Paley raised scientific questions about biological origins that were eventually answered by Charles Darwin / Adam R. Shapiro

That nineteenth-century geologists were divided into opposing camps of Catastrophists and Uniformitarians / Julie Newell

That Lamarckian evolution relied largely on use and disuse and that Darwin rejected Lamarckian mechanisms / Richard W. Burkhardt Jr

That Darwin worked on his theory in secret for twenty years, his fears causing him to delay publication / Robert J. Richards

That Wallace's and Darwin's explanations of evolution were virtually the same / Michael Ruse

That Darwinian natural selection has been "the only game in town" / Nicolaas Rupke

That after Darwin (1871), sexual selection was largely ignored until Robert Trivers (1972) resurrected the theory / Erika Lorraine Milam

That Louis Pasteur disproved spontaneous generation on the basis of scientific objectivity / Garland E. Allen

That Gregor Mendel was a lonely pioneer of genetics, being ahead of his time / Kostas Kampourakis

That "social Darwinism" has had a profound influence on social thought and policy, especially in America / Ronald L. Numbers

Twentieth century

That the Michelson-Morley experiment paved the way for the special theory of relativity / Theodore Arabatzis and Kostas Gavroglu

That the Millikan oil-drop experiment was simple and straightforward / Mansoor Niaz

That neo-Darwinism defines evolution as random mutation plus natural selection / David J. Depew

That melanism in peppered moths is not a genuine example of evolution by

Natural selection / David W. Rudge

That Linus Pauling's discovery of the molecular basis of sickle-cell anemia revolutionized medical practice / Bruno J. Strasser

That the Soviet launch of Sputnik caused the revamping of American science

Education / John L. Rudolph

Generalizations

That religion has typically impeded the progress of science / Peter Harrison

That science has been largely a solitary enterprise / Kathryn M. Olesko

That the "scientific method" accurately reflects what scientists actually do / Daniel P. Thurs

That a clear line of demarcation has separated science from pseudoscience / Michael D. Gordin.