Spontaneous Generation

The Blank Slate

Phrenology

Even before microscopes and theories of cells and germs, man had other ideas about the creation of
living things. Spontaneous generation or equivocal generation is an obsolete principle concerning the origin of
life from inanimate matter. The hypothesis was brought out by Aristotle who advocated the work of earlier
natural philosophers. The theory was not finally put to rest until 1859, when Louis Pasteur proved it wrong
once and for all, drawing influence from Francesco Redi who was an early proponent of germ theory and cell
theory. Meanwhile, the Blank State (or Tabula rasa), widely popularized by John Locke in 1689, proposed that
individuals are born without built-in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and
perception. Modern research suggests that genes and other family traits inherited from birth, along with innate
instincts of course, also play a very important role. On the other hand, Phrenology, developed by Franz
Joseph Gall, became popular in the 19th century during the Victorian era, its proponents believed that
individual character traits, whether intelligence, aggression, or an ear for music, could all be localized to very
specific parts of the brain. According to phrenologists, the larger each one of these parts of a person’s brain
was, the more likely they were to behave in a certain way. With this in mind, practitioners would often study
the size and shape of subjects’ heads in order to determine what kind of personality they might have. Detailed
maps of the supposed 27 different areas of the brain were created, and a person who had a particularly large
bump on their skull in the area for, say, the sense of colors, would be assumed to have a proclivity for
painting. Modern scientific research wiped it out by proving that personality traits could not be traced to
specific portions of the brain. Now widely considered as a pseudoscience.
All this theories stated above were once accepted but are now debunked by modern research studies
or we can say this past scientific discoveries, became popularly known but then were later found to be
completely proved false by other scientist or researchers.

SOURCES:
https://www.famousscientists.org/10-most-famous-scientific-theories-that-were-later-debunked/
https://listverse.com/2009/01/19/10-debunked-scientific-beliefs-of-the-past/