Why scientific truth may hurt

The underlying realities of the world - from Earth's rotation around the sun to Darwin's theory of evolution - are rarely obvious or expected

All is not what it seems. Much of the universe - from the unimaginably small to the cosmological - is not how it appears to us, and our view is lamentably limited. The Earth's rotation around the sun has been accepted for less time than it was not, and we still don't yet know what makes up most of the cosmos. The knowledge that all life is built of cells is less than two centuries old, that all life is encoded in DNA has been known for just 50 years. When Darwin came up with evolution by natural selection, his loyal ally TH Huxley exclaimed "How extremely stupid, not to have thought of that!"

But evolution is not obvious at all, and it took thought and experiment and hard tenacious graft to reveal that truth. The real structure of the universe - the atomic, subatomic and quantum - was concealed from our eyes for all but the tiniest fragment of our tenure on Earth. We humans are awful at perceiving objective reality. We come with inbuilt preconceptions and prejudices. We're dreadful at logic, and see patterns in things that are not there, and skip over trends that are. We attribute cause and agency to chance and coincidence, and blame the innocent as the root of all manner of evil. We use the phrase "common sense" as an admirable quality for scrutinising the world in front of us.

Our senses and psychology perceive the world in very particular ways that are comically easy to fool.

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