Disputed Statements

Parapsychology, Disciplines

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Key Experiment

Currently States Daryl Bem published nine experiments reporting statistically significant evidence for precognition in a 2011 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Independent pre-registered replications (Ritchie, Wiseman and French 2012; Galak and colleagues) failed to reproduce the effect; treated as a landmark case in the psychology replication crisis rather than established evidence for precognition.

Source Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect, Daryl J. Bem tier 1

Parapsychology, Disciplines

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Replication Status

Currently States Independent pre-registered attempts to replicate Bem's 2011 precognition findings, including a series by Ritchie, Wiseman, and French, found no effect; the episode became a touchstone case in psychology's wider replication crisis.

Daryl Bem published a set of experiments in 2011 reporting evidence for precognition, including a retroactive facilitation of recall effect in which subjects' present recall was said to be influenced by future study events. Stuart J. Ritchie, Richard Wiseman and Christopher C. French published Failing the Future: Three Unsuccessful Attempts to Replicate Bem's Retroactive Facilitation of Recall Effect in PLoS ONE in 2012. The method was direct, pre-registered replication: the team ran three independent experiments following Bem's own published procedure as closely as possible, with the analysis plan fixed before seeing the data. All three replications found no effect. Because the replications were pre-registered and followed the original protocol, the episode is treated in the field as a central case in psychology's wider replication crisis, and Bem's specific finding is not treated as an established effect.

Source Failing the Future: Three Unsuccessful Attempts to Replicate Bem's Retroactive Facilitation of Recall Effect, Stuart J. Ritchie, Richard Wiseman, Christopher C. French tier 1

Parsley, Plants

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin Period End Year

Currently States 1653

According To Culpeper, The Complete Herbal

Agnes Arber's Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470-1670 (Cambridge University Press, 1938) surveys the printed herbals of that two-century period and documents how the doctrine of signatures, that a plant's form, colour or habit declares its medicinal use, a yellow flower for the Sun, a perforated leaf for light, a plant of wet ground for the Moon, was applied inconsistently from one compiler to the next. Comparing planetary and use attributions for the same plants across different herbals, Arber finds no agreement between authors, direct evidence the method is a theory of resemblance rather than one of observation or testing. Where a signature plant does have a real effect, as St John's Wort, willow and the poppy do, Arber traces that activity to the plant's chemistry, unconnected to its appearance. The instability she documents between compilers is why this atlas gives no single planetary attribution as settled.

Source Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470-1670, Agnes Arber tier 1

Parsley, Plants

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 1653

According To Culpeper, The Complete Herbal

Agnes Arber's Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470-1670 (Cambridge University Press, 1938) surveys the printed herbals of that two-century period and documents how the doctrine of signatures, that a plant's form, colour or habit declares its medicinal use, a yellow flower for the Sun, a perforated leaf for light, a plant of wet ground for the Moon, was applied inconsistently from one compiler to the next. Comparing planetary and use attributions for the same plants across different herbals, Arber finds no agreement between authors, direct evidence the method is a theory of resemblance rather than one of observation or testing. Where a signature plant does have a real effect, as St John's Wort, willow and the poppy do, Arber traces that activity to the plant's chemistry, unconnected to its appearance. The instability she documents between compilers is why this atlas gives no single planetary attribution as settled.

Source Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470-1670, Agnes Arber tier 1

Paul Twitchell, Historical Figures

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States Twitchell taught that Eckankar was an ancient science transmitted through an unbroken line of 970 prior Living ECK Masters, and that he had studied directly with unnamed masters in Tibet and elsewhere.

David C. Lane's The Making of a Spiritual Movement: The Untold Story of Paul Twitchell and Eckankar (Del Mar Press, 1983) drew on manuscript and textual comparison to find Twitchell's claimed ancient 970-master lineage undocumented outside his own writings, and identified extensive unattributed passages in Twitchell's books lifted from Radhasoami Satsang Beas author Julian Johnson and from the teachings of Kirpal Singh, whose Ruhani Satsang Twitchell had studied within before founding Eckankar. Harold Klemp, Eckankar's current Living ECK Master, has since acknowledged the borrowing while calling Twitchell a master compiler rather than repudiating him, so Eckankar's own leadership no longer defends the literal historicity of the lineage as originally presented, even as it continues to revere Twitchell as Eckankar's founder.

Source The Making of a Spiritual Movement: The Untold Story of Paul Twitchell and Eckankar, David C. Lane tier 2

Peridot, Gemstones

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 1970

According To Modern crystal healing, from the 1970s

Wouter J. Hanegraaff's New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Brill, 1996) traces the specific modern crystal-healing framework, cleansing and charging stones, programming them with intention, correspondence to the chakras, crystal grids, and the accompanying Atlantean and Lemurian origin story, through its twentieth-century New Age sources, and shows the vocabulary and practices appearing and developing within that documented literature rather than being continuous with antiquity. Hanegraaff does not dispute that stones were worn, carved and credited with virtues in ancient societies, a separate and much older practice attested archaeologically, but the specific modern framework's own textual history is what this property records as recent. That the ancient-provenance claim is false is a historical finding about when the current framework appeared, not a judgement on the practice's legitimacy.

Source New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought, Wouter J. Hanegraaff tier 1

Peridot, Gemstones

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin Period End Year

Currently States 1990

According To Modern crystal healing, from the 1970s

Wouter J. Hanegraaff's New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Brill, 1996) traces the specific modern crystal-healing framework, cleansing and charging stones, programming them with intention, correspondence to the chakras, crystal grids, and the accompanying Atlantean and Lemurian origin story, through its twentieth-century New Age sources, and shows the vocabulary and practices appearing and developing within that documented literature rather than being continuous with antiquity. Hanegraaff does not dispute that stones were worn, carved and credited with virtues in ancient societies, a separate and much older practice attested archaeologically, but the specific modern framework's own textual history is what this property records as recent. That the ancient-provenance claim is false is a historical finding about when the current framework appeared, not a judgement on the practice's legitimacy.

Source New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought, Wouter J. Hanegraaff tier 1

Phrenology, Disciplines

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Replication Status

Currently States No controlled comparison of phrenological readings against subjects' actual documented personality or behavior has ever found the method performing better than chance.

Phrenology holds that a person's character and mental faculties can be read from the shape and bumps of the skull, mapping specific traits to specific cranial regions. Robert Todd Carroll's The Skeptic's Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous Delusions (John Wiley and Sons, 2003), a reference work assessing pseudoscientific and paranormal claims, records that no controlled study comparing phrenological readings against subjects' actual documented personality or behavior has found the method performing better than chance. The method is evaluative and comparative, the standard test of any diagnostic claim, checking a practitioner's blind reading against an independently established fact about the same subject. Because the practice has never passed that test in a controlled comparison, the claim of diagnostic validity is treated as debunked rather than merely unproven.

Source The Skeptic's Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous Delusions, Robert Todd Carroll tier 2

Physiognomy, Disciplines

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Key Experiment

Currently States A widely discussed 2016 preprint by Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang claimed nearly 90 percent accuracy distinguishing criminal from non-criminal faces from headshots using machine learning.

Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang posted Automated Inference on Criminality Using Face Images as an arXiv preprint in 2016, reporting that a machine learning classifier could distinguish criminal from non-criminal faces in headshot photographs with close to 90 percent accuracy, a modern echo of physiognomy's older claim that character is legible in facial form. The method was a supervised machine learning classifier trained on two sets of photographs without the photo sourcing disclosed in enough detail for outside reviewers to rule out confounds. Critics pointed out that systematic differences between the photo sets, such as photo type, expression and grooming, could produce the reported accuracy without any genuine link between facial structure and criminality. The paper was never published in a peer-reviewed venue, and because the undisclosed sourcing leaves the confounds unruled out, the claimed finding is treated as unsupported.

Source Automated Inference on Criminality Using Face Images, Xiaolin Wu, Xi Zhang tier 3

Plantain, Plants

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin Period End Year

Currently States 1653

According To Culpeper, The Complete Herbal

Agnes Arber's Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470-1670 (Cambridge University Press, 1938) surveys the printed herbals of that two-century period and documents how the doctrine of signatures, that a plant's form, colour or habit declares its medicinal use, a yellow flower for the Sun, a perforated leaf for light, a plant of wet ground for the Moon, was applied inconsistently from one compiler to the next. Comparing planetary and use attributions for the same plants across different herbals, Arber finds no agreement between authors, direct evidence the method is a theory of resemblance rather than one of observation or testing. Where a signature plant does have a real effect, as St John's Wort, willow and the poppy do, Arber traces that activity to the plant's chemistry, unconnected to its appearance. The instability she documents between compilers is why this atlas gives no single planetary attribution as settled.

Source Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470-1670, Agnes Arber tier 1

Plantain, Plants

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 1653

According To Culpeper, The Complete Herbal

Agnes Arber's Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470-1670 (Cambridge University Press, 1938) surveys the printed herbals of that two-century period and documents how the doctrine of signatures, that a plant's form, colour or habit declares its medicinal use, a yellow flower for the Sun, a perforated leaf for light, a plant of wet ground for the Moon, was applied inconsistently from one compiler to the next. Comparing planetary and use attributions for the same plants across different herbals, Arber finds no agreement between authors, direct evidence the method is a theory of resemblance rather than one of observation or testing. Where a signature plant does have a real effect, as St John's Wort, willow and the poppy do, Arber traces that activity to the plant's chemistry, unconnected to its appearance. The instability she documents between compilers is why this atlas gives no single planetary attribution as settled.

Source Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470-1670, Agnes Arber tier 1

Poltergeist Phenomena, Psi Phenomena

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Replication Status

Currently States No poltergeist case has produced its characteristic disturbances under conditions ruling out the identified person's physical access; several well-documented cases were later found to involve staged effects when placed under close or hidden observation.

Source Poltergeists, Electromagnetism and Consciousness, William G. Roll tier 2

Poppy, Plants

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin Period End Year

Currently States 1653

According To Culpeper, The Complete Herbal

Agnes Arber's Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470-1670 (Cambridge University Press, 1938) surveys the printed herbals of that two-century period and documents how the doctrine of signatures, that a plant's form, colour or habit declares its medicinal use, a yellow flower for the Sun, a perforated leaf for light, a plant of wet ground for the Moon, was applied inconsistently from one compiler to the next. Comparing planetary and use attributions for the same plants across different herbals, Arber finds no agreement between authors, direct evidence the method is a theory of resemblance rather than one of observation or testing. Where a signature plant does have a real effect, as St John's Wort, willow and the poppy do, Arber traces that activity to the plant's chemistry, unconnected to its appearance. The instability she documents between compilers is why this atlas gives no single planetary attribution as settled.

Source Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470-1670, Agnes Arber tier 1

Poppy, Plants

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 1653

According To Culpeper, The Complete Herbal

Agnes Arber's Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470-1670 (Cambridge University Press, 1938) surveys the printed herbals of that two-century period and documents how the doctrine of signatures, that a plant's form, colour or habit declares its medicinal use, a yellow flower for the Sun, a perforated leaf for light, a plant of wet ground for the Moon, was applied inconsistently from one compiler to the next. Comparing planetary and use attributions for the same plants across different herbals, Arber finds no agreement between authors, direct evidence the method is a theory of resemblance rather than one of observation or testing. Where a signature plant does have a real effect, as St John's Wort, willow and the poppy do, Arber traces that activity to the plant's chemistry, unconnected to its appearance. The instability she documents between compilers is why this atlas gives no single planetary attribution as settled.

Source Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470-1670, Agnes Arber tier 1

Powers, Angelic Choirs

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States The Celestial Hierarchy, which sets out the ninefold order of angels including this choir, circulated under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian convert of Paul named at Acts 17:34. Bernard McGinn's The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (Crossroad, 1991) traces how this ascription gave the work the standing of a companion of the apostles.

Source The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, Bernard McGinn tier 1

Powers, Angelic Choirs

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States Renaissance scholars established that the ascription could not be genuine: the place of origin recorded elsewhere on this page places the work's actual composition in Greek, in Syria, around the year 500, some four centuries after Dionysius the Areopagite would have lived. Bernard McGinn's The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (Crossroad, 1991) treats the ascription's rejection as settled since the Renaissance.

Source The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, Bernard McGinn tier 1

Powers, Angelic Choirs

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States The true author's identity has never been recovered. Bernard McGinn's The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (Crossroad, 1991) is among the scholarship that refers to him only as Pseudo-Dionysius, a name that records the unmasking of the Areopagite ascription rather than identifying who he actually was.

Source The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, Bernard McGinn tier 1

Prayer of St Francis, Prayers

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States Francis of Assisi

The prayer first appeared anonymously in the French devotional magazine La Clochette in December 1912. No earlier text exists and nothing resembling it appears in any Franciscan source. The association with Francis began around 1918, when the prayer was printed on the back of a holy card bearing his image, and the label stuck. Christian Renoux's 2001 study settled the question.

Source La Priere pour la Paix Attribuee a Saint Francois, une Enigme a Resoudre, Christian Renoux tier 1

Precognition, Psi Phenomena

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Key Experiment

Currently States Bem's "Feeling the Future," nine experiments reporting that stimuli presented after a response could apparently influence that response.

Daryl Bem published Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2011, presenting nine experiments in which standard psychological paradigms were run with their causal time order reversed. The paper passed the journal's standard peer review process, using conventional statistical methods accepted in psychology at the time, but subsequent independent, pre-registered attempts to replicate its experiments, most prominently Stuart Ritchie, Richard Wiseman and Christopher French's three attempts published the following year, found no effect. The method that distinguishes the original result from the replications is analytic: critics identified that the flexibility available in how the original nine experiments were analysed and reported, common practice in psychology at the time, was capable of producing apparent significant results even with no real underlying effect. Because the paper's failure under pre-registered replication became one of the triggering cases for the wider psychology replication crisis, Feeling the Future is treated as a landmark case in that crisis rather than as established evidence for precognition.

Source Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect, Daryl J. Bem tier 1

Precognition, Psi Phenomena

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Replication Status

Currently States Three pre-registered direct replications by Ritchie, Wiseman, and French found no effect; the original journal declined to publish the null replications without external review.

Daryl Bem, at Cornell University, published nine precognition experiments in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2011, reversing the time order of standard priming, habituation and recall paradigms so the causally relevant event occurred after the response it was said to influence. Stuart Ritchie, Richard Wiseman and Christopher French ran three independent, pre-registered attempts to replicate one of Bem's nine experiments using his own published procedure, and all three were null. The method on both sides is controlled psychological experiment using the identical published protocol, so the replication attempts tested Bem's own procedure directly. Because the failure occurred in pre-registered replications specifically designed to close the analytic-flexibility concerns raised against the original paper, the case is widely cited as a catalyst for the wider reform of psychological research methods, pre-registration and multi-lab replication, that followed it, and the replication status is recorded as debunked on the direct replication evidence.

Source Failing the Future: Three Unsuccessful Attempts to Replicate Bem's Retroactive Facilitation of Recall Effect, Stuart J. Ritchie, Richard Wiseman, Christopher C. French tier 1