Is there ever a point at which wrongness becomes established? In science, there certainly is. The dustbin of science is home to countless theories that have been proven incorrect. From the four elements of ancient Greece to the five elements of ancient China, from caloric theory to phlogiston theory, from Olympian creationism to Hebrew creationism, innumerable cases exist where the scientific community has collectively discarded one theory in favor of another. I’m no historian of science, but I am a working scientist and I am not familiar with any cases of a discarded theory making a resurgence.

Aside: I should add a caveat, that out-of-favor theories on relatively small details do occasionally come back into favor, but I know of no theories that have been completely abandoned only to reemerge as canon. An example of this would be Alfred Wagner’s theory on what would become plate tectonics. At the time if its introduction, it not generally accepted, with most earth scientists being actually hostile to the idea. Wagner, however, was never considered a crackpot, and he continued to be a respected member of the scientific community despite the unpopularity of his theory. When the evidence in support of Wagner became overwhelming, it was fully embraced and became an integral part of modern geophysics.

What I wonder, though, is how long we have to continue with such long-lived failures as abstinence-only sex education. It is often difficult to characterize social issues or problems scientifically. In this case, however, study after study has borne out the idea that AOSE is not only a failure, but is actually worse than doing nothing. That means that old fashioned sex ed (in my generation, that consisted mostly of watching R-rated movies) is superior in efficacy to the programs on which we waste hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.