&gt;Flat earth is totally fine as long as you need to simply go from village a to b and it&#x27;s not too much of a distance.<p>Which is a more useful way of looking at it. Theories have a predictive horizon. The point of science is to increase the predictive horizon.<p>But the other side of that is the ability to create new classes of technology.<p>Electromagnetic theory, relativity and quantum theory are lot more than a tweak on the Newtonian world view. They make it possible to build completely new kinds of technology that are impossible if all you have is Newton.<p>Suggesting that everything is a process of gradual refinement to an increasing number of decimal places is a wrong theory about theories.<p>There&#x27;s a lot more to science snd technology than the orbit of Mercury.<p>&gt;Darwins theory (and later modernizations) are indeed wrong (as in not true) but it&#x27;s the most useful model we have.<p>That may baffle people, but the problem with the Darwinian view is that it&#x27;s based on the principle that species evolve - when in fact ecosystem evolve, in the sense that flows of chemicals, information, and energy self-organise into more or less stable configurations.<p>Species evolution is an interesting epiphenomenon on top of that. But assuming it&#x27;s all there is to know about natural history is like trying to understand meteorology by classifying icebergs. You&#x27;re going to catch some of the more obvious patterns, but more complex relationships are going to elude you.<p>Modelling ecosystems is a very useful skill - especially for long space flight - and it turns out we&#x27;re still incredibly bad at it, precisely because naive Darwinism doesn&#x27;t have the predictive horizon to deal with the problem in a useful way.<p>Without a good theory, systems tend to diverge into instability and everything dies, no matter how fast adaptation happens - which isn&#x27;t usually the outcome you want.