Black Swans
Science can't prove anything. No watter how much evidence may exist that something is so, it only takes one counter example to show that it isn't. But that's not a weakness of science, it's the way things work. Our unwillingess to accept it is a weakness in the way we think. In 17th century Europe the only swans anyone had ever seen were white. In fact, "all swans are white" was used as the standard example of a scientific truth—until 1697, when explorers found Cygnus atratus in Australia— black swans. Here's one I photographed in New Zealand. The fact is, as Francis Bacon warned, our minds are wired to deceive us. "Beware the fallacies into which undisciplined thinkers most easily fall--they are the real distorting prisms of human nature." Assuming there's more order in nature than is actually there is something that crops up frequently—faces in clouds, figures in tree bark and peanut-butter, even religious explanations for natural proce