Why the story of the Vegetable Lamb was believed
Why the story of the Vegetable Lamb was believed
- August 19, 2026
- Research by Cailin O’Connor and Jim Weatherall, logic and philosophy of science, featured in the Financial Times, helps explain our weakness for misinformation
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“It took nearly four centuries after Mandeville’s writings appeared for European botanists and biologists to recognise the Vegetable Lamb as a myth,” write Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall in The Misinformation Age (2019). Does that sluggishness reflect the failure of a particularly medieval mindset, or does it have lessons to teach us today? … For O’Connor and Weatherall, the point of the Vegetable Lamb story is that most of what we believe, we believe because everyone around us believes the same thing. … “Most of us get our false beliefs from the same places we get our true ones,” write O’Connor and Weatherall.
For the full story, please visit the Financial Times.
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