If you really want to see a failure to incorporate new information, look at nutrition science. Things may be changing, but the FDA and so on still seems to be saying fat and dietary cholesterol are bad, despite a rather significant absence of evidence, and a rather strong presence of contrary evidence. They’re getting around to addressing added sugars and high-fructose corn syrup, but it took maybe half a century.
This is pretty easy to understand, though. There are a lot of commercial interests that restrict what the government can say without stepping on lobbyists, and the government tends to have a “Whatever we said the first time must have been correct” complex. Plus, no large-scale organization has any real motivation to get such nutrition advice correct; someone else picks up the various tabs that result from bad information.
Which would lead me to venture a guess about why your medical example has not been corrected: no one really cares. It’s a neat anecdote that illustrates a point about how brain damage can affect behaviour. But the actual number of people with brain damage specific to such areas and also not affecting the areas that actually cause the problem is probably extremely small, so there’s no practical reason to be bothered by that story being wrong.
If you really want to see a failure to incorporate new information, look at nutrition science. Things may be changing, but the FDA and so on still seems to be saying fat and dietary cholesterol are bad, despite a rather significant absence of evidence, and a rather strong presence of contrary evidence. They’re getting around to addressing added sugars and high-fructose corn syrup, but it took maybe half a century.
This is pretty easy to understand, though. There are a lot of commercial interests that restrict what the government can say without stepping on lobbyists, and the government tends to have a “Whatever we said the first time must have been correct” complex. Plus, no large-scale organization has any real motivation to get such nutrition advice correct; someone else picks up the various tabs that result from bad information.
Which would lead me to venture a guess about why your medical example has not been corrected: no one really cares. It’s a neat anecdote that illustrates a point about how brain damage can affect behaviour. But the actual number of people with brain damage specific to such areas and also not affecting the areas that actually cause the problem is probably extremely small, so there’s no practical reason to be bothered by that story being wrong.