Peace

As I said earlier, remember the Rule of 48.

One thing. Nobody questioned it for over a decade.

OK, they screwed up. Scientists are only human after all. There have been worse cockups than that. Look at Piltdown Man. That lasted forty years.

Until genetics really took off after the 1953 publication of the structure of DNA, it probably didn't matter very much anyway. I think it would have been long forgotten if Michael Crichton hadn't used it to have a go at scientists.

Getting something wrong and being insufficiently critical of someone else's published results is very different from saying "some science is based on belief".