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As someone who studies mathematics, there are plenty of examples by which some theorem that was considered as "obviously" true later turned out to be completely false. I was discussing this with my friend when she asked me to cite examples outside of math. The first thought that popped in my mind was the notion of spontaneous generation, but I'm not sure if it was so completely agreed on to be true that it was "obvious". As she is currently a biology undergraduate, I wish to tailor my examples to her interests.

In short, I'm wondering if there are any examples in the history of biology where some "fact" was so seemingly simple and obvious that researchers took it for granted, but it ended up being found to be completely false.

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