Reminds me of when non-coding DNA was thought to be useless, it was labeled “Junk DNA”, and then it was realized it played a role in regulating gene expression.
There's a pattern which we see again and again in nature, where incredibly complex structures and behaviours emerge from interference and feedback patterns between waves - from deciding whether your toenails grow on your face or your feet to the formation of planets, from ant colony foraging and spacing to whether it will rain on Tuesday.
I suspect elements of cognition are similar.
If there's a real concern is not about "the competence of scientists that they make that mistake", but about the certainty of our grasp of the scientific facts in general.
It's not that those scientists were incompetent.
It's more like "science in general doesn't know as much as solidly as we'd like to think" about the matter.
That said, science wouldn’t need to be self-correcting if it was always right.
Science is like a group of people with lights of varying strength exploring a dense forest at night. We often mix up shadows and caves and rocks and animals and people… there’s a lot of room for misinterpretation. To demand otherwise, to demand some kind of mistake free march in good order as if we’re on a brightly lit field, is to ignore that we are… ingnorant.