I got spammed by Big Think, which tags itself as “your daily microdose of genius”, with a link to a listicle titled 7 myths you learned in biology class that you probably still believe. It annoyed me. Sure, it’s trying to correct misconceptions, but the misconceptions given are generally rather pathetic, and I rather doubt that any of them are taught in any biology class. Or maybe they are, and I’ve got an unrealistic understanding of the quality of biology education.
Here are the 7 false things that are being taught in biology class, according to Big Think:
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Humans sit atop the food chain. Yeah, no. I don’t teach the ecology side of biology much, but I can’t imagine such a claim making it into any textbook.
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Respiration is synonymous with breathing. OK, I do teach this side of biology, and the vast majority of the organisms that respire don’t “breathe”. Easy and obvious. But then Big Think says this: “respiration is when muscles release glucose during physical activity”. Wha…? Wrong. Don’t try to correct misconceptions with more misconceptions.
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Cats and dogs are colorblind. Their answer is flat out wrong: they say dogs and cats aren’t colorblind, because “Shockingly, recent research finds both dogs and cats can see the colors green and blue”. That is not shocking, nor is it recent. Colorblindness is a poor choice of term because individuals with this trait typically have two kinds of cones, rather than three; it would be more accurate to call them dichromats, unlike trichromats, the individuals with full color vision. But dogs and cats are colorblind in the same way that colorblind humans are.
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Sugar is as addictive as cocaine. I have never, ever heard this. It turns out that the author got this claim out of a fad diet book. Those things are not synonymous with what you read in biology class, or at least, I hope not.
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Daughters inherit traits from their mothers and sons from their fathers. The article says, “Most people carry this misconception from when they learned how we inherit traits,” which might explain some of the test scores on the last exam in my intro course, but I certainly didn’t teach that. Worse, it then goes on: “Another common misconception is that we get half of our characteristics from each parent. The truth, all that matters is which alleles are dominant.” Holy crap, no. I don’t even know what they’re trying to say there.
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Sharks can smell one drop of blood in the water from a mile away. Not true, but I find it disturbing that anyone thinks biology class is where you drop anecdotes that can be used in your cheesy thriller novel.
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Humans evolved from chimps. This falsehood I know has wide currency — creationists keep making this mistake. But again, it is not taught in biology class, except maybe if your biology class is a homeschooled abomination taught out of books from Answers in Genesis. If the class is teaching any kind of general systematics at all, it’s going to be emphasizing evolutionary trees, not linearity.
I am not at all impressed. The article reads like something written by someone who has virtually no knowledge of biology at all, got a few shreds of factlets off the internet, and then cobbled together some mangled explanations just to make up some clickbait (he succeeded at that!).
I guess the emphasis in “microdose of genius” really belongs on the “micro”. Or maybe they should change it to “homeopathic dose of genius”.