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:
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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”.
As a native French speaker, the distinction between respiration and breathing is new to me.
In French, both are translated as respiration (I suppose respiration was imported from french/latin and breathing from the saxon).
Maybe this list was compiled by a Canadian ?
Debunking misconceptions is fun, so much fun that some people are willing to invent misconceptions just to debunk them.
The addictiveness of sugar idea sounds exactly like something you’d find in a “Don’t eat these 7 things, ever!” clickbait article.
The mildly deranged penguin denies she is responsible for the sugar addition claim. This completely unfounded rumour is said to be a deliberate ploy to switch people from eating cheese and MUSHROOMS! — conveniently leaving moar for her — to something which, when consumed in excessive quantities, makes one much much less able to catch the choicest wild cheeses & MUSHROOMS! She points out the alleged plot doesn’t necessarily make any more vin available, nor get rid of peas, all three of which her actual plots also do… (The third and fourth additional goals are Sooperdooper ÜberTopTop Secret, which the fourth so secret she denies its existence (and sometimes her own existence, when she gets a bit overexcited talking about the fourth goal).)
The mildly deranged penguin also denies she is responsible for the sugar addiction claim.
As a biology teacher (who is an ecologist, and does teach ecology, unlike Dr. Myers), I can say that several of these claims show up on my tests, though never having been heard in my lectures. I was just correcting a student yesterday about the top of the food chain claim, but I doubt the student will remember the correction nearly as long as she will remember the claim. And the humans from apes is pretty ubiquitous; I’ve found a lot of people have trouble with the distinction between “from apes” and “from a common ancestor with apes”.
Much more distressingly common is the equation of “animals” with both “mammals” and “not human”. I often get the formulation of “animals and birds” or “animals and insects” or other silly stuff like that which isn’t biological, since both birds and insects are animals. And the all too common equation of viruses with bacteria.
I don’t know if they’re hearing these things in high school biology (I hope not, but I know quite a few high school biology teachers around here who are not biologists and are stuck into that role because there is no one else to teach some biology class, usually environmental science, my specialty field).
This checks out. I remember the syllabus from my Biology 103 course as a freshman:
Unit 2.2: What do Dogs and Cats See?
The lab where we had to drink a soda then snort a line of cocaine and see which was more powerfully addictive was pretty objectionable, I have to say.
Euclide @1: It’s not just you, even in English people (including in lectures, in textbooks, and in research papers) do use the term ‘respiration’ to refer to the combination of inspiration and expiration that is ‘breathing’. While it’s correct to say that’s not the same as cellular respiration, and the word ‘respirarion’ doesn’t always carry the same meaning, to say it can’t be used to refer to breathing is incorrect. (Don’t get me started though on what some textbooks call ‘anaerobic respiration’…) Would be like me saying ‘bear’ doesn’t always mean ‘a member of the family Ursidae’ because it can also mean ‘carry’… technically correct but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong to use the term either way. Homographs ftw I guess? Context matters… admittedly ‘define respiration’ would be a cruel standalone test question ;-)
iknklast @6 I was just thinking these sound like misconceptions that students come out of some bio classes with… it’s not what they’re being taught, but either preconceived ideas that didn’t get explicitly busted in class or a mininterpretation of what they were presented with. Maybe a better title would have been “falsehoods some of you thought you learned in biology class that your teachers wish you would stop repeating because that’s not actually what they taught you”. Not quite as catchy, though.
I’ve seen
#1 Humans top of food chain
#2 Breathing/respiration
#3 Animals are color blind
#6 1 drop of blood attracts sharks
In curriculum material for 1st – 5th-grade science classes. Either in the textbook or in the supplemental material provided by the district. This has largely been due to oversimplifying.
#4 Sugar addictive was in the health class material.
#5 is a common misconception that I had to correct with my 5th-grade students. My Uncle was color blind and he has 3 daughters, each of them had a son who is color blind. Mapping that out in a simple form helped them see that both parents contribute to every child. The problem there was kid logic.
This reads more as a rebuttal to high school biology classes, where all sorts of inaccurate things might be taught by teachers that aren’t necessarily knowledgeable about biology.
Those sound like popular/fashionable misconceptions of what’s taught in biology classes. Then they pretend to debunk the false pop wisdom which actually validates the misconceptions based on misconception as if they’re true.
Misconception heaped in great big piles of shit – a Great American Commodity dispensed with Uber-American Know-How.
Big Think should just call itself Bull Shit, but that would be a pretense to truthiness.
That’s gonna leave a mark..or it would if they weren’t micro-geniuses.
Posted a few times to people’s articles on that site, and probably how I came under their radar. They are one of those sites that annoy the hell out of me, kind of like Sci Am now does, but, often far worse. They literally can’t seem to tell the difference between soundly founded “ideas” from sources that actually know what they are talking about, and “visionary views”, I suppose you would call them, from people just pulling generally (or seemingly) left leaning newtopian crap out of their ass. (Not to be confused with some health website that uses that name, but rather, “Brand new stupid ideas, which will lead us to a perfect future!”)
This article sounds about par for the course for them. Sure, “some” people might, maybe, get some of these ideas floating around, but it would be more accurate to say that I have heard, more or less, these things from people that *never* took a biology class, like ever, during school, but like imagining what popular silly ideas might be mis-taught in them. But.. the respiration one… sounds like the sort of thing someone “trying” to understand what is being talked about read, and completely misunderstood, on the web. I.e., they didn’t know themselves, but it sounded like it belonged on the list, so they went and read something, and it talked about the “process” of respiration, on a cellular level, so.. they pulled the little bit they did vague grasp, and slapped that in there instead, thereby completely missing the whole f-ing concept. lol
As a high school biology teacher and one of those whom these idiots are accusing of teaching any of this nonsense, I would like to follow PZ and answer point by point, though most of my answers will be much shorter:
#1 – No, we do not teach that humans are at the top of the food chain.
#2 – Not only no, but we spend a lot of time making sure that students do not confuse cellular respiration with breathing.
#3 – PZ has it exactly right. When we have the time to teach this at all (and our time for teaching animal anatomy is limited) this is exactly what we teach.
#4 – No. We do teach that glucose is essential to metabolism, but that’s not what these idiots mean.
#5 – Not only no, but hell no. We even spend time covering how sex-linked traits work, which would automatically disprove any such notion.
#6 – No, and one wonders where the hell that got this one from. It sure didn’t come from sitting in on a biology class.
#7 – Once again, not only no, but hell no. This is another thing we actually spend a great deal of time making sure students don’t think, with a great deal of stress on the idea of decent from common ancestors rather than modern species being evolved from each other.
It’s apparent that these idiots didn’t actually consult any biology teachers or even any school biology curricula to compose this list, they simply depended on their own ignorance and their lack of attention to their own biology teachers.
Is “food chain” a term that’s still being used? I thought it was falling out of fashion in favor of “food web.”
re sugar:
fearmongering, ie trying to make a valid point by exaggerating the harmful effects.
Western society itself (USA in particular) appears to be strongly addicted to sugar, adding it into every food available, only to increase consumption (for profit, obviously). This ubiquitous consumption of sugar has created a widespread occurrence of Type II Diabetes. Even without consumers deliberately adding sugar, so much of our food contains too much sugar to be fully healthy. Sugar was included only for flavoring.
I understand what the exaggeration of its addictability is trying to say. To present it as a fact is shooting itself in the foot, and may lead many to overlook the point it was trying to make.
Heh, I remember Big Think from when Daylight Atheism was hosted there and any time Adam made a post that challenged any religion in any way we’d get this stream of drive-by commenters yelling “HEY! WHAT ARE YOU DOING CHALLENGING MY PRECONCEPTIONS AND MAKING ME UNCOMFORTABLE! THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE “BIG THINK”!”
I see they haven’t changed.
MYTH: Food is born free, but everywhere it is in webs. TRUTH: There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
I think the problem here is equating “colorblind” with “sees in greyscale”, which might in turn be a cultural artifact of people knowing about black-and-white (actually greyscale) photography and television, and thinking that “colorblind” means “sees no color at all, like those black-and-white TVs”.
Or at least, I suspect that’s why I used to think along those lines.
It wasn’t until much later that I learned that seeing no color at all is the rare condition called “achromatopia”, and most colorblind humans, like dogs, cats, and rodents, are dichromats. I remember a specific article about dog color vision showed the reduced-color palette they would see.
There were colour palette picker websites which allowed you to see how the palette would look to a dichromat, or to those with other color vision anomalies. I guess this site is the most comprehensive in that regard currently.
Regarding #1, it depends on what one means by “atop the food chain.” In terms of diet, it is true most humans do not eat tiger steaks or make omelettes from eagle eggs, but they do frequently hunt and kill top predators, and so could be considered to be atop the food chain in terms of predator/prey relationships.
Regarding #2, respiration actually is synonymous with breathing when the term is used in a medical context. Respiratory rate is a standard vital sign.
Regarding #7, while humans did not evolve from chimps, it is generally thought that the last common ancestor from which both chimps and humans evolved was probably more chimp-like than human-like, so the idea that humans evolved from something similar to a chimp is not necessarily a misconception.
iknklastz@6–
Except that we humans are both “descended from apes” and “descended from a common ancestor with apes.” Since humans are apes, these two statements are taxonomically equivalent. Our last common ancestor with chimps and bonobos was an ape. Our last common ancestor with gorillas was an ape. Same for orangutangs. And gibbons.
Our oldest ancestor that was not an ape was a catarrhine primate, before that branch split into the Hominoidea (apes) and the Cercopithecoidea (Old World monkeys) around 30 My ago.
This.
I mean, I guess the point that humans are not descended from any extant species of apes is worth making, but why beat around the bush?
This may not be the right forum for this but I’ve got two genetic questions and PZ or a contributor may be able to help me (a pointer to a good reference would be more than sufficient):
1) What are the mechanism(s) for the selection of which strand of DNA is used for mRNA production ?
2) I’ve seen references to Neanderthal DNA showing up in European DNA at the rate of a little over 1%. Does this mean that 1% the overall European DNA is Neanderthal, or 1% of Europeans have some Neanderthal DNA, or only one half of one Neanderthal DNA strand still exists in the current European DNA set (i.e. one half of one Neanderthal strand split and “recombined” and still is present today), or something else ?
I know I haven’t paid any tuition but I’m hoping you have a senior citizen “Continuing Education” program.
Tom
Iknclast,
That’s the problem with exposing myths. It just gives them more exposure. On the other hand, you can’t leave them un-challenged. It looks like a lose-lose stradegy.
However, some studies have shown that this effect can be minimised by starting off by stating what the correct answer is, then explaining why that answer is correct, and only then explain why the myth is wrong. In this way, you emphasise the truth and de-emphasise the myth.
This certainly appears to be the misconceptions that some science illiterate at Big Think had or still has, which is also why some of their “answers” are equally dippy as well. Perhaps the author also writes for Reader’s Digest, WorldNetDaily, National Enquirer, or some equally vapid publication.
There are many levels of ‘colorblindness’ in humans and true dichromats are not particularly common. The most common form is humans that still have three different cones like others, but possessing a mutation in either the red cone or green cone that skews its response curve towards the other (red towards green or green towards red) so that they overlap much more than humans without either of those mutations. Being in that large group with three cones but skewed response curves means that I have some trouble differentiating between certain red and green color combinations if there is poor lighting (low intensity, crap yellow incandescent lighting) but otherwise have no real issues.
chrislawson
Humans aren’t descended from apes, we ARE apes, so both of those statements are rather misleading. The LCA is thought to be something like a gibbon. An arboreal primate that could also walk bipedally.
MattP,
My father was “colour-blind” but he didn’t know till after I bought my first car. It was a lime green but it looked bright yellow to him. We really only found out about ten years after that when he finally felt it was okay for him to tell me he hated that horrible yellow car I drive around in!
Tethys, we are apes because we descended form apes.
*from
rietplum, that is not false, but by the same reasoning we are also descended from Old World monkeys all the way back to fish. Simply stating that humans arenaked apes dispenses with any room for misunderstanding, or thinking that descended from implies that humans are a special, more highly evolved primate than Chimpanzees or Orangutans. It was once thought that we were descended from Neanderthals, but science and DNA have shown that we are a closely related but completely separate species of human. .
It matters not the size or quality of the dose if it manifestly is NOT genius.
rietpluim,
Although it’s true that apes are descended from other apes, when you say that humans are descended from apes, there is an implication that humans are not apes. So I have to agree with Tethys that the least ambiguous, and more instructive, formulation is “humans are descended from other apes” and “humans are descended from a common ancestor with other apes”, the latter being the most instructive formulation.
“homeopathic dose of genius”
….but shouldn’t that mean ‘a really, reallyreallyreallyreally powerful and efficacious dose’?
Or am I wrong about homeopathy??
I’m surprised you’ve never heard the sugar addiction claims. Since Food Nation and similar books documented how the fast food industry doctors up its products with extra salt, sugar, and flavor (try to make a croissanwich at home, and it never tastes as good, because some company in New Jersey injects the eggs with egginess, the bacon with baconness, the croissant with buttery croissantness, and the cheese with cheesiness), and the corresponding American obesity, the addictive properties of fast food have become not just a casual conversation topic, but a concern of policy makers and school administrators and the medical profession.
So I’ve seen the claim about sugar dozens of times. But, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5174153/
There is little evidence of glucose or sucrose addiction in humans, even though we all crave chocolate or a quarter-pounder from time to time. It’s really just a matter of sweetness being appealing to our taste buds. I nearly always add a bit of agave nectar to my sauces.
As for the rest, I was an OEB major (ducking CMB and organic chemisty where possible, because they were harder!), and an epidemiologist by profession, and we were taught just the opposite of nearly every one. It’s a silly list.