Top 10 Biggest Lies Taught in School About Science

Yup, this is a lie! Humans didn't evolve FROM monkeys. They evolved WITH monkeys. Both are cousins, evolved from a common ancestor that is neither.

Why are there still monkeys today? Because we evolved WITH them, not FROM them.

But religion. Religion isn't science! It's fine to believe in it, but if it tells you false things...

This is the most common misconception among creationists. Humans did not evolve from monkeys. All apes, including human beings, evolved from a common ancestor.

Humans and monkeys share a common ancestor, which evolved in two separate ways. We may be like brothers, but not parents to one another.

This is really not taught in school past casual mentioning in elementary school. What most people are referring to are the five wits, and while they don't cover all sensations (like balance, pain, temperature, moisture), they are still culturally important. You can't really write a poem about the world as experienced through temperature or hunger.

Seriously?! If those are all of my senses, how can I subconsciously decide to run from a tiger, recall information from certain stimuli, eat, sleep, rave, repeat?

The brain, in fact, has many more senses than that.

Under infrared, certain species can see different colors. I am not talking about hues or tints - those are just our basic colors with a drop of black added or a drop of white added to the colors humans see: red, yellow, blue, the primary colors. Apparently, there is a part of our brain which is locked into seeing just the primary colors and the secondary colors (mixing two primary colors will give you a different color. Blue and yellow give you green). These colors are secondary colors.

To reiterate, hues and tints are simply adding white or black. Humans see them as well as primary colors, and we can see secondary colors. There are other colors, but 1. Humans cannot even imagine what they are, and 2. Currently, only a few animals can see colors that we can't see, since they have different wiring in their brains. This probably evolved for their survival thousands of years ago.

Not 10%. Hitting a baseball with a bat will use more than 50% of the brain. Also, while you're eating with your friends, you use all your senses, which is almost 50% of your brain.

I was offended when I saw a Teen Titans Go episode proving that we use 10% of our brain. Man, that cartoon is stupid.

Then wouldn't evolution have gotten rid of that other 90%?

Wrong, we use 100% of our brains. At any given time, we use 10-40% of it, depending on the situation and which part needs to be used more. However, every part of the brain is used.

Hmm, yes, I am TOTALLY gonna need to know how embryology works when I have a job! (Yeah, never happening.)

The geographic North Pole is in fact a magnetic South Pole. Why else would the north pole of a compass point north? And also, it's not a physical pole like a lamppost that stays in one place. Because the rotating core of the Earth drives this magnetic field and is not a perfect sphere, perturbations in the core cause the poles to move. Mind blown!

Given the nature of the spinning orb we are on, compasses won't all point to the same place at the same time from different geographical positions.

Try getting a region 1 compass to point you even close to magnetic north from a region 3 location.

I believed this lie in primary school, as did most people. It is in fact momentum and energy which are needed to induce gravitational wells. But Einstein famously stated that mass and energy are interchangeable, so mass serves as the more noticeable source of gravitational force. How else could we model both energy and mass with the electronvolt unit? Think E=mc^2.

Nothing can burn in space. For something to burn, oxygen needs to be present in the atmosphere around it. Plus, if a star such as the Sun were burning, it would have run out of fuel by now. The Sun is driven by the fusion of atomic nuclei to produce heavier nuclei, in which their mass is converted purely into energy. This process yields more energy for a given quantity than burning.

These nuclei can continue to fuse for longer than coal, including fusion into heavier nuclei in the case of the heaviest stars, from hydrogen up to iron. Iron is the most stable nucleus, so less energy is released than put in when heavier elements are fused. This is why fission works to generate power from them.

When 5-year-olds take on science, they are told that everything is made of particles, which is, in a sense, true, ignoring waves and strings. But that implies to them that all particles are the same. They later rename them "atoms" and call them fundamental. Later, they tell you to forget that, because atoms are made of nuclei and electrons, and this time, they mean it, nothing smaller. But they don't.

This will eventually wind down to leptons, quarks, and bosons, which are fundamental as far as we can confirm, but it's more than a decade of misinformation beforehand.

True, black holes are formed when matter is compressed to such an extreme density that light cannot escape its surface, but that's only half of it. Once the matter is compressed, it is reduced to an infinitesimally small point, a singularity. The "surface" of a black hole is the event horizon, the boundary which, once crossed, light cannot escape. We cannot see past it because light would need to be reflected off of the surface to illuminate it.

We also cannot be crushed to death because the tidal forces, which change immensely with spacetime in the vicinity of a black hole, stretch us to death instead. This is spaghettification. However, because of the time dilation outside of the black hole, one would not simply tumble into it like you see in Star Trek. Your approach slows until the light from your body fades from view. To an observer, you never enter the black hole's space. But you can't really enter a singularity's space anyway. By definition, it is a point in time but not in space. It is the universal arrow of time which makes this unavoidable.

Most teachers think that proximity to the Sun is the only factor contributing to a planet's temperature. Now, that's wrong: atmospheric composition, nucleus activity, soil chemical composition, albedo, and even the presence of life are also factors, and they can change the game significantly.

It's a common misconception that Mercury is the hottest planet because it's closest to the sun, when in reality it's Venus.

Venus is, of course, the hottest planet.

The brain has two hemispheres. They control how you move and think. They even determine your talents.

I've seen children shiver at the very mention of the name of the chemical. It has got a bad reputation because of global warming, but without it, we wouldn't have sparkling drinks.

CO2 is also used for cryogenics, respiration stimulants in medicine, and oil extraction.

If we did not have carbon dioxide, then we would freeze.

Trees and plants need it to live, and humans need trees to breathe.

No, they are not entirely blind. Sharks are also not entirely blind. Moles are nearly blind but still not completely blind.

Eh, I think you'll find that Pos is about as unreligious (and unbiased, I might add) as they come.

Even though they're not blind, it's a saying or catchphrase, okay?

This was just told so that you didn't do it for too long. My grandma did this to my mom, and for the longest time, she believed it.

Not science. This isn't real at all.

If you mow a huge lawn with a normal-sized mower every day, chances are you are going to want to move up to a larger lawn mower eventually. This larger lawn mower was a gateway from the first lawn mower. This "gateway theory" can be explained with almost anything. The fact that alcohol has been found to be a bigger gateway drug than cannabis has shut this theory down the drain.

It is possible, but not with the naked eye. The Great Wall of China is too narrow, and its color blends in with its surroundings.

When I was at Disney World years ago, I watched the news in my hotel room, and they said that Pluto is no longer a planet, something that school had taught me for YEARS. I was surprised. Fast forward to a few weeks later, school has just started, and I was in my 9th grade science class learning about astronomy. I told the teacher that Pluto is no longer a planet anymore, and all my classmates were like, "WHAT!" The teacher told them that I was right. They were all really confused.

Poor Pluto, excluded from the group. Also, it isn't a planet.

I fully believed this statement during my primary school days. While the second part of the statement is actually true, the first part is horribly wrong or can be misinterpreted by kids. The correct statement should be, "Humans breathe out air in which the concentration of carbon dioxide is relatively greater than what it is in the inhaled air." The percentage of oxygen is still greater than that of carbon dioxide in exhaled air too.

When we inhale air, about 0.04% of carbon dioxide is inhaled along with 21% of oxygen. But when we exhale, the percentage of carbon dioxide increases to 4% at the expense of oxygen. Clearly, the percentage of oxygen in exhaled air (17%) is still greater than CO2 (4%).

I think this is brought on more by pop culture. Movies where astronauts glide through "zero gravity" environments, or where the ship engineer flips an "anti-gravity" switch and gravity "disappears."

If anything, this myth is dispelled once you learn what gravity is in school.

That's very false. Gravity is a universal fundamental interaction with infinite range. Gravity is responsible for all attractions between objects, and without it, there would be no solar systems or galaxies.

But dark energy is what keeps them apart.

Here's a research topic... Hiroshima.

I was pretty confused in school about it, but when I did research on nuclear decay, I got it all.