What was a fact taught to you in school that has been proven false during your lifetime?
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That humans came out of Africa once and then settled the rest of the world. In reality there was a constant migration of humans in and out of Africa for millennia while the rest of the world was being populated (and of course it hasn’t ever stopped since).
I love how much DNA analysis has completely upended so much “known” archaeology and anthropology from even just a couple decades ago.
Whats about DNA??
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That I was a republican. The teacher gave out this political alignment quiz that was incredibly biased asking things like "do you like lower taxes or higher taxes?" and "do you like more freedom or less freedom?" All the questions basically lead you to the same answers. So the entire class basically had the same result.
This was in middle school so I wasn't even politically engaged yet. I didn't realize how crazy this was until years later.
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Did they finally find that out? Last time I checked even PhDs in aerospace engineering still added "we think" at the end of their explanations.
NASA has a webpage on aeronautics that says lift is the mechanical force created by a solid object turning a flow of liquid or gas. They also have an equation for calculating lift for any solid object/fluid combo.
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I was taught the Philippines was a US territory. I just learned last night that hasn’t been true since 1946. I went to school in the 90s.
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Going to college was guaranteed success in life.
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That America is the best and most free country in the world.
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"You need to learn this because you won't always have a calculator on you!"
That wasn’t so much a “fact” told in school as it was a prediction, and it was true for them. Some people carried pocket calculators, but most people didn’t. Some supermarkets has calculators built into their carts, but most didn’t.
Failing to predict society’s norms in 20 years isn’t the same as teaching a false fact.
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Junk DNA.
Junk DNA is still a thing - some parts of thr genome are verifiably junk, and the rest is just "unkown". It's just that some of the "unknown" bits back in the day have now been found to actually be useful. At least this is my understanding as a non expert.
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Not only in School, even at university I was taught the DNA structure was solved by Watson und Crick. But they stole data from Rosalind franklin and even openly admitted it years later.
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That tastes have specific regions on the tongue. We actually had to protest when that shit was taught at our son's elementary school. Don't know if it came up for our younger daughter.
Poor kids at school had old atlases where Germany was still separated. But I guess that's just obsolete and not false knowledge.
There's a weird thing here. I totally accept that the traditional tongue map is pseudoscience and debunked, but if you're paying attention to something like wine or good chocolate, letting it spread across your whole tongue really does seem change the flavor and bring new aspects to what you're tasting.
My subjective impression is that there is some effect to exposing the whole tongue to a stimulus, and I'd really like to understand it more - but when you search the web, you pretty much just get deconstructive articles about the old model, and not much about what might actually be happening.
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"Those bullies will be working at a gas station whole you'll be the boss!"
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My favourite one was that the earth is 6000 years old
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Taste buds are arranged by flavor in four sections of the tongue. Complete load of horseshit.
The multiplication table is still fact even if you have a calculator.
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This was my first thought as well!
Pluto is a great test for what types of person someone is.
If someone says Pluto is still a planet. They have a personality where they are immovable and can't accept scientific change.
If they do say pluto is a new kind of dwarf planet they arw more accepting of new information and belive in the scientific method.
It's a great quick test when meeting news people.
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Whats about DNA??
Gene sequencing wasn’t really a thing (at least an affordable thing) until the 2010s, but once it was widely available archaeologists started using it on pretty much anything they could extract a sample from. Suddenly it became possible to track the migrations of groups over time by tracing gene similarities, determine how much intermarrying there must have been within groups, etc. Even with individual sites it has been used to determine when leadership was hereditary vs not, or how wealth was distributed (by looking at residual food dna on teeth). It really has revolutionized the field and cast a lot of old-school theories (often taken for truth) into the dustbin.
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The appendix is a vestigial organ that doesn't actually do anything in humans. (It might still fit the definition of vestigial, but it's far from useless and we keep learning more about how valuable gut health is.)
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"You need to learn this because you won't always have a calculator on you!"
Basic mathematical literacy is a prerequisite to being able to use a calculator.
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My favourite one was that the earth is 6000 years old
The question was about things taught at school.
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My favourite one was that the earth is 6000 years old
Where did you go to school? Everybody knows its 2025 years old.
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We don't know what the appendix does, the whole pluto thing, I think the Oxford comma is going out of style, and cursive in general.
But I love cursive, mine was "very nice" according to my teachers.
