What was a fact you were taught in school, that has been disproven in your lifetime?

Stirring the pot a bit helps motivate more thoughtful responses.

 

It's important to remind you of two things:

In 1600, the Catholic Inquisition condemned the philosopher and cosmologist Giordano Bruno for heresy, and he was then burned alive in the Campo de' Fiori in Rome. This wasn't the scientific community, and it's important to recall that Bruno claimed the Earth itself was moving because it was a living soul-containing entity, and the inquisition felt that crossed their line of rigid belief structure. (This was called uh, early pre-cosmology structure if I remember right. It's kinda out there with astrology I think. Not my field though.)

The reason the topic we're now dancing around is so controversial is because so many people can't tell the garbage pseudoscience from the real stuff, and have been mislead by the hucksters and political forces using disinformation to sway people into emotional decision-making manipulation. If everyone had some years of scientific research under their belt, they too could pick up those publications in question, and poke holes in them instantly, using that chart I shared earlier. But it's unrealistic and unfair to expect every person to have the same level of scientific competence - so the question becomes, how do we find a way back from where we're at now? Restore people's ability to decipher actual field specialists from junk by trusting actual expert opinion to indicate what's factual and what's pseudoscience? It's hard to see the path forward that will rectify the issue in our lifetimes when factual reality itself has been distorted into a topic of confusion and disbelief based on opinions, biases and feelings.

 

This is exactly what I was referring to in my previous post, i.e. facts that I learned in school are NOT disproven, rather what is being taught these days (attempting to disprove what I learned) are in fact not true. We learned that sex and gender are the same thing. All through nature, animals and plants, there are only 2 sexes/genders. Just because someone now decided that due to peer pressure and social issues and trauma and a long list of reasons, that there are more genders, after thousands of years of just 2 genders, doesn't necessarily make it true, or disprove what I learned.

This is of course just my humble opinion and I am not open to getting into an argument with anyone about it...just saying.

 

I can't think of a comment that highlights the very sentiment of my own post better, to be frank.

 

The powers that be, whether ancient or modern, always have sway over "the science" because the powers that be control so much of the funding. Whether that is old school religious stuff that were essentially the government of the time, or the current kind of academic and political powers, doesn't really change it. There are always entities/groups trying to control what is allowed to be shared as science. I'm not saying there aren't good scientists that are conducting good science, but what is available and publicly pushed is politicized and agenda driven hogwash quite often.

To the point of finding our way back, what recourse do the good scientists have when their certifications or degrees are threatened because they refuse to play the politics? What can they do when the truth is labelled as misinformation and they are completely silenced?

True, good, honest science is great. It's led to amazing things and is generally a boon to mankind. However, it gets buried when it's not in support of the current agenda/power structure.

 

You aren't really making the argument you think you are. @Black Wolf 's point is still correct. There's a difference between genotype & phenotype. Those ½ million Americans are still only either of two phenotypes. Biological male or biological female. The additional "sex" chromosomes only introduce developmental disorders, not phenotypical change or the creation of a new/third/fourth biological sex. Regardless of how purple/pink/or blue they dye their hair.

 

This^. Not very confusing. Just because the NIH comes out with "new" guidlines and such doesn't change a thing for me.

 

Though interestingly, and I learned this the other day, what we traditionally think of male and female is XX and XY, but the Y is atrocious at reproducing itself. In many people, even today, the Y is unrecognizable and will eventually not exist in the form we know of it
now.

https://www.latrobe.edu.au/news/articles/2022/opinion/men-are-slowly-losing-their-y-chromosome#:~:text=The sex of human and,evolve a new sex gene.

In addition there are species of animal and plants that can change their sex.

https://www.inverse.com/science/animals-can-change-their-sex

on topic statement:

Sexual rigidity was what highschool biology taught me. And as “not a biology major” in the rest of my career it stuck with me as that. Sexual plasticity, however, is apparently very much a thing. The world is a crazy interesting place.

I guess the bigger “on topic” statement here for me is this:

All the “rigid rules” I was taught as a kid turned out to be much more fluid the deeper I got into my educational journey.

Even after college the more I learn, the more my hard and fast rules not only become challenged, but NEED to be challenged, because there is so much fluidity in the world that I shouldn’t be rigid about any of my thought processes.

 

https://grants.nih.gov/grants/glossary.htm#G

Whoever demonized the NIH to you on this topic should be immediately suspect to you.

 

Fair enough, like I said it's been years since I've been schooled in it.

 

There was a time when everyone knew that Babe Ruth's and Hank Aaron's records would never be broken......
It's best to have an open mind on certain things no matter whether it may be false or true, but still challenge.

 

Yes, this! This is the healthy mindset that allows humanity to progress forward.

It's also the shining light that unveils pseudoscience and reveals corruption in both institutions and people. Willingness to accept new information AND question it reasonably are the balance to living in an informed state.

 

No one demonized me on the NIH on this particular topic. The NIH has served us well for the most part over the years with their research. The NIH has become a bit politicized lately like so many other things. I'm just naturally cautious a bit now. I need a few peer reviews. Nothing wrong with that.

 

“Keep playing with that and you will go blind”

BULLSHIT!! 20/10

 

Did you click the link? The NIH definition agrees with your interpretation, lol

 

Grown adults no longer look both ways before crossing busy streets like our preschool teachers used to tell us to do.

So, apparently, no, you don't have to look both ways before crossing the street. It was all a myth.

 

Not quite. Clinical research is wonderful as long as the grant approval process is fair. Not saying it isn't.

 

I mean, we're literally talking about my day-to-day work now, and yeah, the competitive nature for getting grants awarded from the NIH is now "it takes money to get money" level stuff. It's just as wild from this side of the bench as it appears from the other side.

 

Why would I? Every extra second I have available, I am too damn busy to look both ways to cross a street because I have to make my point in derailed conversations on tundras.com.

 

Please don't interpret my response as talking down or being an all-knowing a-hole (I'm just a dentist, call a real doctor if there's an emergency har har!), but I do make a good chunk of my living being able to interpret what articles like this are *actually* saying vs what the headline says vs what a news outlet that cites the article is trying to say. It mostly involves materials science/chemistry, and a little immunology/virology but it's applicable with biology as well.
"The Y chromosome is changing. Theres something else that's acting as the Y chromosome that has taken its place and these 2 species of rodents still have biological male (phenotypes) because of it."

Thats it. Evolving nomenclature and/or genotypes that still produce the same phenotype, while interesting, doesn't change the M/F dichotomy.

All creatures great and small, as the saying goes.

 

More like 1/10,340.

 

I was listening to an interesting radio program about why our musical tastes (might) change as we age and one of the points the speaker made was that every generation has the right to believe the music they grew up with during their formative years is the best music of all time.

 

Recess on an asphalt/gravel-covered playground, with killer playground equipment, is good exercise for you. Go on out; run, play, stick your arm under the merry-go-round, bail out of the huge swing set, climb onboard the teetertotter, etc., etc...

 

Your response leads me to believe that I wasn’t clear in my thoughts, for that I apologize. Nothing I said was in disagreement to your statement. The point I was trying to make was in regards the rigidity of our thinking as a human cognitive bias. We tend to adhere to hard and fast rules and definitions thereof, especially with the information we get first. We form beliefs and it becomes very difficult for us to separate ourselves from them. Then we become closed off to other possibilities. Interestingly intelligence doesn’t free us from cognitive biases, the smartest among us are still saddled with all the baggage and limitations of the human mind.

Anyway, in this case I was attempting to use the example of some simple high-school biology to make the point. I was taught in high school that to be male you had to have an XY chromosomal makeup. Clearly, that is just not the case. The placeholder for Y can be any number of other things so maybe we shouldn’t be so rigid in our thinking. That’s it, Nothing more, nothing less. Again I’m sorry if I did poor job of making that point.

 

Well, closest so far but:
1/32" x 32 = 1"
1" x 12 = 1'
1 football field = 300',
so 32 x 12 x 300 = 115,200 or 1/115,200th of a football field.

(I hate myself)

 

I gotcha now. I was still kind of dialed in to my response to another poster. So I was focused more on how calling X "A" and calling Y "B" doesn't change what the result of that pairing is. Which, to your point, isn't part of the cognitive bias issue.

 

My point was that a football field is actually 110 yards (330 feet) not 100 yards. I was also too lazy to do the conversion and just multiplied 9400 by 1.1.

 

We tend to only remember the food stuff also. The garbage gets forgotten about so we’re left thinking every song on the radio was a banger in our day.

 

I must be the exception that proves the rule as, for the most part, I prefer the stuff that came out during my parents' formative years to the stuff that came out during mine.

 

I remember being told "cite your sources" and "conclusions must be supported by results and relevant to original objective" and it being sarcasm when teacher said "it's on the internet so it must be true". Seems those are irrelevant now.

TLDR version: "research" is well beyond the scope of the average person who claims to have done research.

Present day, overuse and exploitation of the term "research" bugs me.
Even some peer reviewed articles published in respected journals may not be published with sufficient information to judge relevance of conclusions to the presented data.
A 5 minute internet search and skipping to conclusion section of a couple articles is not "research". If you state a purpose of the search with clear inclusion and exclusion criteria for using search results and then list what results you included/excluded from your assessment, that is the correct way to start.

Then there are articles that give statistical data and say the p value proves results are significant. Stats can easily become sketchy business. Have to know exactly what the null hypothesis was. Also have to know the statistical power of the data to justify saying the sample size is reasonably relevant to the overall population. Among other variables and specifics that people may not think to challenge when reading someone else's statistical data presentation.

I say this thinking of medical field and other regulated industries that have to prove results for a blessing from the government.
Someone wants to say they researched tires before deciding on a set to buy, then whatever. I'll assume that was a 30 second search and a gut decision and still refuse to call it research even if the person really read up on compounds, tread patterns, weather effects on materials, etc before buying the tires. That's an informed consumer, not a tire researcher.