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alt title(s): You Fail Biology 
...wait, what?!
You don't really get nature, do you?
A subtrope of Hollywood Science.
Note that there are cases where the MST 3 K Mantra certainly applies, especially if the entire world of the work of fiction is pretty crazy and, thus, all bets are off in terms of good science. Therefore, most of the examples below are culled from series who were at least trying to be taken seriously. (So please keep that in mind before adding an example on this page.)
These tropes are, in general, easily justified by the simple explanation that the phenomenon in question is analogous to the bit of science (mis)applied, but not the same as the actual science: some sort of phlebotinum-copy of a person is "like" a clone, but is not "the same" as a clone, and therefore it isn't ridiculous that he's got his original's scars. Very few works actually use those justifications, however.
Contrast Art Major Biology.
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Subtropes
Examples:
Advertising
- Trojan condoms are doing an ad campaign which tells the viewers to "evolve" by using a condom. Are they advocating eugenics, or do they just not understand how one goes about participating in the process of evolution?
- The commercial is basically saying "You'd have to be a Neanderthal not to use a condom", which is why one would "evolve" into a modern human by using one. Its implied meaning makes sense.
- Now, given that modern humans did not in fact evolve from Neanderthals...
- Might also qualify as a weak form of Double Entendre: while "evolve" in the popular yet biologically incorrect sense of "personal advancement or enlightenment" is necessary for the preach factor, "evolve" in its literal sense is needed for the punchline to work, without which the ad is simply a forgettable public service announcement. In this sense the ad is even "throwing biology".
- The popular term is also literal, seeing as it's the older phrase. Words often mean different things inside and outside of a given field, creating confusion, but both uses are still correct.
- In this
 commercial for Orangina, the peacocks are wearing bikinis. But those kind of peacocks are male. Real female peacocks (actually called peahens) are a brownish color.
- Given the nature of that ad, can we assume this is fail? Not all women's clothing is worn by women after all. Also, it's just a commercial (aimed at furries), you should really just relax. Besides, brown peahens just wouldn't look as cool.
- In an H2OH commercial, the narrator voice comments how cool it is that nature gave spikes to the hedgehog, instead of you (human). In the video, though, the guy shoots spikes all around. Unless they're speaking of some sort of mutant hedgehogs...
- FurReal Friends has a new line of baby animal animatrons that you feed fake milk. Unfortunately, that line contains a duck and a parrot. When did baby birds start drinking milk?
- Actually, most (if not all) doves and pigeons secrete a form of milk through their crop (part of the alimentary tract) and feed it to their young. However, ducks and parrots do not.
- Bratz has "'Lil Angelz" veterinarian toys, including pets who get sick. The problem? You take their temperature orally. That's passable, for a children's toy, but the animals' temperatures are at normal human temperatures- as opposed to their actual regular temperatures.
- Again, it's a children's toy, we don't want to confuse kids.
- Lots of ads and other kinds of artistic portrayals show "parrots" that don't exist in nature, with bizarre coloration, patterns, etc. Oh well. But even depictions which were obviously done with a good attention to detail, including real-life parrot coloration, feather layout, anatomy, etc. still often mess up the feet. A very large fraction of all parrot artwork gives them "chicken feet" (with three toes facing forward, one facing back) instead of real parrot feet (which have two toes forward, two toes backwards). Corona Beer ads are especially bad about this. The same problem often crops up in depictions of woodpeckers, cuckoos, and roadrunners, which also like parrots have zygodactyl feet.
Anime and Manga
- In Witch Blade, Tatsuoki Furumizu's end game scenario is this trope incarnate, and is actually made worse because it's the bastard fusion of Squick, Nausea and Nightmare Fuel, with heavily implied Hikaru Genji Plan. Throw in a very messed up case of reverse oedipus rex, and it just gets even worse.
- Franken Fran is odd about this. Sometimes it's a case of Art Major Biology, and sometimes it does things that are obviously not biologically possible. But given the main character is a Cute Monster Girl and her sidekick is a cat with a human head, you have to give somewhere.
- Black Jack does not fail biology. He makes it his bitch.
- The whole Apotoxin plot in Detective Conan, which stated the Million To One Chance Fountain Of Youth (and for the other 999,999, poison) acted by initiating an uncontrollable cascade of apoptosis. The apoptosis thing is true, when explained. But where did Haibara and Conan get enough nutrients for their cells to multiply so quickly? And wouldn't their risk for cancer exponentially increase each time they take the antidote? Let alone that Baigar Is The Antidote...
- Extensive fan research and investigation has been done into the workings of APTX-4869, and the science behind it is more or less sound, if bizarre and improbable. Apoptosis is the natural death cycle of cells. The toxin also causes, in the victims that survive the poison, activation of telomerase. The initial effect of the poison is easy to explain—the body heats up and the rapidly dying cells become vapor. At a certain point, the rapid cell regeneration and rapid cell death balance and cancel each other out, resulting in the "turned into a child" effect. Since the cells of the body are then locked into a perpetual cycle of mitosis and apoptosis, and the dying cells are perfectly healthy, the dead cells are most likely re-absorbed by the new dividing cells as nutrients. Then the dividing cells die, and are absorbed by the next generation of cells, and so forth and so on, possibly for infinity. Going by the stated properties of the poison, and the uninterruptible cycle of mitosis and apoptosis with no reduction in telomere length, it's conceivable that any victim of APTX-4869 is effectively immortal—though trapped in their age-impaired form for the rest of their life. (Don't ask me to explain the temporary cures and where the 200% increase in mass comes from, though. I haven't come up with a plausible bullshit explanation for that one yet. :P)
- Apoptosis is an energy-dependent process, which means that apoptizing cells may heat up. However, even if all the cells in your body entered apoptosis simultaneously, you wouldn't vaporize. If some of your cells could vaporize, if even 10% of them did so, you'd die from having boiling hot gas in places never intended to hold gas at all. If the cells just died instead of vaporizing, you would still probably die due to the damage to your lungs, heart, digestive tract, or nervous system. Re-absorption of dead cells by dividing cells would be much less than 100% efficient, due to thermodynamics and the body just not being designed that way. Significantly increasing the amount of mitosis taking place in the body would increase the risk of cancer, which would probably serve to shorten your life expectancy instead of lengthen it.
- In Love Hina, Ken Akamatsu seems to have been blindsided by myths about eyesight. Supposedly, Naru 'ruined her eyes' by studying so much for her entrance exams, and towards the end, Keitaro has developed night blindness, unstated but implied to be from going on so many digs with Seta. While these things are possible, they would require our fun couple to do most everything by dim candle-light, never get enough Vitamin A in a modern culture, and basically seems a combo of somewhat realistic biology and old wives' tales. Maybe this was meant to symbolize their blindness about their mutual feelings, but genetics also plays a huge role in eyesight.
- It is possible that Naru is astigmatic (a condition where the lens of the eye focuses images to two different parts of the retina) which over time can actually cause a degradation in eye sight, depending on the nature of the abnormality in the lens. For example, this troper is astigmatic in one eye and is near sighted in both, which (before it was diagnosed) caused a strain related degeneration in vision as the result of a ton of close-work (reading and staring at computer monitors) as his eyes were trying to focus in three different ways simultaneously (two different ways for the astigmatic eye and an entirely DIFFERENT way for the other eye).
- Let's not forget that this is a world where being cold and/or rained upon can lead to a cold and one gets the runs from not wearing a shirt; the first is a common misunderstanding (since being cold and damp is conducive to illness) but the second makes no sense whatsoever. Unlike our buddy Tezuka, medicine is not Akamatsu's forte.
- And also don't forget that Naru rarely wears her glasses around Hinata House, yet it's a plot point in Volume 3 that without her glasses on (As they've fallen off (broken in the anime)) she doesn't recognize Keitaro!
- This could be technically justified by arguing that Naru knows that the only male around Hinata House is Keitaro, and the chances of meeting another one there are usually slim to none, thus, she gets accustomed to the idea that whenever there's a male in the room, that male must be Keitaro.
- In One Piece Portgas D. Rouge, Ace's mother held her pregnancy for 20 months to keep the world government from getting at her son. She died soon after from the strain, but still...
- Given the 'Made of Iron' nature of One Piece, this can be classified as the strongest feat ever done by a woman.
- Adam Blade of Needless performs a spectacular inversion of this trope by demonstrating a more or less correct understanding behind how aerobic organisms involved. The fact that he does this whilst being lit on fire, with some heavy metal music playing in the background, only serves to add to the general level of awe one feels while watching the scene.
Comic Books
- In the Wham Episode of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, it is revealed that Swamp Thing is actually a plant, not a transformed human. Fair enough (stranger things have happened in the DC Universe). The thing is, we're told that his memories were transferred to the plant in the same way that planarian worms can learn how to run a maze by eating other planarians that solved the same maze. While it is, admittedly, a fantastic idea for sci-fi writers to play with, it's too bad the planarian worm experiment from 1962 was faulty to begin with and has since been discredited. The new worms in the maze were actually following the slime trails left by the old ones, rather than relying on transferred memories. Placed in a fresh maze, they performed no better than the old ones. (Funnily enough, the scientist saying this in the story is, at his best, not quite right in the head. And later, Moore does, in fact, reveal that A Wizard Did It.)
- Moreover, the character who blames it on planaria worms is a botanist, not to mention an alien plant elemental who holds all animal life in contempt. There's no reason to expect he'd know more about flatworm biology or decades-old memory-transfer experiments than your average schlub (shrub?) on the street.
- Speaking of Superman, some versions of his mythology are built on really, really stupid biology, and I'm not talking about Bizarre Alien Biology, either.
- Version 1: Kryptonians are supposedly semi-photosynthetic, which is what gives them superpowers under yellow suns. Of course, Krypton had a red sun. Let's assume that life on Krypton has been around for a spectacularly long time, including their sun's yellow phase, and we'll give it a pass and call the powers vestigial. But then there's the reason why Kryptonians didn't just keel over and die because they were living on an entire planet made of Kryptonite: Kryptonite radiation is lethal because of the way it interferes with the sunlight-absorption process. Essentially the Kryptonians have evolved a wide variety of exotic traits that manage to cancel themselves out completely, but only on their own home world.
- "Mutations that are neutral, or even harmful, in one's natural habitat but prove useful in other habitats" is roughly how blind fish, lizards and insects became the norm in underground cave systems.
- Version 2: Kryptonite is only supposed to exist at the safely-buffered planet's core. Of course, this raises complaints from geologists, so let's all throw up our hands into the air and scream what the hell.
- Version 3: When Man of Steel was Superman's origin story, Kryptonite didn't exist until Kryptonian terrorists managed to detonate a nuclear weapon either in or near the planet's core. The nuclear reactions started forming Kryptonite, which eventually started affecting the natives as "the Green Death."
- In the version of the late 1970s, the shards of the planet turned into Kryptonite some time after the explosion, handwaved as a delayed effect of radiation from the blast. This version allowed an entire city, having been blasted away intact (a multiple-science failure in its own right!) time to carpet their divot with lead. That gave them enough time to produce Supergirl before getting wiped out by a meteor storm....
- In the Sandman series, in a scene set a very long time ago, involved Despair and Krypton's sun Rao (which was a red star), implies that Kryptonians were (or perhaps would be) created for the sole purpose of ultimately being killed off so that one could survive and mourn his lost race. Be that so, the existence of a race on a planet that seems custom made to kill them is perhaps a bit more understandable, if no less unfeasible.
- Depending on how you interpret more recent DC comics, this may have nothing to do with the properties of Kryptonite itself, and everything to do with Kryptonian biology. The Daxamites are a Kryptonian offshoot that left Krypton and colonized a planet with a dense lead core. As a result, they suffer no ill effects whatsoever from Kryptonite, but even brief exposure to lead - and not even direct exposure, but just being in the same general area as it - causes instant and irreversible terminal lead poisoning.
- What?! How does that even...? Does lead give off some sort of unknown "lead-radiation" that affects them? Does it teleport into their bloodstream? That's another whole case of You Fail Physics Forever all by itself!
- Science fiction author Larry Niven famously wrote a short piece on what would happen if Superman had sex (which he has had). Just for starters, Lois Lane would be dead and it gets worse from there. It's called Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.
- And Niven's essay, too, is a You Fail Biology Forever, in that he suggests Superman would kill Lois by ejaculating. But ejaculation is powered by smooth muscle tissue, not skeletal muscle, and it's the latter which appears to be enhanced in Superman. If his smooth muscle were equally overpowered, he would've destroyed the Kents' house as an infant every time he wet his diapers. As the Man of Steel doesn't seem to have destroyed every Toilet of Kleenex in the Daily Planet washrooms, it's a safe bet that only his voluntary muscle power is super-strong.
- The X-Men are all created by one singular gene being wonky. Never mind that genes create proteins, and there is no flight enzyme... *twitches*. Heroes was better, but not by much, there is no way it would be the same four genes for every power. And people herald it as a "deconstruction"...
- Considering that the X-gene was placed in the human genome by alien space gods made of energy...
- Even with the minimum of 2 alleles per gene, with incomplete dominance, that's 81 possible powers.
- And alternative splicing... so yeah, one gene isn't the issue. The magical proteins are.
- Hell, let's just mention the idea that "the next stage in evolution" is a gene that does something at random.
- Or, for that matter, the next stage in evolution.
- Even Warren Ellis is not safe from failing biology - after he explained the difference between normal and artificial mutants (or were they mutants from alternate reality? I don't remember) in his first Astonishing X-Men story, people at scans_daily pointed out that genetics don't work that way. Ellis admitted his mistake.
- A medical doctor maintains the blog Polite Dissent. Subtitled "Comics, Medicine, Television & Fun," it takes a critical look at medicine as portrayed in comic books and television.
- The Chick Tract "That Crazy Guy" is intended to warn teenagers about the dangers of premarital sex. Among other errors, it includes the old saw about there being holes in latex big enough for HIV to pass through (and for some reason, the statement that doctors don't trust latex gloves to protect them from HIV - if so, why use them at all?); the implication that since HIV could get through a condom, so could gonorrhea (despite the fact that the clap is a bacterial infection, and viruses are about one one-hundredth the size of bacteria); and a diagnosis of HIV+ being rendered less than a month after exposure (when a test for HIV is not accurate until at least three months after exposure).
- By that line of logic, every microbe under the sun would be waltzing into our bodies through our skin pores.
- Another Tract, "There Go The Dinosaurs" (from which the top picture is from), claims that because all the plants died after the Great Flood, there was less oxygen and thus the big dinosaurs were slowed down. By that logic, we'd still have all the other smaller dinosaurs around and big animals like elephants and giraffes wouldn't exist. Also, how did all the plants come back? Pretty much any time Chick uses "science" in his tracts, he fails everything forever.
- In the Buffy The Vampire Slayer miniseries "Viva Las Buffy", in which our heroine travels to Las Vegas, the villains are two twins joined at the hip: the man's a vampire, the woman's a mortal with deadly aim. One problem: conjoined twins are always identical and thus, always the same sex. Furthermore, their joining was so minor (both had full limbs and organs), any sane doctor would have separated them at birth.
- There is a theory that conjoined twins don't *have* to be identical. I can't find any evidence for a male/female conjoined twin, but it may be possible.
- It's not. Conjoinment happens when the blastocyst (a pre-embryonic ball of cells) tries to split in half, as it would to form identical twins, and fails to fully divide. Thus only identical twins can be conjoined, thus they have to be the same gender. Now, it IS possible, though incredibly rare, to have twin absorption occur in non-identical twins; this requires the fraternal twins to be sharing an amniotic sac, which is very rare in the first place, and it doesn't cause a conjoinment, but the destruction of the absorbed embryo (which may be found later inside the other twin's body as a ball of cells and sometimes hair). There is a very, very rare situation where the absorbed twin's cells become incorporated into the other's body on a large scale, which results in what's referred to as a genetic chimera, one person with cells that hold two distinct genetic codes. In most cases this chimerism is not discovered until late in life, usually when a genetic test comes back with really weird results.
- Conjoined twins are not always Identical twins - there are numerous cases of male/female conjoined twins (though relatively rare in comparison) that are caused by fraternal twins sharing an amniotic sac - it is also far more common to have fraternal conjoined twins than to have a chimera. I know this because I have personally witnessed the separation of male/female conjoined twins.
- I'm afraid your statement is incorrect. There are zero cases of male/female conjoined twins; I don't know of a mechanism by which it could happen. Whatever you think you witnessed, it was not that.
- Of course, this being Buffy (and as such, anything can happen), they could be hermaphrodite identical twins that their mother choose different genders for just to be contrary.
- The funny thing is that you are all arguing about the male female thing while ignoring that one is a vampire and the other a human. Vampires and humans have different requirements all together. Humans benefit from sunlight, vampires die in it. Vampires need blood, humans need food. This opens up the door for even more questions, such as: Can the guy feed from his sister? How is mortality handled when one is immortal and the other can die from something such as old age? How does a curse that, in nearly ALL fiction and mythology about vampires, allow only one to be a vampire, and keep the other - who is bonded to the vampire via flesh and blood - as a human?
- The story "La Nuova Razza" from the fumetti Terror Blu takes this to truly hilarious levels. It's about sperm that are super-intelligent, can TAKE OVER YOUR MIND by slipping into your brain(?!), are the size of tadpoles, have eyes and mouths (with teeth!), devour human flesh, and-wait for it-SEXUALLY REPRODUCE.
- Sounds like somebody should have used a condom. Or did they somehow eat that as well?
- In this Daredevil comic, an associate of the Big Bad from that country where everybody is a bullfighter decides to prove his badassery waving the red cape in front of a... ahem... couple of lions. Did somebody tell this guy that lions don't charge?
- Herge usually did the research for his stories, but in one album he makes a GRAVE mistake: Tintin, the captain and another guy are shipwrecked on a raft. Tintin, who should know better as The Hero, seriously suggests drinking sea water, and even the captain who should know even better than a landlubber just complains about the dead fish in the sea instead about the fact THAT DRINKING SALTY WATER WILL BE WORSE FOR YOU THAN DRINKING NOTHING AT ALL AND MAY KILL YOU.
- Arguable. Alain Bombard, the man who crossed the Atlantic on a boat - as he claimed, without food or water (so he likely knew what he was talking about) wrote that salt water may not allow you to survive more, but you will remain conscious longer - which will give you time to search for other water sources.
- According to The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Travel, drinking one liter of sea water per day as an absolute last resort would not be healthy, but might keep you alive.
Fan Fic
- This troper once beta-read a friend's story that had the main characters having sex 27 (twenty-seven) times in a single night. His groin hurts just thinking about it. She didn't detail all 27 liaisons individually, which is probably just as well given that what we did see of their sex lives was pure IKEA Erotica.
- Animal comparisons are a very common method of establishing a character as having a Biggus Dickus. Truly clueless writers compare the hero to a gorilla. And the women are impressed by this.
- As You Don't Know Jack put it, "King Kong my ass!"
- At one point in the fanfic Shinji And Warhammer 40 K, Shinji is required to go through a temple of trials. He specifically invokes this trope during his proceeding rant, complaining that the giant scorpions he encountered shouldn't be able to support their own weight.
- This troper once read a fanfic where the villain's plan was mind control—by inhibiting the digestive enzymes in saliva. According to the fic, once the enzymes (just the ones in saliva, mind you) were nonfunctional, the victim would be unable to feel pain and thus be easily controllable. Sadly, the author deleted this story when her fail was pointed out.
- Even if that made sense, where did The Above Troper's friend get the idea that somehow not feeling pain made people obedient?
- Isn't that obvious? If the victim cannot feel pain, his blinking reflex will be suppressed (i.e. eyelids would move only by conscious effort). This causes the endocrine activity of the liver to increase. Which again triggers an auditory inversion in which the victim perceives high notes as low ones and vice versa. And presto — instant obedience!
- In Light And Dark The Adventures Of Dark Yagami, Dark shoots and kills Watari on his way out of the "Whammy" house. Watari returns six chapters later, having been revived by CPR- even if he hadn't been killed, CPR could not have saved his life.
Film
- The only frog species that goes "ribbit, ribbit" is one found, oddly enough, in California near Los Angeles. The sound editors, when they needed frog noises back in the day, didn't have a budget large enough for them to fly to, say, Nigeria to record a throwaway sound effect for a Tarzan movie, and went out back instead.
- Although there is no official explanation given as to the how the Rage virus in 28 Days Later works after infecting a victim, the idea of a virus infecting its host after a single heartbeat places a pretty heavy strain of the Willing Suspension Of Disbelief any movie requires. Of course, since it doesn't affect the ability of many people to enjoy the movie, it doesn't really matter all that much.
- To be fair, it seems that the number of heartbeats would be the key solution there; as the time it takes for people to turn is variable. Example: the girlfriend in 28 Weeks Later likely has her heart race as an Infected breaks through the wooden boards and bites her arm, whereas the Dad in 28 Days Later is quite stressed, but quite idle, when he's infected. He has enough time to tell the others to stay away from him repeatedly. Then Don in 28 Weeks Later, who turns faster than Brendan Gleeson's character, but slower than the girl earlier in the film, after kissing his wife.
- Arachnophobia, where a giant South American spider mates with a common North American spider. Taxonomically and size-wise, this is like a female mouse and a male giraffe not only getting it on, but having completely healthy mouse/giraffe hybrid babies. Sure, there is a lot of size variation between genders in many spiders, but the female is always the big one.
- Bee Movie.
- Let's start with a massive case of Insect Gender Bender of the most common case, that are male worker bees. Also, bloodsucking male mosquitoes appear. Lots of them.
- Then the whole process of honeymaking (which actually involves bees vomiting nectar back and forth into each others' stomachs) is depicted as a fantasy Willy Wonka-esque process. Bad, but not critical.
- Then we have the fact that one bee stings a man.. and survives by putting a plastic toy knife on the place of its sting, disregard the fact that real bees practically lose their internal organs when stinging, and that's why it's fatal.
- And finally... pollination. Let's be quick: bees don't pollinate consciously, they aren't, by far, the only pollination vectors that exist, and, the worst offence of the film, you cannot pollinate a flower with pollen from another species of flower. It's like trying to impregnate a horse with whale semen, it just wouldn't work!
- And the fact that they revive dead plants through pollination, which is akin to bringing someone back to life by having sex with the corpse.
- Don't knock it, it worked for Fortunato in Wild Cards.
- The Butterfly Effect: the alternate ending shows him strangling himself with his umbilical cord. Only that he doesn't have to breathe; the umbilical cord supplies all nutrients, and oxygen is not needed. The worst that would happen is the doc noticing and there having to be surgery. Or him getting asphyxiated after birth.
- In real life, babies actually die like this, because it cuts off blood flow to the brain. Nearly happened to my niece.
- I almost died like this. Someone even took pictures. Know how a baby is usually purpleish tinted, covered in filmy resin stuff, slimy and all manner of Squick? Well, I was not only slightly purple, but downright violet from lack of blood. C-Sections saved my life.
- It depends how the film played the scene, of course. Still pretty silly regardless.
- In Crank, the main character is given a drug that stops his adrenaline from flowing. This troper saw the movie with a biologist who confirmed that the drug would work. Two mistakes were made though: he would have died within seconds. Also, fear is the most effective way to produce adrenaline.
- Well, one presumes that knowing you're going to die within a few hours is pretty scary.
- The 2008 remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still. "His life-support suit was similar to a placenta." "That makes sense, because a placenta sustains life." Words cannot describe the idiocy of this reasoning.
- The Doom movie has the mutant monsters come from the genetic experimentation of long dead human Martian Precursors. Fair enough. But it turns out that the mutations are caused by there being a "gene for evil" in the "poorly understood 10% of the human genome" which the genetically engineered chromosome reacts to. Now, when one of these mutants bites a healthy human, it infects them like a virus. Never mind that the Lego Genetics are atrocious enough, but chromosomes are huge (for cell structures) and not at all like viruses.
- Qualification: viruses are entirely capable of adding to a person's genes, though a whole chromosome in a retrovirus could be too much.
- There is some talk of using artificial chromosomes, or so I've read. The problem is, obviously, getting them in in the first place (as you point out, a retrovirus would not be enough -an understatement, in fact-)
- Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed attempts to discredit evolution by claiming that just about every absurd misconception about evolution is exactly what scientists believe, and chucks around a lot of long-discredited Creationist quibbles. (Evolution cannot increase information, evolution violates thermodynamics, evolution is "just" a theory, evolution says a cat can give birth to a dog, and other ridiculous stuff like that.) Sorry, Ben, but nobody with any real education thinks that evolution works like you think we do.
- A film that in the first ten seconds invokes Godwin's Law - trying to liken those who are proponents of evolution to Nazis - at least clearly telegraphs the lack of desire for any actual science. Those who pay attention will notice that Ben spends a lot of time talking to scientists who don't like evolution and think it's wrong! The only problem is, none of them are evolutionary biologists...
- Face/Off features John Travolta becoming Nicolas Cage and vice-versa through face transplant. Never mind Travolta being 2" (5cm) taller, or their different hairdos (Travolta gets his hair cut to match Cage's, but we never know about the other). Don't ask how muscles, nerves, and blood vessels are connected so well the facial expressions are never compromised. Or how the surgery is reversed for Travolta's character in the ending.
- Never mind the height difference - while John Travolta has many redeeming and charming qualities, it's fair to say that no-one is going to mistake him for Nicolas Cage in the nude. Considering that he has sex with his enemy's wife while in his guise as Travolta, who is presumably intimately familiar with every inch of her husband, having been married to him for about 20 years, it seems unlikely she wouldn't have spotted something was amiss.
- And what about their VOICES?
- They put a microchip on the man's larynx to alter the voice. How, you got me.
- It's also worth pointing out that there have been face transplants in real life, which don't produce faces identical to the donors because many features of a face are the result of the underlying bone structure.
- And this begs a further question: John Travolta gets his face back in the end and even decides he doesn't want his old scar back. All well and good, but why in the world would he want his old chubby bod back?
- Godzilla is a prime example of this trope. It's just best not to think too hard about how a giant radioactive dinosaur, giant butterfly, or half-plant half-Godzilla hybrid is even able to exist. Just invoke the Rule of Cool and a bit of Techno Babble and be done with it.
- In The Horror Of Party Beach, a doctor explains that the monster is actually a dead human whose organs were invaded by aquatic plants before they had the chance to decompose, and calls the result "a giant protozoa." Protozoa are single-celled lifeforms, and "protozoan" is the word for describing one in the singular.
- Jurassic Park contains a character who is supposed to be a paleontologist saying "Dinosaurs and man. Two species separated by sixty-five million years." The problem being that dinosaur is not a species designation, but a much higher taxonomic rank. There are currently known to have been more than 1,000 species of dinosaur. Furthermore, most of these species have been extinct far longer than 65m years.
- Another scene has him holding a baby dinosaur in his hands. "What species is it?" he hisses to a nearby geneticist. "It's a Velociraptor," responds the geneticist. Neither of these trained scientists who really ought to know these things picked up on the fact that Velociraptor is the genus name. The species is probably Velociraptor mongoliensis.
- The answer could have entailed "I don't know the species, this is all I can tell you," but given that this came from the guy who created it, and even more so given the general level of scientific knowledge in this work...
- If the amber-preserved blood came from a varient of the Velociraptor genus which had not previously been found in the fossil record, then it would need a different name from V. mongoliensis. However, its existence as a newly-documented species couldn't be officially reported until the park went public. So until V. Hammondi (or whatever) could be openly revealed to the taxonomic community, the raptors wouldn't really have a species name, just genus.
- An early scene has the paleontologists digging up a Velociraptor mongoliensis in the Montana badlands. As the name implies, they lived in Mongolia, and not Montana. The raptors are also way too big. Although if you pretend they're saying Deinonychus every time they say Velociraptor, it makes a lot more sense, because Deinonychus did live in Montana, and was somewhat larger. (Although the raptors might be closer in size to the even bigger Utahraptor.) The cheetah speed and chimpanzee intelligence can at least be filed under artistic license.
- Also, the third movie has a boy using T. rex urine to make other dinos get away. Reptiles (and the dinosaurs' direct descendants, birds) do not pee. The kidney's excretion leaves the body in the feces.
- Well, reptiles DO urinate (For example, blue tongued skinks will pee if they are are frightened while being handled). The only problem is that said urine is basically odorless. Birds, on the other hand, do not urinate. Also, we really don't know whether dinosaurs urinated or not, as they aren't exactly like modern reptiles.
- This troper recalls a Science News article about possible evidence of dinosaur urination: a set of fossilized sauropod tracks, with a fluid-eroded trough between them, exactly where a massive stream of urine would've washed the soil away.
- Maybe it was some sort of scented secretion used to mark territory, not pee. Would a kid know the difference?
- There's also the whole concept of using DNA from dinosaur blood, found in the stomachs of mosquitoes preserved in amber. In real life, DNA breaks up very quickly after death, and such a way of 'preservation' simply would not work.
- Actually DNA doesn't break up that quickly after death at all - it's a very stable molecule, unlike proteins which do degrade very quickly. If DNA disintegrated shortly after death its effectiveness as a forensics tool would be much less than it actually is, for example. DNA can in fact remain relatively intact for hundreds if not thousands of years. Millions of years, however, is another matter entirely. We have actually managed to recover minute samples of dinosaur DNA, but they are fragments totalling no more than a few hundred base pairs, which is barely enough to count for even the very smallest of individual genes.
- An argument was recently posted in the It Just Bugs Me page for The Matrix. Basically, no amount of genetic engineering is going to break the laws of thermodynamics.
- Note that as stupid as it was, it's never said that the bio-batteries were a closed power system.
- And that makes it even a bigger problem. The actual matter is that injecting energy (food/nutrients/whatever) inside a system (a human being) to transform this energy (from chemical to electric) would result in even less energy. One much better solution for the machines would be to simply burn the humans and whatever they were feeding humans with, the combustion would generate much more energy than digestion (which, in turn, consumes a lot of this primitive energy to keep the "battery" alive).
- This was due to Executive Meddling - originally the humans had their brains linked together to form a supercomputer.
- Also in The Matrix, made by a character rather than explicitly by the creators: Agent Smith goes on about how humans aren't actually mammals, but a type of virus. Taxonomical classification is by definition a question of who's descended from whom, and even when it wasn't conceived that way, the physical structure of the organisms in question was always what counted. He should have just framed it as a metaphor instead of trying to get all sciencey. Also, it is not true that every species of mammal instinctually develops an equilibrium with its surrounding ecosystem. Evolution happens by natural selection, not even instinctual design - if there are any instincts of a species that help maintain the equilibrium, they are the result of development, not the other way around - and this incidentally applies to viruses in the same way as to mammals. And of course to humans. And if it were really true that humans multiply until they have consumed every natural resource and then move onto another area, Earth would be barren by now and we'd have ran out of new areas long ago.
- It was pretty clear that he was being metaphorical.
- Well he was basically giving a Hannibal Lecture.
- Especially given that he doesn't actually assert, at any point, human beings to be a virus, he merely compares us to them. He also refers to humanity as a "disease, a cancer on this planet", clearly contradictory if take to be intended literally, making it farely clear that he's simply looking for pejoratives to explain a point, rather than proposing taxonomical redefinition.
- If it were literal, someone would have pointed out that a virus and a cancer are two very different things.
- Considering what Smith is, it's possible he was mentally comparing humans to a computer virus, and then clumsily translating this into terms that a flesh-and-blood creature like Neo can relate to. There's no good reason why a sentient program would find a biological virus so viscerally offensive, after all.
- Uh, context, anyone? The whole point of that scene was that Agent Elrond was psychologically torturing Morpheus. This troper seriously doubts that Smith cared the slightest little bit whether what he was saying was scientifically accurate. From an in-character POV, the point, the ENTIRE point, of him saying those words, in that sequence, was that it was the speech he felt most likely to have the most demoralizing effect on Morpheus, in the least time. Real-world torturers have been known to claim that the sky is neon orange for similar reasons. They don't actually believe that the sky is neon orange, but they do believe that forcing their victims to admit to such will somehow benefit their interrogation.
- A b/w horror movie called Monster on the Campus, in which the protagonist injects himself with a Coelacanth's blood in order to become a caveman. So, basically the "evolution" take on Jekyll And Hyde.
- The Species movies. A film about the difficulties Natasha Henstridge has getting laid was pretty absurd, wasn't it?
- There's the Plot Tumour whereby "Natasha doesn't want to mate with someone with a genetic defect" in the first movie becomes "the blood of someone with sickle-cell anemia is toxic to the aliens" in the second.
- The worst offender in there has to be what happens to The Virus infected astronaut's human victims in Species II: his Evil Spawn go from conception to full term in minutes and then tear their way out of their hosts like chestbusters. This is pretty ridiculous because, whatever alien biology the fetus has, it needs nutrients from its human mother to survive, and the human uterus could never supply enough to allow such growth rates. These things would need to assimilate as much as nine pounds of material in minutes; even Alien chestbusters usually had the decency to take a couple of hours. Then there's the part where the infected astronaut blew off his own head with a shotgun and not only survived but retained his memories, which is sort of like smashing your hard drive, getting a new one, and expecting your old files to still be there when you plug it in. Did I mention his hair and beard also somehow know to grow back to just the right length to match his old cut? And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
- Speaking of the Aliens films, there's Alien Resurrection, where the series (already shaky after Alien 3) came around for another go at the shark. It features probably the worst instance of magic cloning ever- Ripley, who threw herself into a vat of molten metal to kill the alien queen she'd been impregnated with at the end of Alien 3 is somehow cloned from surviving material. OK, not THAT much of a stretch. The clone is part alien. Eh, a bit hard to swallow but I guess we can accept the dead queen's DNA got mixed up with hers. The clone not only retains the memories of the original, but is impregnated with a clone of the queen, which is part human. No, just... no.
- '50s B-movie The Amazing Colossal Man has one of the doctors tending to the titular rapidly-growing man describe the human heart as "one big cell." As Tom Servo says, "You're not a real doctor, are you?"
- In The World Is Not Enough, Renard has a bullet lodged in his medulla oblongata that is "slowly killing off his senses". No one could survive that. In fact, it would be an Instant Death Bullet.
- This is credited with removing his sense of touch, despite this not being where the sense of touch is in the brain. The sense of touch is in the parietal lobe (mostly) which is at the top back of the brain. The medulla is at the bottom of the brain. While some have survived with bullets in their brains, such as Kiran Prajapati, who they were likely thinking of, if a bullet was damaging your medulla your heart would quickly fail, you would stop breathing, and your sense of touch would be fine.
- In The Day After Tomorrow about a day out of a zoo, wolves apparently become vicious human predators that will slam themselves bodily into doors in a desperate attempt to reach sweet, sweet human flesh. Also they look more like wargs.
- The African exhibit in Night at the Museum includes an ostrich. Ostriches are African, so no problem, right? Except that the exhibit is specifically and prominently titled "The Hall of African Mammals."
- Maybe its role in the diorama is to represent the natural prey of one of the mammals? Many museums do that.
- The Happening. Let's see. Plants develop the ability to secrete a neurotoxin that makes people kill themselves. All at once. Without anyone realizing. And it's stopped by the Power Of Love. And as a bonus an act of nature, that we can never truly understand, because apparently understanding acts of nature isn't sort of...what biologists do.
- Arguably the Acacia trees have developed a similar system of self defence, when a giraffe begins to graze on one of the trees it releases tannin, a foul tasting and toxic chemical, in to it's leaves while also releasing a pheromone that alerts all nearby trees to do the same. However in a quirk of nature the giraffes learnt to browse from downwind.
- Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus has a shark capable of chomping down on a US Navy destroyer as well as leap clear enough out of the water to snatch a 747 out of the sky. The giant octopus of the movie is similarly sized. Disregarding the depths necessary for a Godzilla-sized shark to get to enough speed and grab a 747 at flight altitude (much less even know the thing was there), the scientist main characters at one point play up the standard idea in films that only insensitive ecological morons would kill such wonderous creatures and insist that they will only help if the military promises only to capture the monsters. They ignore the fact that feeding these things would require the destruction of most of the ecological systems of Earth.
- Never mind how it knew the plane was there: how'd it intercept something that was flying at jetliner speed?
- Push has the lead character inject soy sauce directly in to his blood stream with no side effect at all.
- Snakes On A Plane, despite being generally scientifically accurate (if you don't mind a Suck Out The Poison scene, which, technically, was done when there was no other choice and had some precautionary measures taken) forgets a simple rhyme: Red and Black, Poison Lack; Red and Yellow, kill(/bite) a fellow.
- Not an example of this trope, as that rhyme is only useful in North America, where only one type of coral snake is found. The snakes in the film came from all over the world, which is home to many venomous species with adjacent red and black stripes.
- The Jaws films are offenders of this, but the worst would have to be the fourth one- Jaws the Revenge. Most glaring is how a shark decides to kill a family out of revenge, even though their minds are unable to comprehend something like revenge. How it would be recognize relatives anyway? It also comes with the amazing ability to travel from Martha's Vinyard to the Bahamas (which is too warm for great whites) in three days. And it roars. And leaps into the air.
- Going past all of the usual dragon examples that would apply to the beast from Beowulf (like wingspan), how does a heart that can fit in a man's fist pump blood through the body of a seventy foot long flying and swimming reptile?
Literature
- A good three-quarters of Michael Crichton's novel Next is critical of the media for reporting on new biology finds and theories, especially those having to do with genetics, as news without fully understanding the science behind them. Or whether they've been proven true yet. No, for the last time, blondes are not going extinct. (The book is more fun to read if you just imagine Crichton screaming "GENES DO NOT WORK THAT WAY!!!" over and over.)
- Unfortunately, Mr. Chrichton himself is guilty of promulgating utterly unrealistic effects of genetic manipulation, including a "maturity gene" that makes people get off drugs and act their age (before dying of premature senescence).
- Considering that his previous book was State of Fear in which he failed climate science forever, he wasn't one to talk. Even worst when he added an appendix to explain his inaccurate views as fact.
- In the Star Trek New Frontier book Stone and Anvil, it is explained that Mark McHenry gets his abilities because he is descended from Apollo and Carolyn Palamas. No one else in the line has these abilities because the godhead is carried on the Y chromosome, and all their descendants prior to Mark are female. Of course, females have only X chromosomes, and there's no explanation where Apollo's Y chromosome was hiding out for the intervening century. (Now, if the book had said the godhead was carried on the X chromosome, but recessive so females couldn't get without having two copies (which would be unlikely without some close intermarriage) like haemophilia or certain types of muscular dystrophy, that would have been a different story. Barring X-inactivation, of course. But that's getting into degree-level genetics, and I won't try to elaborate further here. That's what The Other Wiki is for...)
- "Degree-level genetics"? This troper learned about sex-linked traits and X-inactivation in Grade Ten...in 1978.
- Mariel of Redwall, of the Redwall series, mentions Gabool the Wild having gold "replacements" for his canine teeth. Sadly, he is a rat, and rats do not have canine teeth to begin with.
- Not to mention most of the physical deformities exhibited by characters (often the villains) would be cause for them to be outcasts and likely dead in short order.
- To be fair to Arthur Conan Doyle, at the time the Sherlock Holmes stories was written, legitimate scientists were speculating that some things might be theoretically possible, so it's not always a case of Did Not Do The Research, but more of a case of Science Marches On. That said:
- In "The Creeping Man", the titular character "devolves" into an ape by shooting up with monkey blood, or brain juice, or something. Just... no. (An episode of Mystery based on this story had to put a disclaimer at the beginning of it explaining this fact, lest the audience treat the story's events as pure Narm. It is instead claimed that the character has been driven mad by the adverse effects of the hormones so that he thinks he is a monkey.)
- In "The Speckled Band", the villain controls a snake through the use of a bell, which a snake would be unable to hear.
- This one was lampshaded in a Russian miniseries. Watson points out that the snake couldn't possibly hear its master's call. Holmes replies that the villain wasn't sure in his method either, and also tapped his cane on the floor.
- Snakes can hear actually. It just wasn't known at the time the story was written.
- Wayne Barlowe does a pretty good job of maintaining consistent and possible alien biologies in Expedition... except for the Daggerwrists. Pregnant Daggerwrists are cannibalistic and are executed by their tribes when their single offspring is born. If you can't do the math, this means that at least two Daggerwrists will die for every one born.
- Since the narrator only witnessed one birth, it's possible to rationalize that it was a rare single birth of a species that usually has multiple births. But yeah, it was pretty much definitely an oversight.
- Similarly to the above, in the Point Fantasy book Brog the Stoop, it's mentioned that a female "Stoop" (vaguely elven creatures with blue skin) can only bear one "Stoopling," which would mean every generation is half the size of the previous one, thus leading to extinction pretty quickly.
- Similar, again, is a Dutch book by A.F.Th. van der Heijden called Het Leven uit Een Dag. Humans only live one day in the book. They can only have sex once, then their reproductive organs will wither away (the woman will get pregnant instantly). Since the humans in that world only get one child, each generation will be half the size of the previous one. Since a new generation only takes a day to grow up and die, humankind would be extinct pretty darn soon.
- Likewise, the vampire-like creatures from George R.R. Martin's Fevre Dream seem doomed to slow extinction, as their females give birth to single offspring and always die as a result. Granted, Martin's vampires are actually aware of this quandary, but that can't explain why their young would evolve the self-destructive habit of clawing their way out of the womb, in the first place.
- Well, the source is clear. That's what they thought about lions in ancient times - hence the Aesop's fable about a hog boasting to a lioness about the number of her babies, to which the lioness replies "I have one, but it's a Lion".
- J.K. Rowling, on the Harry Potter series, says that "magic is a dominant and resilient gene."[1] Given the number of wizards born to Muggle parents (and the extreme rarity of the reverse), this blatantly flies in the face of middle school genetics. You could say that A Wizard Did It (it is magic, after all), but the far simpler explanation is that magic is recessive and that squibs have mutations that block or repress the magic gene.
- This may be a whole class of subtrope: treating "dominant" and "recessive" as synonyms for "awesome" and "lame", rather than their proper meaning in genetics, which are "works even if you only get one" and "only works if you get two".
- I doubt she meant "awsome" and "lame". It sounds more like she was trying to describe how couples with only one magical parent would still have magic children. Still way off base, though, when muggle born wizards come in to the picture.
- This troper always figured the "wizard gene" was just something that showed up randomly and wasn't necessarily genetic, like ADHD, since muggles will sometimes have it, and that squibs were just unlucky.
- However, if it was just a recessive gene, children with one wizard parent would have a rather low chance of being a witch/wizard. Population genetics would show that the amount of muggles with the gene is rather low (if you look at the amount of muggleborn wizards (less then 50 a year for the whole of Britain seems a good guess)), and even if the muggle parent had the gene there would only be inherited in one of two children.
- Let's not get into the huge advantage it is to be able to do magic from an evolutionary point of view, and how it would take a relativly short time before everybody has the magic genes.
- It's not just genetics where the series fails biology: both the book and movie of Philosopher's Stone feature a snake that winks at Harry. Snakes don't have eyelids.
- It's conceivable that only Harry could've seen it wink, because his Parseltongue ability translated its body language into human terms.
- The basilisk in the second book rants about the smell of blood, and about ripping and tearing its prey. But if it's enough like a real snake for Harry to understand it, then it should gulp down its prey whole, making blood and flesh-rending (with what?) a highly inappropriate appetite.
- This troper has just one question. How was Hagrid conceived, when his father was a tiny thing that he could pick up when he was a child, and his mother a 30m tall giant?
- Stephenie Meyer, author of Twilight, seems to think that, while vampires' bodies are said in the books to be "frozen in time" and that all their bodily fluids are replaced with venom, male vampires can still get female humans pregnant. Because, you know, 107-year-old sperm would still be alive and viable... And that's not even getting into the fact that the female vampires' bodies are just frozen, period.
- She also failed genetics- werewolves supposedly have 24 pairs of chromosomes (for 48 total) and humans have 23 pairs (for 46 total). This would mean the children of any werewolf-human couple would have 47 total chromosomes... which means they would be completely sterile. (Because 47 doesn't divide nicely into pairs. This is also why mules are sterile.) Unfortunately, she shot herself in the foot here because it's shown quite clearly that werewolf (excuse me, "shapeshifters") and human children have been able to have children of their own.
- It has actually been proven that some mules and hinnys (the reverse of a mule) are capable of producing viable offspring. However, that is no reason to not criticize Twilight.
- Mules and hinnies are, as a rule sterile. This does not mean that every so often, they will not manage to produce offspring, but note that we are not producing more by breeding mules or hinnies with each other...
- She also fails biology in claiming that menstrual blood is "dead blood" and therefore not attractive to vampires.
- In the Replica series of YA novels, the bad guys repeatedly try to get hold of Amy's super-DNA by cutting her hair and fingernails. Not to mention the installment where her DNA reverted to "normal" after getting her ears pierced ... wait, what?
- The Pern novels, aside from their Lego Genetics and impossible Giant Flyer physics, also claim that dragons and their kin defecate through openings at the ends of their tails. Pity that any animal with such a design would swiftly die of feces-borne infection if its tail got bitten off, which is a rather common injury for real-world wild animals.
- Yea, but a fire lizard (the "evolved" predecessor from which the dragons were genetically engineered), having lost his tail thus, would likely die the first time they saw a larger predator anyway, as their only two seriously feasible means of escape from predators are flight and going between. The former would be impossible due to the necessity of the tail for balance and coordination in flight, and going between with such an injury would leave them as surely dead as sitting there waiting to be eaten. Thus, such an injury would be unlikely to ever leave one alive long enough to die of an infection, making the evolutionary pressures from such an infection minimal at best.
- Except that tail-wise defecation seems to predate the evolution of both flight and teleportation. Tunnel snakes don't fly or go between, despite being the primitive cousins of dragonets, and they're the only ones for whom such an anatomical arrangement actually makes sense (because they wouldn't have to belly-crawl over their own wastes). But why didn't the first dragonets to walk, not belly-crawl, hit upon the more sanitary arrangement that every IRL vertebrate uses?
- If the timeline is accurate in Gone With The Wind, then Scarlet O'Hara was pregnant for approximately 22 months. To be fair, this is probably accidental.
- Christopher Paolini says tens of thousands of insects were living in a single square foot of moss. Then he goes on. As his main character is listening to the ants "urges" he lists them as follows: "the urge to find food and avoid injury, the urge to defend one's territory, the urge to mate...". He does realize that only a small percentage of ants ever actually mate? It's the drones and the queens, that's all. Not to mention, ants aren't particularly territorial. They are known to occasionally invade other ant hills, but there are also many, many cases where I've found three or four ant hills in close proximity in my backyard, perfectly fine with each other. Not to mention the part where ants live in colonies - it would not be 'one's' territory, it would be at least 'their', indicating a more collective territory.
- Let's take a look at Maximum Ride. Even if we ignore the Lego Genetics as necessary to the plot, James Patterson really needs to learn a bit more about wildlife. Hawks don't live in groups, dammit!
Live Action TV
- An episode of Spooks/MI5 features a terrifyingly potent virus which is a recreation of the Black Death! Which would indeed be horrifying... if this editor's acne medicine couldn't kill the black death. Not to mention that the disease still exists... but was caused by bacterium, not a virus.
- The Depford Mice Trilogy did this one in the first book. Possibly justified by the Villain actually having lived through the Black Death, and also being a demonic cat. (Who probably didn't gain a passing grade in biology.)
- In one of the early episodes of Smallville (which, admittedly, is not well-known for scientific accuracy), an embittered loner entomologist decides to take out his newfound mutant aggression on his mother. He blames this on his nifty bug genes, but rather than describing a real critter, he likens himself to the pharaoh spider — an animal that doesn't actually exist outside of the relatively obscure video game Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy.
- Too many Star Trek episodes to name. (Some are covered on the subtrope pages.) A recent legendary example is the Enterprise episode "Similitude," in which a fast-aging clone of Trip is created... and ''gains Trip's memories'' as it ages.
- Don't forget the lovable redneck getting knocked up... by an alien by... PUTTING HIS HANDS INTO A BOX OF SAND.
- Another Enterprise offender: an Ensign has a slug-pet that is not faring well on board ship, so they drop it off on a planet. Not its native planet, mind you — just a planet. Admittedly it won't have any breeding stock, but still...
- The planet in question has been jokingly called "Saltworld" by fans ever since.
- In the "Voyager" episode "Macrocosm" we have viruses(!) which can grow in size - up to a meter, fly, and hover in the air - something tells me the word "virus" was completely misunderstood...
- The Voyager episode "Threshold," which not only posits that evolution is a fixed, unchangeable concept, but that the pinnacle of human evolution is a large salamander. Brannon Braga has since joined the ridicule of the episode, though it didn't stop him from co-writing the Enterprise episode "Dear Doctor," in which the same misconception of how evolution works is used to justify genocide.
- And don't forget that apparently these super evolved salamanders are capable of mating and having progeny in about a day and these salamander offspring are apparently fairly well developed for having only having been conceived a few days previously.
- Both Voyager AND Enterprise have had genocide justified by the exact same statement - "sometimes the logical course of evolution is extinction." Clearly, evolution is like the Prime Directive - a mystical all knowing force that cannot be ignored - even if it means genocide.
- The Occampans (Kes' race) In Voyager, can only reproduce once, and have one child. What kind of species would evolve such a trait and thrive? You'd need EVERY member of your race to reproduce to have 0 population growth. If any member of the race dies, then the race as a whole has taken a blow it cannot recover from! Heck, how did the Occampan race come about? Since they can have only one child, and thus cannot grow in numbers, how are there so many of them?
- It says that there is only one pregnancy, not that there is only one child. While we only see single births, we have only seen part-humans and Kes herself get born. Litters may be a common occurrence (see Mayflies).
- The TNG episode Genesis was on a par with Threshold - demonstrating that Rick Berman may have a PhD in this trope. Switching on Barclay's T-cells causes the Enterprise crew to - sigh - devolve to a variety of different species... most of which have common ancestors diverging HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF YEARS AGO - and Spot the cat becomes an iguana. Apparently in Star Trek, everyone walks around with copies of not only the future evolutionary patterns of their own species but ALSO whole swathes of species that are completely unrelated to them from their home planet.
- Enterprise started as it meant to go on - Klaang has a message encoded in his BLOOD. As it was done by replacing one of the chemical bases in his DNA - this would require astronomical luck if only one cell had been modified or one Klaang sized corpse.
- The Xindi... just... The Xindi.
- A somewhat more subtle example - Vulcans are said to have copper blood, which would logically be hemocyanin. The problem being, Vulcan blood is said to be green - hemocyanin is either colourless or blue. Most likely Did Not Do The Research.
- The theory was that human blood was red because it contains oxidized iron, ie. rust. If Vulcan blood contains oxidized copper, it must therefore be green, since copper rust is green. (Didn't say it made sense.) One doubts that Gene Roddenberry even heard of the word "hemocyanin".
- An episode of Pushing Daisies has a company that wants to make many clones of a carefully bred dog that died shortly before the events of the episode. They plan to harvest the dog's DNA from the ashes of its cremated body. This ignores the fact that cremation destroys DNA, along with most other organic molecules.
- In the episode before that, a jockey who lost the use of his legs in an accident walked again because he had the legs of his dead horse implanted into his body, and the second episode had a make of car that runs on dandelions. The show is clearly not going for scientific realism.
- Considering the fact that it is about a pie-maker who can raise the dead-even after they've been cut in half, squashed flat, and melted into a sunny side up egg, I would say this is more of a case of Art Major Biology.
- In the first episode of Primeval, Cutter comes across a human skeleton. He is initially worried that it may be his missing wife, but he soon realizes that it's a male skeleton and thus can't be her. Fair enough, but the way he checks is by counting the number of ribs. Never mind that this is based solely on the Biblical account, which even then only affected one individual from who knows how long ago, wouldn't checking the shape of the hipbones be easier?
- In Doctor Who an alien wasp disguised as a human gives himself away when he starts buzzing while he's talking. The buzzing sound is caused by a wasp's wings, not their voice. Possibly justified since it's an alien that only happens to resemble a wasp, but the earlier scenes still only feature the buzzing noise when it's flying.
- In the CSI episode "Crash and Burn," the suspect says, "I have to feed my fish. Clown loaches, tetras, angelfish..." when the aquarium clearly contains goldfish, angelfish, and a couple other species (possibly tetras in there somewhere). There are, however, no clown loaches - probably because they're best kept in groups of 5 or more, in tanks over 100 gallons, which the tank in the episode definitely was not.
- Considering how the suspect in question was a killer and narcissist, he may not have cared whether his clown loaches were miserably overcrowded.
- In the third episode of Sanctuary, Zimmerman claims that the last major outbreak of the Bubonic Plague was in 800 AD (the end of the Plague of Justinian). Leaving aside for the moment that he should have said "AD 800," the last major outbreak of the plague was in 1945. He was only off by about a millennium. Even ignoring the occasional outbreak in modern times, he's completely missed a little thing called "The Black Death" in the 14th century, the most famous plague outbreak in history.
- Monk: A woman kills a billionaire by poisoning a death-row inmate, thus ruining the kidney he was going to donate to said billionaire. They both apparently have the "rarest blood type in the world" — "AB Negative with D antigen." Except, the Rhesus D antigen is what we mean when we say "positive" or "negative." No wonder AB Negative with D Antigen is so rare... it doesn't exist! "AB with the D antigen" would mean he's AB+... and therefore can accept any blood type!
- Also of note, only blood expresses the Rhesus antigen. All that's required to match in organ transplantation is the ABO blood type; all the recipient needed was another AB-type kidney.
- Something similar occurs in the first season of Dexter, when Dexter has a flashback to being sick enough that he needed blood. He apparently has an extremely rare blood type that meant donor blood was in short supply, and they had to find a close biological relative of his to donate. That blood type? AB negative. While this is the rarest blood type, it's also compatible with any other type of blood, as long as that blood is also negative.
- Sliders had an episode where a virus devastated humanity because penicillin/antibiotics had never been discovered, and thus the group saved the day with mold. PENICILLIN DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY. Of course, we are talking about a series that thought Einstein invented the Atomic Bomb.
- In fever it is a "disease" it's never said to be a virus. [2]. And in our reality if the Einstein-Szilárd letter hadn't been sent, the us may not have begun working on it. His actually working on it in that world is a case of Alternate History.
- Eleventh Hour likes to totally screw up cloning (at least the clones are born as infants and not carbon-copy adults with complete memories). In the first episode, Jacob Hood insists that cloned pregnancies are more dangerous to the mother carrying the clone and that you need the "real scientist" at the birth, when in fact a cloned infant poses no more threat to the mother than an in vitro pregnancy, which is scarcely more risky than a natural one (and in fact the mother's health is only in jeopardy if her own body is incapable of carrying a pregnancy; if the baby is unhealthy it will simply miscarry). Then in a later episode, he makes the claim that clones are born genetically the same age as the original that they were copied from (so even though they look like babies, their genes are actually adult or even geriatric), stating that the telomeres which break off each time a cell replicates are severely shortened. However, scientific research measuring telomere lengths has proved this to be false; the developing embryo somehow "knows" how long its telomeres should be and resets them to this length with the enzyme telomerase.
- Out Of Jimmys Head once featured a brain transplant. Worse, they managed to save the "Personality Gland".
- An enemy agent on Chuck injects herself with a sizable amount of ricin so that she will not talk. That's all well and good, as ricin has no antidote...but it also takes days to do its dirty work. She of course died instantly.
- The Tomorrow People. What makes it worse in this case is the fact that the show had a scientific advisor listed in the credits!
- Claims that evolution takes "thousands" of years.
- In "Hitler's Last Secret", John explains, straight faced, that "Genes are those body cells known as the DNA molecule." Which is about as biologically accurate as saying "Fribble fribble rhubarb, fribble fribble ploo," and only slightly better grammatically.
- How have we missed Heroes? Evolution does not work that way, dammit!
- Fringe. Dear god, the science in this is horrible. Given the premise it seems clear they are deliberately invoking Rule Of Cool, as they don't even try to make sense. Perhaps it takes place in an alternate dimension with different rules...which would be appropriate for the show.
- The thankfully short lived Threshold (not to be confused with Voyager episode... though not far off) had DNA being "hacked" by sound... which was apparently capable of changing humans DNA to a triple helix - as part of an idiotic "xenoforming" plan. So, one of the lesser sins.
- While the 4400 has one of the better explanations to how people get super powers (no reason is ever really good, because, well, they're super powers) what drives me round the bend is that they inject a neurotransmitter into their bloodstream to get the powers. Neurotransmiters don't travel in blood!
- Especially anoying when they could have just as easily had it injected into the spinal column, or said it was a hormone that triggered the production of neurotransmitors, but no...
- In Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles's first season, Derek needed a blood transfusion. Apparently, he needed his own blood type despite being AB ("Universal recipient", able to take blood from any other type)... Sarah said she was type O ("Universal donor", able to give blood to any time), but her biological son John was AB?! Even if John's father Kyle was also AB, John must have an O from his mother, so he's either A or B, yet his not-AB-blood worked just fine... *headdesk*
- An episode of Animal Planet's: The Most Extreme was about modern day animals and their ancient ancestors. Fair enough....until they start talking about the Komodo Dragon and state that its ancestor was the Tyrannosaurus Rex. If the producers of the show had done even five minutes of research on the internet (or even just read a current book on dinosaurs), they would've realized that Komodo dragons and the Tyrannosaurus rex aren't even closely related to one another. A more true ancestor for the Komodo dragon would be the ancient Mosasaurs (sea-dwelling reptiles that lived around the same time as the dinosaurs). Somewhere a paleontologist is smacking his/her head against the wall in disbelief.
- Also, your common farm chicken is more closely related to the T-rex (Birds are essentially modern-day theropods) than the Komodo dragon is.
- The misconception about lizards being direct descendants of dinosaurs, and that millions of years ago giant lizards roamed the Earth, is quite common especially in older movies, so common in fact, that many people consider it a fact even to the point of refusing to believe this isn't so. Lizards do not descend from dinosaurs. The most direct descendants of dinosaurs are birds.
- Nobody expects a fake-cryptid-sightings show like Lost Tapes to keep up scientific credibility, but the idiotic statements of their bogus "experts" can be such Wall Bangers, this troper wonders if they're doing it on purpose. When discussing werewolves, a fake biologist cites instances of a chameleon or octopus changing color as examples of "metamorphosis". Never mind research: do the writers even look up terms in the dictionary before writing this garbage?
- In an episode of Glee, appropriately titled "Vitamin D," the cast of Glee takes Vitamin D and acts as though it's a stimulant, much like caffeine. Vitamin D does NOT work that way. If the writers absolutely had to go with a vitamin, they should have chosen Vitamin B12, which does give you a boost of energy. (They give it to patients with chronic illnesses, actually...)
- Uh, no. Mrs. Schue clearly says that it's pseudephedrine, which IS used as a stimulant (as well as a common ingredient in methamphetamine manufacture, which is why her buddy was arrested for buying so much.). As far as This Troper can recall, Finn is the only person in the show who calls it Vitamin D, trying to cover for himself. Finn is the same guy who thought that women have prostates, so maybe it's just the character Fails Biology Forever.
- In the Bones episode, The Dwarf in the Dirt, Dr. Brennan epically Fails Biology Forever when she tells Sweets the chunk of brain Booth is missing would in no way mess with his aim because it was taken from his Frontal and Parietal lobes (which according to her only deal with memory). She then states that only the Occipital lobe (sight) and Cerebellum (coordinated movement) have anything to do with aiming a gun. The part of the Frontal lobe closest to the Parietal lobe is called the "Motor Cortex" and, oddly enough, is in charge of motor control. The Parietal lobe (which is a major part of spatial relations) has a part next to the Motor Cortex called the "Sensory Cortex" which, you guessed it, is about feeling ones body. Of course, moving, feeling and spatial relations have nothing to do with aiming a gun... Nothing at all...
- Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory. Yes, Sheldon. When he is unable to learn to drive on a driving simulation without crashing into a pet store or ending up on the second floor of a building, he claims that because he is the next stage in evolution of humanity (citing his small incisors and his massive
ego brain, he does not need to learn how to drive, because the task is beneath him. Evolution. Does. Not. Work. That. Way.
New Media
Real Life
- Recently in Egypt, they started slaughtering pigs to stop the spread of swine flu (H 1 N 1). Problem is, H 1 N 1 isn't spread by pigs any more than your normal flu is.
- The province of Alberta in Canada is currently vaccinating citizens for the seasonal flu. However, the health minister has stated that once the H 1 N 1 vaccine becomes available, the seasonal vaccine will no longer be used in favour of exclusively vaccinating for H1N1.
- Thankfuly, that Wall Banger was short lived. both vaccines are available.
- The old idea that antibacterial hand gel, which touts a 99.9% effectiveness rate, makes bacteria stronger by leaving only the ones that are resistant to reproduce. While this is true for antibiotic medicines (when taken not according to the doctor's orders), the hand gels usually work by the inclusion of alcohol, where the survivers are usually so only because of the laws of statistics.
Tabletop Games
- In Warhammer 40000 science generally takes a backseat to the Rule Of Cool, but one particularly egregious example needs to be mentioned: The eldar are stated to have TRIPLE HELIX DNA. And are somehow still hinted to be capable of birthing a viable human/Eldar hybrid, the sole example of which is, of course, one of the Ultramarines.
- We don't mention him anymore. Probably for the same reason we don't mention the Squa- *BLAM*
- Not to mention the incomprehensibility of the Genestealers. Apparently, after three generations of hybrids getting progressively more and more human (which presumably means that the Genestealer DNA is getting more and more diluted), a fourth-generation hybrid has a chance of being... a purestrain Genestealer. Yes, it's alien DNA (and thus presumably subject to somewhat different rules), and yes, purestrain Genestealers are awesome, but come on.
- Dungeons And Dragons at least justifies its moments of failing biology forever (admittedly, usually A Wizard Did It). For example, all human/tiefling descendants are tieflings. Forever. Nobody ever finds a tiefling hiding unknown in their family tree; oh no, if your great-grandfather is a tiefling so is everyone descended from him. Apparently when devils are involved, Mendel's laws are more like suggestions.
- Actually, it appears to work more like "half-demon for a few generations, tiefling for a few generations, human eligible for Demon Bloodline feats", judging by the various sourcebooks on the subject (and depending on who you mate with).
- Depends on what version you read — Planescape, 3rd edition, or 4th edition. As of 4th edition, tieflings have supernaturally tainted blood, rather than a genetic condition; the first tieflings were the result of normal humans undergoing an infernal ritual, rather than interbreeding with demons.
- Some D&D examples of this trope don't even have A Wizard Did It as an excuse. One of the Mystara setting's supplements featured a former underground empire of gnomes, now abandoned and infested with kobolds, various dungeon vermin, and wild herds of fungus-grazing mules. The mules were supposedly the feral descendents of the gnomes' mule beasts of burden. While mules may not be 100% sterile, having an entire population of their descendents is a major biology-fail, even if they aren't inexplicably surviving underground!
- In FGU's Space Opera, a character who has died can be injected with "TKM"; a drug that stops cell decomposition. But the drug reaches the whole body via circulation, a function that stops at the moment of death.
Video Games
- In Sly 2, one of Bentley's plans works on the assumption that tigers dislike water. In real life, tigers are one of the few known types of cat who like to get wet.
- Since Bentley's plan is to completely submerge most of a temple, the plan would work anyway. Tigers dislike drowning as much as any other cat.
- Also in the Sly games, Bentley (a turtle) and Murray (a hippopotamus), both aquatic creatures, are incapable of swimming, instantly drowning upon contact with a body of water.
- Although in Sly 3, Bentley is wheelchair-bound, so at least he has an excuse.
- It should be noted that neither turtles (most species, anyway) nor hippopotamus can swim for very long unless they're just wading. There's a difference between "hangs out near/in water" and "aquatic."
- Um... turtles are aquatic. Or at least semi-auatic. You're thinking tortoises. Turtles swim extremely well.
- Sly also can't swim and many creatures are instantly destroyed upon contact with water, but considering the target audience it's probably a case of MST 3 K Mantra all over the place.
- The whole business in Metal Gear Solid where the Les Enfants Terribles twins were created as double-dominant and double-recessive for absolutely no reason other than to give Liquid Snake something to obsess over. Note that while often commented on, his speech prior to this on recessive genes being "flawed" is entirely correct in the context of the story, since they're being spoken of regarding cloning a man with supposedly superior DNA, not normal reproduction.
- Except that having a recessive gene doesn't necessarily mean it's not expressed - you could be homozygous recessive. There's also the part where Liquid grossly misapplies Asymmetry Theory. Not to mention the virus that kills people by recognizing their DNA, the two viruses that somehow counteract each other, the guy whose body carries a charge of 10 million volts, the guy who stops a blast of said 10 million volts by firing his revolvers at it, the other guy who's COVERED IN BEES, the one with photosynthetic fungus in his skull...You know what? Let's just throw all of Metal Gear Solid under this category.
- We probably could engineer a virus to kill people by DNA sequence recognition. It'd be tough as hell and would take forever with current technology, but it's technically possible - map out the genome of a person, pick a sequence that's distinct, design a sequence-specific binding molecule, insert it into a virus while ensuring you're not screwing with its modus operandi, and send it off. But dear gods, there are far easier ways of killing someone...
- No, you cannot be homozygous recessive, because the idea of homozygous traits being dominant or recessive in an individual as opposed to a population is meaningless. There's nothing that they're dominant or recessive to.
- Well, technically, they can still be referred to as homozygous recessive, if you're comparing it against a population. Solid Snake's blue eyes are a recessive trait to Liquid Snake's green, for example. Given that Big Boss's are blue, though, and that dominant genes =/= better genes (though it would've been sorta funny to have Liquid Snake have six fingers or limb dwarfing), it's still ridiculous. Not to mention how ridiculous the idea that to make a "dominant" clone, you'd have to make a weak one to shuffle recessive traits to. There's this thing, it's called sequencing... It's how we design primers for PCR, and it'd be far easier to do.
- Refuge In Audacity is a distinct trope.
- You forgot the girl who can bend the path of bullets through sheer force of personality. (And that's even after Ocelot takes away the device that she didn't know she'd been using up to that point!)
- This is justified in The Last Days Of Foxhound by being a lie to manipulate Liquid by Big Boss. Mantis and Naomi usually serve as the author's mouthpieces on the subject.
- Completely
justified handwaved within the canon of the games in Metal Gear Solid 2 - according to Emma, the entire public knowledge of genetics was completely distorted by the Patriots (instead of 5,000 genes, the average human has about 50,000), meaning that we are the ones who are inocorrect, not them.
- In Metal Slug 3D, there's a scene when Rumi tells Marco that carbon dating estimated that an alien ruin Marco was exploring was 8 billion years old. Even bypassing Ragnarok Proofing, carbon dating will only work on artifacts less than 60,000 years (or so) old. Other methods of testing radioactive decay are necessary for something far older.
- Another problem is the alien ruins are well on their way to being twice as old as the sun (4.6 billion years old).
- I just assumed Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale and they meant 'million'... which still puts it outside the realm of radiocarbon dating, but at least it's relatively new compared to the planet.
- Diddy Kong is often called a chimpanzee (and, in some instances, referred to as Donkey Kong's nephew), even though he has a tail.
- In fact, the Kongs themselves. Having the same last name implies they're more or less related, despite them being very different species of apes and monkeys.
- The thing with Diddy being Donkey Kong's nephew is really just an obvious pun. Whether or not they are really all related or just a group of friends isn't definitely stated in the games.
- Cross-species adoption, maybe?
- Cranky calls him Donkey Kong's "nephew wannabe" in the manual for DK 64, implying no blood relation, but a family-like bond between the two of them.
- The framing device for Assassins Creed revolves around a device capable of reconstructing an ancestor's memories in great detail by scanning their descendants' DNA. Official word is that the DNA being scanned is 'junk DNA'; DNA that we don't know what's for. (This is not particularly better, but in a game where you play as a bartender playing as a badass Persian ninja with a knife for a ring finger you take what you can get.)
- In Spore, evolution at least takes place between generations, but your progeny can only evolve body parts that you have previously collected from an existing creature!.
- It must be noted that Spore can be called an "evolution simulator" only to the same point that Harvest Moon can be called a "farm simulator", i.e., in a very rough level, and many aspects are simplified and/or tampered with to appeal to Rule Of Fun. In Spore Creatures, you don't even need to mate to create an egg, and the offspring can be incredibly different from the parent creature.
- When the offspring the player "inhabits" is born all the rest of the creatures of the same species around it have changed as well. This and the amounts of time on the timeline show that between "mating" and the egg hatching, several if not thousands of years are meant to have past. Eggs suddenly growing several times in moments still fails though.
- A full list of errors can be found here.
- In Super Mario Galaxy, the level "Kingfin's Fearsome Waters" consists entirely of an Underwater Boss Battle against Kingfin, a giant shark skeleton. Now, this is fine and dandy, except for the little fact that SHARKS DON'T HAVE ANY BONES. Sharks are cartilaginous fishes, meaning their skeletons are made up of cartilage (flexible and dense flesh, like the stuff that makes up your nose and ears). A shark does not leave a skeleton behind after it dies — its cartilage skeleton decomposes with the rest of its flesh.
- You have a problem with a shark skeleton, but not with the fact that it's swimming around trying to eat you?
- Willing Suspension Of Disbelief will usually accept one massive leap as an intentional divergence, but if they get the little details wrong the whole thing just looks silly.
- There is no Word of God that says Kingfin is a shark. He may as well be a gigantic grouper or barracuda.
- Or some kind of giant alien fish. Sharks don't really come in "giant" (except whale sharks, and they're pretty harmless).
- Ever heard of a Megalodon? Sure they're extinct, but that's a shark that DEFINATELY came in "giant".
- Bioshock. PLASMIDS DO NOT WORK LIKE THAT
- Assuming the body doesn't reject them and had a way to assimilate them into your DNA, they could be technically possible, especially with ADAM essentially being "magic". Until you switch weapons.
- Parasite Eve: Here's a Drinking Game: Take a sip every time you sense a cellular biologist suffering wall-induced forehead injuries. Not a shot, unless you think you can live without a liver (using MITOCHONDRIA! You can start at that remark).
- Surpringingly averted in Pokemon of all things. It is implied that evolution took a markedly different route in that universe, and that many "Legendary" Pokemon's abilities are actually blown out of proportion. There's also a fair bit of magic or just plain "We don't know why!", for good measure
- On the other hand, biologists in the Pokeverse fail a lot, one of the most staggering examples being the separation of the Nidoran genders as two different species, and the fact that apparently nobody knows where Pokemon eggs come from. Justified, but still jarring.
- Where do Pokemon eggs come from? Hot Skitty On Wailord Action, of course.
- This Troper feels it necessary to remind you that your character is ten years old! Perhaps the reason the Daycare Couple tell your character they "don't know how it got there" is to preserve his innocence? The thing about Nidorina and Nidoqueen being two of the only three gendered Pokémon unable to breed with anything (Nidoran, Nidoking, or Ditto!) is what confuses the heck out of me...
- It was originally due to a glitch, but for the sake of continuity, it was kept in. And Latios/Latias, Cresselia, and Heatran can't breed with anything, either, despite being gendered.
- This troper read somewhere that Miltank and Tauros are also supposed to be gender variations of the same species (Tauros being a bull Pokemon and Miltank a cow Pokemon).
- And Illumise and Volbeat in later games. Meaning that they got the Nidorans right, they just have unusual names (ie the same), in this case. Species is more defined by raw statistics and moveset than looks, as other species do sometimes show physical differences in sex, for example Steelix
- Must be noted, though, that in Steelix case, it's merely sexual dimorphism, i.e., slight changes in appearance that differentiate male from female. Volbeat/Illumise, Tauros/Miltank and the Nidorans are a totally different matter, with different entries on the 'Dex and all. There's only one case which is better related to dimorphism, which is the Burmy/Mothim/Wormadam line.
- Having different 'Dex entries just means they have vastly different movesets, not that they're actually different species.
- The Cure Virus in Ever17. Willing suspension of disbelief can take this troper a pretty long way... but a natural retrovirus that not only rewrites the host to be immortal and have a healing factor? Maybe that one can slide. But with no apparent benefit to itself and also apparently adapting itself to give infrared vision to cover the inability to cope with UV rays and therefore be unable to go out when it's not dark? Don't think so! Retroviruses are not magical, intelligent and they do not change DNA for the benefit of their host.
- Except viruses depend on their host surviving, because killing it means that the virus can no longer use the host body for reproduction (the benefit to the virus). Carried logically in the other direction, anything which helps the host live longer will also help the virus live longer and continue to reproduce.
- If you think about it, odds are the Cure virus isn't natural. Leiblich was researching virus engineering, afterall. It would explain how and why they knew Tsugumi had been infected at all. They infected her. Then, they studied her to try and find out what was about her that made the virus work.
- World of Warcraft doesn't know how horses run (the game animates them the same way as a cheetah, with legs outstretched in the suspension phase instead of collected).
- Elekk (a pseudo elephant mount) freakin' gallop. Come to think of it, so do the mammoths. Knee joints of adamantium!
- Done deliberately and frequently by Gaia Online, usually either for the Rule Of Funny or the Rule Of Cool. There used to be a lampshade of it in the Fishing minigame, along with the Hand Wave that things are just different in Gaia— "You might be wondering why you just caught a trout in the ocean. Gaian trout are marine fishes, you idiot."
- The character Mirai, who supposedly just graduated with a degree in marine biology and sells pet fish for the Aquariums, frequently fails at even knowing what the newest specimens for sale are.
- Evolving Items.
- Megapuberty.
- Still, Liam coughing up his own kidney in response to an overenthusiastic Heimlich maneuver was ridiculous even for Gaia.
- In Tsukihime, it's mentioned off-handedly that vampires prefer to drink virgin blood because 'one's blood cells are more pure before one has exchanged bodily fluids with others'. This troper isn't going to touch the biological problems with that comment with a ten-foot pole, and will only make an off-hand comment to, oh say, mother's milk or kissing.
- Whoever designed Fish Tycoon evidently believes that aquarium fish are not only all the same genetically-compatible species, but also all hermaphrodites. And not in the "start as one sex, switch to the other" sense that a few fishes do exhibit, either: any two adult fish can knock each other up at the same time.
- Star Ocean: The Last Hope features a number of baffling evolutionary presumptions. For instance, there are apparently "right" and "wrong" ways to evolve, and we should "make our hearts worthy" of evolution. Edge Maverick must not hold protozoa in very high regard.
Web Original
Western Animation
- In the early episodes of The Venture Brothers, part of the Monarch's shtick was his epic failure at biology in general and understanding the insects he so admired in particular. For example, "Like the mighty monarch butterfly, I weave a web of treachery!!!"
- In Danny Phantom, failed cloning resulted in a female, younger version of Danny, named Danielle, who would devolve into ectoplasm if she used her powers. She got better.
- Actually, cloning should produce a younger version, just a fair bit more so than the cartoon likely portrayed. As for female, depending on the cloning method used, that's hardly impossible. All it takes is for the botched version of the process to accidentally give her an extra copy of his X, and to leave out his Y (if the "he" had been the clone, and the "she" the source, it'd have been a bit more of a failure, as there'd be no legitimate source of the Y). And regarding how it altered her magical powers, well, A Wizard Did It. They are magical powers, after all.
- In an episode of Ben10, some cows and a human were turned into mutant monstrosities due to exposure to an alien mutagen. Fortunately They were 'only briefly exposed', so the mutation reversed itself by the end of the episode!
- When Bobby gets a summer job for a guy who cleans poop off lawns in King of the Hill, he and his employer gross out his folks by describing an incident at work: their discovery of deposits of gigantic turds, scattered all over an estate's grounds. Turns out it was alpaca poo, as a neighbor's damaged fence had let a whole herd go trespassing ... and it also turns out that the writers chose the worst possible animal to blame it on, as alpacas produce lots of tiny "beans" of dung, and herds of them do so all in one place. Obscure, but a single phone call to a petting zoo could've rectified this one.
- South Park does this quite a bit, but in a particularly egregious example, it is portrayed that before an abortion, a woman is given a waiver of some sort to donate the fetus to stem cell research, whereas feti are only good for adult stem cells; you need an embryo for embryonic stem cell research, and abortion usually (if not always) occurs after 8 weeks of fertilization, by which point the aborted matter is fetal tissue, not embryonic tissue. In addition, even if an abortion were performed before this point, the embryo wouldn't be in any sort of usable condition, as all aborted tissue is considered bioharardous waste and must be treated and disposed of as such.
- Titanic The Legend Goes On. Would you believe that dolphins are able to survive the freezing temperatures of the north Atlantic? No? Well, this movie sure did!
Other
- Emily Dickinson. To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,/ One clover, and a bee, the longest-lived bee there ever was, who's also completely independent on his hive, yet somehow magically the right kind of bee to pollinate clover,/ and a truckload of plant incest. Oh, also revery. Yea, revery. Revery is very important here. Right.
- According to scholar Judith Farr (via Wikipedia) she "was known more widely as a gardener, perhaps, than as a poet" in her day and studied botany. Considering the ~1800 poems she cranked out, she was clearly going for quantity.
- I have to disagree with you there since out of those ~1800 poems she only submitted a handful for publication during her lifetime.
- Ray Comfort was filmed in a clip where he used the banana as evidence of intelligent design, going so far as to call it the "atheist's nightmare." The banana, Comfort pointed out, was perfectly shaped to fit the hand, came in handy packaging with a pull tab, and conveniently changed color to let you know when it was ripe. Unfortunately for Comfort, our banana is the domesticated version of a plant that forms a small, turd-shaped fruit filled with huge seeds and little in the way of edible pulp.
- No it was an invention of Dr Anna Ban retroactively delivered to the New World.
- This video humourously debunks Comfort's original claim by comparing the 'designed' banana with another fruit that God presumably also designed — namely, a pineapple. Given the relative inaccessibility of a pineapple compared to a banana, the commentator notes that "God, you really fucked up on this one."
- Especially considering that the pineapple, even after you get past the spike defenses of the plant itself, and even after you remove the spiky, pointy, painful armor of the fruit, is still trying to kill you (in a planty way) ... because the fruit itself features an enzyme which will, if enough is consumed, digest the person eating it. Seriously; there are known cases of death-by-eating-pineapple.
- This troper is allergic to pineapple and the juice will indeed "eat" her skin. Which has caused her to become mildly phobic about the stuff, for obvious reasons.
- Really? Googling "death by eating pineapple" just turns up articles about the health benefits.
- Ray Comfort himself eventually confessed that the "banana argument" was a really bad move on his part.
- Similarly billed as "the atheist's nightmare" is an unintentionally hilarious creationist video in which they talk about how, if evolution was correct, you'd see life coming...from a jar of peanut butter.
- See also the principle of spontaneous generation, or life emerging from non-life, mostly disproven by Francisco Redi in the 17th century, and disproven once and for all by Louis Pasteur in the 19th century. Opponents to evolution may want to read middle-school level biology textbooks a little more closely.
- And not to be outdone by Comfort, his friend Kirk Cameron is on the hunt for the "crocoduck", which he says is the only way that evolution could be proven. In reality, such a beast would actually disprove evolution.
- There's more where these came from...
- Blogger Andrew Sullivan repeatedly called for the release of records that Trig Palin was actually born to Sarah Palin, as opposed to her teenage daughter Bristol. He never clearly reconciled his suspicions with the fact that Bristol herself gave birth to a baby just eight months after Trig was born.
- Double-fail because maternal age is one of the main risk factors for having a Down Syndrome baby.
- A staggering 41% of museums don't know how dogs walk.
- "...the toe bone's connected to the heel bone..." [Nope.]
- "...the thigh bone's connected to the backbone..." [Also nope.]
- "...the neck bone's connected to the head bone..." [No such thing as "the" neck or head bone.]
- What do the three lines above refer to?
- Dem Bones song found here (warning for sound)
- Bill O'Reilly answered a question regarding the Canadian health care system's success with this brilliant statement: Canadian life expectancy is "expected" to be higher than the United States because the US has "10 times as many people".
- PHM Atwater studies near death experiences and pre-birth memory. In one interview she mentions about gene selection, where the child selects what genes they will have in life at the moment of conception. Has no one told her that GENETICS DO NOT WORK LIKE THAT!!!! For those who don't know I'll explain (forgive me if i use the wrong terminology or botch it completely, I'm not 100% sure if im right but i have a faint idea): A human zygote (ordinary cell) consists of 46 chromosomes, this consists of 23 chromosomes from the mother and 23 from the father (I'm not going to go into the situations that result in more or less than 46 chromosomes). Because a sperm or egg contains 23 chromosomes and a normal cell contains 46, a normal cell divides once by mitosis (clones itself essentially, each cell contains 46 chromosomes), then the two cells divide by meiosis to give 4 gametes,(In each cell The chromosomes are divided at random into two different gametes, each containing 23 chromosomes, so 2 cells =4 sperm or eggs in father or mother respectively) which is how we get variation. An egg can only be fertilised by one sperm, so 23+23=46. We can't choose our own genes, only our parents can, but that's a whole other ball game (and even then they can only choose from their own genes), obviously Mrs Atwater has not done the research.
- Generation Rescue and other fringe groups that believe mercury in vaccines causes autism, despite the fact that their claims aren't backed up by actual studies, and the original report suggesting the link was rejected by every major health organization and even retracted by its own authors. Even after mercury was removed from vaccines (and the type they were using wasn't harmful), the fringe groups still suggest a link between vaccines and autism.
- A little group called the Shakers back in the late 1700's/early 1800's was a small religious sect. Their law put a ban on any sort of sex. Apparently, either they didn't want their ideals to last to long, or someone forgot to tell their leaders that in order to have a new generation, you kinda need to have sex.
- They kept up their numbers through adoption or conversion, and, in fact, still exist today (though The Other Wiki says there are exactly four of them today...) Still, successful widespread conversion would have meant bad things for the human population, no doubt.
- It's Intentional. The Shakers are one of the better known and more recent sects who held that the end of the world was coming any day now, and therefore the question of having a "new generation" was essentially moot.
- Antibacterial soap is popular during flu outbreaks, despite the fact that flus are viral, and thus antibiotics do squat against them.
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