You Fail Biology Forever - Television Tropes & Idioms

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.
This troper just saw a commercial for fish oil, saying that it protects your heart by strengthening your cell walls. Uh... this troper is pretty sure that we don't have cell walls. Cell walls belong in plants, fungi, and some bacteria, not people. This is one of the simplest concepts in biology. It would take less than a minute of research to prevent that ridiculous mistake. That gave this troper a pretty good laugh.

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.
- 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.
In Naruto, the Cursed Seals are stated to get their body-morphing powers by duplicating an enzyme that Jugo's body naturally produces. Enzymes actually mediate reactions by bonding to a substrate (say a protein or sugar) to break it down to smaller products or built it up into a bigger one (meaning they could let their body produce certain chemicals, but not change the physical structure of a person's body). Now, if the cursed seal was described as a virus, maybe it might make sense.
It seems that some Hentai artists ignore the fact that BABIES ARE BORN, NOT POOPED!
- And the hentai artists that believe that you can penetrate the cervix with a penis and it will magically only hurt the female. Ignoring the simple physicality of the "which would bend/break first" debate for the moment...

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.
- 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.
  - If only his voluntary muscle was super-strong, there would be many places on his body where you could shoot him with a regular bullet and kill him.
  - Not if his invulnerability is based on his super-skin rather than his muscles. Or if strength and bullet-proofing are different powers.
  - Considering Superman has enough control over his muscles to not destroy everything he touches(see his World Of Cardboard Speech) I imagine he can similarly restrain himself when he's making love to his wife. If not, he can always bring over a Red Sun radiation lamp from the Fortress to nullify his powers.
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.
- Yet another Chick Tract "Big Daddy?" has a double-page spread of a row of ape-men all conveniently posed to obscure their genitals running from "Lucy" (portrayed as a squat young chimpanzee) up to "Modern "Man". The second-to-last is billed as "Cro-Magnon Man: One of the earliest and best established fossils is at least equal in physique and brain capacity to modern man ... so what's the difference?" It should go without saying that when Cro-Magnon man was discovered he represented the earliest known example of ... "Modern Man".
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. 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.
- Not to mention that one is a human and the other a vampire. 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?
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.
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?) in his first Astonishing X-Men story, people at ~~scans daily~~ pointed out that genetics don't work that way. Ellis admitted his mistake.

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!"
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.
- "You gave me CPR...for a bullet wound...to the head."
Subverted in the Danny Phantom / Gargoyles crossover, "A Wish Your Heart Makes." Titania gives Vlad a vision of what his life might have been like if he had stayed friends with Jack and Maddie instead of turning evil. This leads to Vlad becoming Danny's biological father to prevent him from being born with hemophilia. (Jack and Maddie had just discovered that Maddie and Jazz were carriers for it.) Once Vlad wakes up from the vision, he reminds Titania what almost anyone who knows anything about hemophilia would have already noticed: because it's carried on the X chromosome, any son of Maddie's would have been born with it no matter who his father was. Titania admits that she included that error on purpose so Vlad would know for sure that it really was All Just A Dream.
- But there's still a minor fail in there. "Any son of Maddie's" wouldn't necessary have hemophilia; the chance of inheriting the mutation is only 50% for each offspring. It's true that the father's identity doesn't change the odds, though.

In Batman And Robin, cops in Mr Freeze's lair SCREAM "My Lungs!! My LUNGS are FREEZING!!" courtesy of some freezing gas by the icy villain. How, pray tell, does Joel Schumacher explain their ability to form sounds, much less scream, when their ''lungs'' are freezing?
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.
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-)
  - However there are some pretty big viruses out there.
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. (And some scientists would argue that some dinosaurs live to this day. These dinosaurs are technically known as "birds.")
- 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 variant 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.
  - The most intelligent dinosaur was less intelligent than a cat, and had intelligence comparable - surprise! - to a bird.
  - There are birds that are smarter than cats (parrots, crows) so that bit isn't really informative.
'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 the 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.
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.
- I'm more concerned as to why they have Egyptian, Roman and Wild West exhibits in a Natural History Museum. As well as a statue of Theodore Roosevelt.
  - There's a statue of Teddy because he well, "donated" many of the animal specimens. It's in front of the building.
Push has the lead character inject soy sauce directly in to his blood stream with no side effect at all.
Snakes On A Plane is a horrendous violator of biology, and even ignores rules which they mention within the film. The snakes are shown as shockingly aggressive, actively pursuing prey, whereas most snakes (including those shown in the film) are relatively sedentary; the snakes in the film bite repeatedly for no apparent reason, simply killing without eating the people or defending themselves, and then move to attack and kill other people who are neither a threat nor viable prey. The snakes are described as being so aggressive and violent because they are being stimulated by sexual pheromones, except that snakes are not praying mantids or black widows and do not kill their mates while they have sex, and in fact do not have sex at all. (At least not as humans have sex.) If snakes were to be brought into a violent frenzy when in the presence of sexual pheromones they would require separate pheromones for each individual species, and would be just as likely to attack each other as humans, as any other species would be as much of a threat/competition as the people would. Finally, when it comes to snake venom itself, one character correctly mentions that different snakes have different venom, all of which require a specific anti-venom depending on the species, but at the end one child is treated because another drew a picture of a cobra, instantly telling the doctor exactly what kind of anti-venom is needed, even though they had earlier made specific mention of different types of cobras. The film is not meant to be serious, it is simply filly fun, and the day is actually saved because one character knows Mortal Kombat, but the biology does not even deserve an "F;" it gets an "Incomplete" because it did not even show up to enough classes to qualify as a full-time student.
- Also, they could've just turned the heat down with the air conditioner.
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?
- Erm, magic? It is a dragon...
In Ice Age 2: The Meltdown, a young anteater is seen blowing bubbles in a pool of meltwater, by breathing out through its elongated snout and in through the mouth at its base. Real anteaters have tiny mouths, and they're located at the tips of their snouts, not underneath them. Keeping the end of its snout continuously submerged should've drowned it.
- Also, Scrat the proto-squirrel has huge saber-like canine teeth. Being rodents, squirrels — even prehistoric ones — don't have canines at all.
Any Christmas movie which shows female reindeer without antlers, or male reindeer retaining their antlers into December, Fails Biology Forever. Females of the species need antlers to guard their young from predators, whereas males shed theirs after the rutting season.
- Actually not true, males retain antlers in winter if they have a "special operation".
The Mission To Mars writers clearly had a lacking understanding of genetics. To start with, one of the characters constructs a model of a DNA molecule from supplied spacial coordinates, then Gary Sinise is able to look at a (very small) string of computer-generated DNA, and see that it "looks human." This is impossible, because a) you can't tell what species a sequence came from by looking at such a small sample and b) spacial coordinates that form a double helix say precisely jack shit about what bases (and, by extension, what genes) are contained in the DNA sequence. Then someone mentions it's missing "the last pair of chromosomes," when the simulation makes it readily apparent it's missing the last pair of bases. To top it all off, the coloring of the bases appear to suggest that a base pair is made up of two identical bases, which is just wrong.
A scene in the bad Canadian vampire B-movie Thralls features the lead villain vampire punch another man through his stomach, tear part of his spine out and show it to him as the now-spineless man merely stands there. And then, rather than break in half where his spine used to be... he just collapses. Wall Banger and then some.

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, blonds 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 hemophilia 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...)
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.
  - Those defects would include walking upright and speaking English. Not all animal characters are as realistic as Richard Adams's.
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".
- 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 relatively 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.
- 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?
  - There is a parody avatar that showed Hagrid's dad walking into what he thought was a cave, masturbated, and returned 9 months later to find a baby and the cave walking away.
- In-universe, the Weasleys probably deserve a You Fail Biology Forever prize for not noticing that rats only live two or three years, yet Scabbers had been around long enough to be Percy's school pet before Ron's.
- Why is it that the owls produce droppings instead of pellets?
  - Because "droppings" is a euphemism for all kinds of feces, liquid or solid, including pellets?
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?
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.
- Is it ever explicitly stated that Scarlet O'Hara is not an Elephant?
- Considering it was Melanie Wilkes who was pregnant...
In The Stand, the explanations given for the operation of the superflu virus are sketchy at best, and it seems highly unlikely that the disease would have resulted in such massive destruction. (Among other things, a plague is deadliest if it has a long incubation period, giving it maximum lead time in which to spread before the victim becomes too sick to move around.) Still, there aren't any obvious Wall Bangers... until the end. Up until this point, the superflu had been a binary proposition: Either you got it and died, or you didn't get it. At the end, however, a baby born to one immune and one non-immune parent gets the superflu and then recovers; which leads the thoughtful reader to ask, what the hell happened to the children of immune and non-immune parents born before the flu? As a bonus, the explanation given for how the baby recovered is a load of crap.
Even Shakespeare falls prey to this trope: the sexual joke beneath Malvolio's line 'These be her very C's, her U's and her T's, and thus makes she her great P's' falls flat for this Troper, because she doesn't; the urethra is where urine comes from, not the vagina.

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.)
  - There is some speculation that the Black Death may not have been bubonic plague, but the writers would have had to do more research, not less, to know about it.
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.
  - Never mind that particular slug's fate: shouldn't Starfleet have a rule against introducing species to an alien planet? For all they knew, the thing might've been acting ill because it was about to lay eggs. Bye bye, ecosystem...
  - Indeed, that seems a far more dangerous risk to primitive civilizations than any other contact.
- 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 colorless 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 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 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.
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.
- On The third episode of Season 3, a foreign leader requires a blood transfusion and has AB- blood type. Dr. Awesome is yelling is trying to find someone with AB- blood type; even though people with AB bloodtype can receive A, B, AB, and O blood types as long as they are negative.
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.
In Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicless' 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 Crying 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 statements of their bogus "experts" can be such Wall Bangers it makes you wonder 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 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.
Rachel on Friends was pregnant with Emma when Chandler and Monica got married in May of 2001. According to when they say she went on her maternity leave in season nine, she gave birth in late August or September of 2002. Making her pregnancy last around 16 months.
While The 4400 has one of the better explanations for how people get super powers (no reason is good because, well, they're superpowers) — well, the powers are gained by injecting neurotransmitters into the blood. That's not how neurotransmitters transmit...
- Especially annoying because they could have had it injected into the spinal column, or said it was a hormone that triggered the production of neurotransmitters; but no...
In a Battlestar Galactica episode (season 2, episode 13), the supposed genius Dr. Baltar heals president Roslyn's cancer by injecting her with some cylon/human hybrid blood that is more resistant to diseases because it has no antigens (which means it has bloodtype O) and therefore it has no blood type. Therefore it is somehow capable of destroying a cancer in a very late stage. Furthermore, cancer cells (or any other animal cell type) aren't cultivated in a petri dish and on agar, as it is shown on the pictures Dr. Baltar has, but are instead cultivated in cultivation flasks in a fluid.

"As far as I know I wasn't an egg. I don't believe human beings lay eggs do they?"

In Egypt, they started slaughtering pigs to stop the spread of swine flu (H1N1). Problem is, H1N1 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 H1N1 vaccine becomes available, the seasonal vaccine will no longer be used in favour of exclusively vaccinating for H1N1.
- Thankfully, 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 survivors are usually so only because of the laws of statistics.
- The gels that don't require water (they simply evaporate) usually use alcohol. Antibacterial "soap" usually uses triclosan or another active chemical, towards which resistance may conceivably build up. The discussion on this is fairly recent as well, corresponding with the recent popularity of such products.
  - The data that are available suggest that antibacterial soap is not that much better at disinfecting than regular soap, but that's not a knock against triclosan; most of the scaremongers forgot that regular old soap is an excellent disinfectant.
It's been said (and even reported in supposedly reputable newspapers) that redheads and blondes will disappear in favour of brunettes at some point because both hair colours are recessive conditions. This is not the case; google "Hardy-Weinberg principle" to find out why.
- The biggest wallbanger of this is that it's been trotted out to support "white rights". Does that make any sense to anyone?

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.
- How about the Kroot? Mostly blank DNA, and they evolve very rapidly by incorporating DNA from everything they eat into their genetic structure.
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.

Krogans are reptiles. Krogans have testicles. 4 of them. Look for balls on a snake. You'll see why this belongs.
- To be fair, they're aliens, so they don't really have to be the same. They're also not exactly reptiles, having evolved upon a differet planet. Also, this was just for WTF Squick value.
- Also snakes do have testicles, they are internal and not inside a scrotum like for some mammals. No one says the Krogan's are external either. Only that there's 4 of them.
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.
- 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.
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).
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.
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).
The Cure Virus in Ever17. Willing suspension of disbelief can take you 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, after all. 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). But is it a big enough deal for the devs to correct it? Not really.
- Elekk (a pseudo elephant mount) freakin' gallop. Come to think of it, so do the mammoths. Knee joints of adamantium!
- The wolf mounts, and by extension all wolf mobs using the worg model◊ run nothing like an actual wolf would run. Wolf mobs using the alternative wolf model◊ run pretty much properly, which makes you wonder how the developers managed to mess it up.
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.
- Actually, what was meant by "right" and "wrong" was that skipping millions of years of evolution isn't natural, and evolution should occur on its own time, hence, "having a worthy heart". Think "War of the Worlds".
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. And no, you can't be a homozygous recessive individual because the term is meaningless outside a breeding population.
- There's a theory that Ocelot and/or the Patriots were simply screwing with Liquid's head when they told him about the whole dominant/recessive thing - a theory backed by the fact that Ocelot later confesses to Solidus (who may well not be in on the deception) that Liquid was the dominant one and Solid the inferior. It's possibly he was also lying to Solidus. On the other hand, the theory's undermined by later revelations that Liquid and Solid are not perfect clones of Big Boss and that all three of the Les Enfantes Terribles should have been smart enough to figure out he was lying (unless they really know nothing about genetics).
- There's also the part where Liquid grossly misapplies Asymmetry Theory. Not to mention the guy whose body carries a charge of 10 million volts, the man who can't decide if his pet internal beehive is full of bees or hornets...

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 Ben 10, 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!
In King Of The Hill, during a visit to a mental hospital to bail out Boomhauer after he woke up in a downtown area from a tanning on a inner tube gone excessively long (and got arrested by a cop for indecent exposure), Dale Gribble was also accidentally admitted into the hospital after he proclaim to one of the doctors there that peanuts were evolving a defensive mechanism that is behind the peanut allergies of some people.
- When Bobby gets a summer job for a guy who cleans poop off lawns, 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!
- That's nothing. In The Legend Of The Titanic, dolphins even jump as high as the deck of Titanic and manage to float in the air for a short amount of time.
Justice League has a glaring biological failure serve as the key plot-point to a first-season episode. In Fury, Arisia attempts to wipe out all men on Earth with a deadly "allergen". Allergens are not contagious; different people (and different species) have different allergic reactions to the same substance. And crystals do not make something super-allergic!
The Marvelous Misadventures Of Flapjack plays with this with how medical practices were back in the day with Doctor Barber. One infamous quote from him is, "Silly Flapjack. The human body is a complex system of pulleys and counterweights, all working to manipulate the food hole."

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.
- This video humorously 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.
- Ray Comfort himself eventually confessed that the "banana argument" was a really bad move on his part.
  - He never said it was a bad argument, he said the militant atheist Commie Nazis had taken it out of context. The full argument consists of pointing out superficial similarities between a banana and a soda can - a variation of the (thoroughly debunked) watchmaker argument. When applied to life in general, it's a strawman because soda cans do not reproduce. When applied to the universe, it's a non sequitur because it implies a distinction between designed objects and natural ones.
- 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.
  - Not so much, no. "Risk factor" doesn't mean "absolute necessity". More Down Syndrome babies are born to younger mothers than to older ones, simply because there are many more babies in general born to younger mothers than to older ones. It's like people who think they'll never have a heart attack because they're not fat.
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.]
  - Dem Bones song found here (warning for sound)
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.
- Since you mentioned the terminology...a normal cell with the full number of chromosomes for its species is called a diploid. A sperm or egg cell is indeed called a gamete, but it is also called a haploid too. A zygote is formed when the gametes fuse.
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.
- This comment fails biology forever. Antibacterial gel contains alcohol, which is excellent at inactivating viruses. Antibacterial soaps also kill bacteria that can cause dangerous opportunistic infections in people who have the flu already. Saying they do "squat" is simply pandering to the mentality that all health warnings are scaremongering by neurotic weirdos. (Related to the mentality that the only people who matter are perfectly healthy young adults, and that anyone who isn't in that group "should go ahead and die already", as George Carlin famously said about people with life-threatening food allergies who minorly inconvenienced him.)
- Not to say that washing your hands isn't a good thing to do, it's very helpful. Just that antibacterial isn't any better than the normal stuff.
Common throughout Films, Live Action TV, and even occurring in Anime (*cough*Darker Than Black*cough*) is the misconception that a stopped heart can be restored with an electric shock. In reality, (good) doctors/EMTs/paramedics/what-have-you never shock during asystole (no heartbeat). A defibrillator shocks the heart in order to stop the heart when it's in an abnormal rhythm (such as ventricular fibrillation, when all the muscle cells in the heart are contracting to their own rhythm). This is done hoping that the heart will restart itself, and work correctly, similar to rebooting a Windows PC out of a BSOD.
- Note that the spoilered series involved supernatural powers; considering some of the other stuff the character in question can do (Super Empowering comes to mind) allowances can probably be made.
Any superstitious idiot who presumes that rhino horn would make a potent aphrodesiac doesn't know jack squat about rhinos. We're talking maybe once in three or four years, tops, because that's how long it takes a female to birth and raise a baby before she's ready to mate again.
- You Fail Culture Forever. They don't take rhino horn because they think rhinos have sex all the time: they know that's not the case. They take it because they're desperate and scared they'll be impotent forever, and they'll try anything. (The shape of the horn is another reason.) Fear is a great motivator.
Mister Seahorse in general. The fact that the relevant details can be found in its entry on the Body Horror page really says it all.

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