on the crap you used to know but shouldn't anymore...

[acroyear]

The Falsehoods : Greg Laden's Blog:

Biology is harder to learn than quantum physics. Why? Because most people think they totally get biology, but everyone knows nobody gets quantum physics. Therefore, any effort to explore quantum physics will result in new learning, but people rarely learn new biology. The bottom line is that our brains are full of biology, which would be good if most of it did not consist of falsehoods.
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The things that people know already often need to be removed from the brain prior to teaching new stuff. This may seem a little offensive to some, but really, it is easier to just admit it. I'm not saying that everything I might ever tell you about evolutionary biology, for instance, is necessarily true and correct, but in most cases (unless you are an evolutionary biologist) it will be more on the mark than the stuff you learned in Kindergarten or the stuff you learned by simply absorbing the information in which we are all steeped, daily. Personal experience and the nature of the media dumbly conspire to prepare students to fully misunderstand even the most basic concepts in evolutionary biology. These things ... the things taking up valuable brain space but that deserve no place in your grey matter ... are The Falsehoods.

Comments

[ren-tigger.livejournal.com]

Seems to me that applies significantly to history, as I am sure you know from WHERE we know one another.

When I did my rather lengthy university studies into writing my novel length paper on what I affectionately titled "Medieval Misconceptions." I was blown away by how many beliefs of mine, common beliefs were totally wrong!!

Now it is all about fact checking and double checking, etc.. so I can totally see the same false beliefs when it comes to biology. And I totally agree on the concept on why it is harder to learn, cuz ya usually gotta start over, and most people don't feel like it.