Artistic License Biology: Difference between revisions
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== Advertising ==
* In an [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMoRw8IKcvk 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. It's said that porcupines can shoot their
* 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 [[wikipedia:Dactyly#Zygodactyly|zygodactyl]] feet.
* There's the "oxygenated water" thing. Drinking water with more oxygen packed into it is good for you, right? Well, only if you had fish gills in your stomach. If you stomach and intestines could perform that sort of gas exchange, Coke and Pepsi with their carbon dioxide would be deadly poison. Lungs do that function excellently, thank you.
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** A turtle which ''flies'' by flapping its ''fins''. Of course that's pure [[Rule of Cool]] in effect.
* ''[[Axis Powers Hetalia]]'''s most prominent female character Hungary used to think she was a boy. And she thought that penises grow as you age, which would "explain" her...lack of one. ''And'' she laughed at Prussia for "not knowing."
* [[Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle]] features, to make a long [[Mind Screw]] short, a [[My Own Grampa]] situation<ref>
* The masters in [[Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple]] didn't fail biology. Biology failed them.
* [[Handwaved]] in ''[[Digimon]]'', anything impossible that a Digimon (or the Digital World) does is explained away by saying "they're just data".
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* 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: their joining was so minor (both had full limbs and organs), any sane doctor would have separated them at birth - not to mention the fact that conjoined twins are identical and not fraternal and would therefore [[Critical Research Failure|necessarily be of the same sex]]. Of course, this being ''Buffy'' (and as such, anything can happen), [[A Wizard Did It|a wizard probably did it]].
* 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? Probably both) in his first ''Astonishing X-Men'' story, people at Scans Daily pointed out that genetics don't work that way. Ellis admitted his mistake.
* When Ellis wrote ''Iron Man: Extremis'', he explained the eponymous magic bullet (a single injection which would turn ordinary mortals into supermen) as a "Data package contained in a few million carbon nanotubes, injected directly into the brain". The information package would then rewrite the repair center in the
* ''[http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1593 How to tell the birds from the flowers]. A manual of [[Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot|flornithology]] for beginners'' by R.W.Wood parodied semiliterate "botanics" books:
{{quote|Some are unable, as you know,
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* [[Mister Seahorse|MPreg fics]]. Sometimes [[Hand Wave|hand waved]] by [[A Wizard Did It]] sometimes...not. The so called real biological justifications range from [[Squick|babies delivered anally]] to the character having a uterus. The latter example ignores the lack of ovaries, fallopian tubes, a menstrual cycle or any relevant opening with which to eject the baby. There's [[You Fail Biology Forever]] and then, there's this.
* The ''Digimon'' fanfic ''Red Digivice Diaries'' fails in two ways. First is, when Digimon have sex, the male grows a penis. Seriously, WTF? Second example is that Digimon don't give live birth. Instead, they have digitams develop and give birth to that.
* There is one Harry Potter fanfic that places Draco's penis at a minimum of ''forty-two inches long''.<ref>
** Not to mention that he'd have it [[Groin Attack|dragging against the ground]] [[Nightmare Fuel|wherever he goes]]. And he better be asexual, or else he's going to live a life of forced celibacy, or have to romance giantesses.
*** [[Wild Mass Guessing|So he travelled back in time and fathered Hagrid!]]
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* In ''[[Mystery Science Theater 3000|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. Also, algae are not "aquatic plants". They're algae.
* ''[[Jurassic Park]]'' contains a few:
** One character who is supposed to be a [[Somewhere a Paleontologist Is Crying|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 65 million years (and most paleontologists would argue that some dinosaurs live to this
** 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''.
** 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 [[Rule of Cool|artistic license]].
*** The misidentification of ''Velociraptor'' was actually due to [[Science Marches On]]
** The entire premise of the movie (and the book) fails. If the amber-preserved blood was any more than 1 million years old, the DNA would have been irrecoverably decomposed, no matter what it was preserved in. Cloning extinct species from before 1 million years ago is impossible.
*** And even if the DNA were available, we have absolutely no idea how to turn that DNA into a viable dinosaur egg. You'd need complete information about how the oviducts of that particular species operated even to get started, and we don't even have any fossils of dinosaur oviducts, let alone a clue as to their gestational duration, average internal temperature, etc.
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** The Burmese python practically growls and flashes fang like an aggressive dog. Then it manages to kill the [[Jerkass]] in moments, when in reality it would take much longer even if the guy had a heart attack almost immediately. Finally, the python has no problem getting human shoulders down its throat. A real python would need a few moments to unhinge and stretch out its jaw, and then would probably need some time to properly position a meal that wide. Assuming a snake that size could get its head over an adult male's shoulders in the first place; even most potentially man-eating snakes will have trouble consuming a large person. Yes, there were time constraints, but still. At least the python seems to still have been working on its meal when the poor thing got sucked out the window.
* Going past all of the usual dragon examples that would apply to the beast from ''[[Beowulf (film)|Beowulf]]'' (like wingspan), how does a heart that can fit in a man's fist pump blood through the body of a [[Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever|seventy foot long]] [[If It Swims, It Flies|flying and swimming]] reptile? Never mind that a heart in the neck protected by tracing paper is a bad idea anyway. Blocking the trachea and being easily rip-outtable are not desirable traits in a heart. Although being the product of a gold thing and a human you can hardly expect it to have evolved properly...
* 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,
** The authors have said in an interview that it was [[Played for Laughs]]. Later crosses into [[Accidentally Accurate]] since [http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/11/03/141997834/scientists-unveil-fossil-of-saber-toothed-squirrel-that-lived-among-dinos a recently discovered prehistoric mammal was indeed squirrel-like], [[Science Marches On|and did indeed have fangs]]. It was not a rodent though, and lived in the ''Mesozoic'', not in the Cenozoic, much less the last ice age.
* 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, with one exception: males retain antlers in winter if they have a "special operation".
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* ''[[The Reaping]]'': Members of the [[Religion of Evil|Satanic cult]] sacrifice all their children to Satan, except for the firstborn, who are inducted into the cult, [[You Fail Biology Forever|to ensure the cult itself can survive]]. In reality, you would need (on average) two offspring to survive (and reproduce) per couple just for the population to remain stable. Even if the cultists recruit outsiders to marry the kids they don't sacrifice, attrition would still wipe them out, as some of each generation are likely to die, fail to reproduce at all, or leave the cult.
* [[James Cameron]]'s ''[[Avatar (film)|Avatar]]'' has some [[Taxonomic Term Confusion]].
* ''[[Piranha 3D]]'' contains an idea so [[
* While most of the less-than-realistic aspects of the [[Godzilla]] films can be attributed to [[Rule of Cool]] and/or [[Rule of Funny]], there's a scene in the 1993 version of ''Godzilla VS Mechagodzilla'' in which one of the human characters feeds Baby Godzilla a leaf. This would be fine and dandy, if Godzilla's species wasn't already established to be carnivorous (Godzillasaurus pretty much looks like a jumbo-sized T. rex) and that Baby Godzilla clearly has teeth better suited for tearing apart flesh rather than munching on veggies.
** The 1998 American Remake ''constantly'' showed Zilla running at a rather high speed. People, there's a '''very''' good reason why very large animals (IE: Elephants, Apatasaurus, Tyrannosaurus, etc.) don't move fast (or don't run very often). To put it nicely, if Zilla were to trip while running that fast, he'd pretty much ''splatter'' all over the pavement when he fell.
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* 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.
* ''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. 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 [[Watership Down|Richard Adams]]'s.
* In Susan Collins' first novel in ''[[The Hunger Games (novel)|The Hunger Games]]'' trilogy, there are birds called jabberjays that were created by man to spy on people and relay their conversations to the Capitol. Fine and dandy. But then they (exclusively males) are left to die out after they are discovered; they then mate with female mockingbirds,
* 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 eponymous 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.)
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** A mouse the size of a domestic cat would have problems with that anyway. It's moot for purposes of the story.
* Medb, Queen of Connacht, from ''[[Táin Bó Cúailnge|Tain Bo Cuailnge]]'', is defeated because her period saps the strength of her army. In itself, that's pretty bad, but more for its [[Unfortunate Implications]]. The biology fail comes about because her period makes her ''piss'' blood. [[Squick|Enough to flood three parade grounds in fact.]]
* In [[Madeleine L'Engle]]'s ''[[A Swiftly Tilting Planet]]'', all of the good and significant descendants of Madoc, the good Welsh prince who sailed to America, went native, and married a Native American woman of a tribe called the Wind People, have deep blue
* [[Stephenie Meyer]]'s ''[[Twilight (novel)|Breaking Dawn]]''. Vampires don't have any blood in their tissues, so Edward shouldn't be able to get an erection in the first place. Also, Meyer has said that Vampires' cells don't divide, but sperm is created by a type of mitosis called meiosis, which means that Vampire men shouldn't be able to get women pregnant repeatedly a la Nahuel's father.
** Not to mention, Vampire venom at one point was stated to replace all fluids in the body which is why it turns into a sparkly rock like substance. If you follow that logic, his sperm should have been replaced. So basically, the first time they had sex and he orgasmed... she should have become a vampire instead of becoming pregnant.
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*** You think that would [[Shmuck Bait|actually]] [[Too Dumb to Live|stop them]]?
* The Marquis de Sade's [[Salo Or The 120 Days Of Sodom|120 Days of Sodom]] briefly mentions a man who has sex with a goat. This causes the goat to give birth to a [[Half-Human Hybrid|monster]] (which [[Crosses the Line Twice|he also has sex with]]).
* [[Michael Crichton]]'s novel ''[[Sphere]]'' has quite a few. The squid might get a pass for being an alien manifestation, although the biologist should know better than to believe that a normal squid could tear a metal structure to pieces. More flagrantly and not given a pass by the [[Rule of Cool]], same biologist sees a seasnake and finds it perfectly normal to see one 1,000
* In ''[[The Sword of Truth]]'' Richard rips out his evil half-brother Drefan's spine with his [[Super Strength|bare hands]]. Drefan proceeds to keep fighting. There's some attempt to justify this by explaining he knows a (''non-magical'') technique that he used to stop the blood loss, but that doesn't do much to address the fact that it is now ''physically impossible'' for him to control his legs.
** He was stated to lean up against a waist high wall. I got the impression he managed to raise himself into a sitting position.
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* Played straight and averted in Christopher Paolini's [[Inheritance Cycle]]. At one point, the [[Big Bad]] sends [[Implacable Man|soldiers who are immune to pain]]. This seems to endow the soldiers with cockroach-like resilience, with them surviving hideous trauma and even being able to move despite cut tendons and broken limbs. One takes dozens of arrows and still has to be beheaded. In reality, the injuries would kill them despite an immunity to pain. Averted in ''Inheritance'', where the irradiated Vroengard is full of mutants, suggesting Hollywood nuclear physics, but it is in fact a magical effect.
* In ''[[The Millenium Trilogy|The Girl Who Played with Fire]]'', Ronald Niedermann is a 6'6" musclebound blonde giant, who has a disease which renders him unable to feel pain. The book even mentions that most people who have this disease die at a young age, but then hand waves it away by saying he's just too tough to die. This is, of course, not how it works. Normal life is dangerous enough for people with this affliction, but this character was an amateur boxer and gets in several fistfights over the course of the book. One untreated injury could conceivably kill him, most notably when he takes a full-strength punch to the kidneys from a pro boxer. But even before that, the kind of muscular frame he has cannot be maintained without weight training, which would be catastrophic without pain sensors to determine one's limits.
* In the original novel version of [[Frankenstein]], Victor worries that if his monster had a female monster to mate with, they would produce monster babies. That would be all fine and dandy if the monsters weren't made from reanimated human flesh, almost guaranteeing them both to be infertile. Even if by some miracle, they were able to conceive, any child of the two of them would in fact be human, biologically descended from whoever the monsters' reproductive organs came from
Like the Sherlock Holmes example above, this is also actually a case of [[Science Marches On]]. The original novel was published twenty years before Schwann and Schielden founded cell theory, and almost fifty years before Pasteur definitively disproved abiogenesis. In fact, the most exciting discovery of the time was the effect of electrostimulation in disembodied muscle tissue, so the story of a creature made from dead human material reanimated by lightning was as grounded in modern science (in 1818) as literature about sentient computers is today.
** Although there is no reference to Victor's using lightening. There is a single reference to the "apparatus of life".
* According to his backstory from ''[[James and the Giant Peach]]'', James Henry Trotter's parents were eaten alive by an [[Rhino Rampage|escaped zoo rhinoceros]]. In real life, rhinos are supposed to be ''herbivores''. Fortunately, the film adaptation averted this by changing said rhino from an actual rhinoceros to a large [[Nightmare Fuel|rhinoceros-shaped demon made entirely out of thunderclouds.]]
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{{quote|'''Spencer:''' Do girls ''have'' bladders?}}
* Too many ''[[Star Trek]]'' episodes to name (some are covered on the subtrope pages).
** 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
** ''[[Star Trek: Voyager|Voyager]]''
*** In the 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...
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*** 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 was actually explained in a novella that twin and triplet births were extremely common among Ocampans, so it depends how you look at it.
** The ''[[Star Trek: The Next Generation|TNG]]'' episode "Genesis" was on a par with "Threshold"
*** Data devolving into a pocket calculator would have made more sense.
*** a) ''Threshold'' didn't say that evolution was fixed, it just posited that it (change) could be severely (and randomly) accelerated in certain circumstances. Paris' random allergic reactions and physiological changes had nothing to do with evolution, which takes place over time and hundreds of generations. This is sci-fi, so concepts such as genes being forced into flux are par for the course. b) ALL life is related. DNA is the blueprint, the programming lanaguage. The episode was dealing with a 'what if' - namely, what if that language could be distorted and partially rewritten?
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* On Discovery Channel's ''I Shouldn't Be Alive'', the narrator explain the effects of hypothermia on human cells, using the term "cell walls", in one episode (and is sure they have used it other times). Animals do not have cell walls (in fact, Animalia is the only kingdom where they are totally absent). Yes, they probably just don't want to explain what a cell membrane is/[[Viewers are Morons|assume the audience won't understand the explanation]], so they use a term the audience will know. Considering Discovery's association with fact and science, it seems like they would be willing to spend an extra ten seconds quickly explaining what it is.
* On one episode of ''[[Charmed]]'' two characters performing an autopsy in the coroner's office both appear to believe that a woman with "high levels of testosterone" in her bloodstream is a biological anomaly, rather than a statistical outlier. "Testosterone? How's that even possible?" It's as if the writers believed that women normally have no testosterone in their bodies at all (in actuality, they do, and some have more of it than others).
* ''[[Life After People]]'' just lapsed into this trope, showing footage of ''Volvox'' and ''Paramecium''
* Cryptid-buffs on ''Monster Quest'' attempted to catch photos of Bigfoot, baiting camera-traps with smelly chunks of salmon. If Bigfoot is alleged to be a great ape, why assume it would use smell to find food, or consider fish edible? Apes are mainly vegetarians, the species that do eat meat don't scavenge it, and their sense of smell is only slightly better than our own. Brightly-colored fruit would seem the better ape-attracting food to offer.
** Except for those apes that are ''omnivorous'' and HUNT, humans and Chimpanzees being two examples.
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** Could all be handwaved in one of three ways: 1) The TARDIS doesn't give a literal translation of the Doctor's biobabble, it instead renders something the companions can understand, even if it's wrong. 2) The Alien physiology/technology in question could work differently from our understanding. 3) The Doctor makes it up cause it sounds cool.
* The spin-off ''[[Torchwood]]'' has a character ask if Weevils might be mutating and thus becoming immune to the Weevil spray. So far so good. Then the [[Battle Butler]] adds "or evolving".
* A Korean drama special entitled ''Last Flashman'' has a girl find out a shocking birth secret (that she's an alien or something) because she has blood type O but both her parents have type A. Most of the people are shocked and confused and maintain strongly that it's impossible to have blood type O from A parents. This is biologically wrong, since having O blood type with A parents are perfectly
* In an episode of ''[[Fringe]]'', the [[Monster of the Week]] is a fast-moving, foot-long slug that turns out to be an engineered ''cold virus''. Walter attempts to [[Hand Wave]] this by stating that it isn't entirely unprecedented since large ostrich eggs are single cells. Except viruses aren't cells. Cold viruses are strands of genomic DNA contained inside of a protein coat, and entirely unable to move under their own power. Saying that it was a "giant" cold virus makes as much sense as a "giant" hemoglobin molecule.
** Wait, wait, wait. Ostrich eggs are single cells now? [[Mystery Science Theater 3000|You're not a real scientist, are you?]]
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** In ''[[Stargate Atlantis]]'' Dr. Becket concludes that the Wraith evolved from the Aratis bug by using every trope in the biology book. The DNA of the Aratis bug mixed with human DNA, and because parasites are normally identical to hosts they feed from, the Wraith were born.
* ''[[Glee]]'' has had several in-universe examples:
** Early on, Puck claims that women do not have prostates, but [[wikipedia:Skene
*** Was the "woman technically have prostates" claim presented in universe? Because if so, that's some massive biology fail right there: just because Skene's glands are homologous to prostates does not actually make them prostates.
** Finn was persuaded that he had impregnated Quinn by ejaculating into a hot tub they were sharing, while both of them were wearing bathing suits.
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* ''[[Metal Gear Solid]]'':
** The whole business 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. And no, you can't be a homozygous recessive individual because the term is meaningless outside a breeding population.
** There's also the part where Liquid grossly misapplies Asymmetry Theory. His ramblings just make it seem like the writers had at some point heard of the biology/genetic concepts mentioned, but didn't actually bother to look into them any real way.<ref>[[Word of God]] is that Liquid, personally, has no grasp of how genetics works, and was deliberately taught wrong just to wind him up and make him driven</ref>
* In the Director's Cut edition of ''Scratches'', the brief sequel/epilogue reveals that {{spoiler|the mother of the game's [[Bertha in The Attic]] had been taking thalidomide, presumably accounting for her child's deformities. But thalidomide is specifically responsible for phocomelia, a birth defect in which the limbs are underdeveloped and flipper-like. This game's Bertha may be grotesque, but he's ''not'' a phocomeliac, and wouldn't be very scary if he were.}}
* Oddly, ''[[Pokémon]]'' has an example of this. Several of Cubone's Pokédex entries state that it wears the skull of its mother. Every Cubone encountered has a skull on its face, which means that EVERY SINGLE Cubone commits matricide (or its mother just dies) shortly after birth and each female Marowak/Cubone can only have one child. The species should have either died out or have rapidly dwindling numbers at this point.
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* In ''[[Kit N Kay Boodle]]'', most of the biological oddities can be put down to creative license. However, Skamm (the current antagonist) and his male love interest are supposed to be [http://images.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&source=hp&q=ridge+ tail+monitor&gbv=2&aq=0s&oq=ridgetail ridgetail monitors]. The external genitals and hair are par for the course in a furry comic, but they also have external ears. Combine this with the fact that Skamm's a lawyer and it's impossible to think of him as being anything other than a weasel.
* As referenced above, [[Metal Gear Solid|Liquid Snake's]] appalling grasp of biology is repeatedly referenced and mocked in [[The Last Days of Foxhound]]. It actually explains that the entire dominant / recessive genes thing was complete rubbish, and that Liquid was told he was the inferior one as a part of installing a massive inferiority complex in him, so he'd constantly keep on pushing himself to do better. And then it turns out to be a [[Double Subversion]], because Big Boss explains that it was actually Solid that got all the "recessive genes." It isn't just Liquid's grasp of genetics; it's Hideo Kojima's that's so hilariously wrong.
* ''[[Ménage à 3]]'': DiDi's breasts literally defy the laws of both biology and
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* In ''[[Survival of the Fittest]]'', during V1 in particular, there were examples of writers who decided to eschew any pretence of realism in their kills. Later versions have done their best to avert this. A particularly...[http://z10.invisionfree.com/SurvivalOfTheFittest/index.php?showtopic=425 interesting example.]
* [[Rule of Funny|Played for laughs]] by ''[[Cracked.com]]'': "It's like every single AC/DC album cover came to life and punched your eyeballs right in the dick." Read more: [http://www.cracked.com/blog/7-images-too-badass-to-be-real-that-totally-are/ 7 Images Too Badass To Be Real (That Totally Are)]
* Keith Thompson's [http://www.keiththompsonart.com/pages/ghoul.html Ghoul] seems to depict [[wikipedia:Kuru
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* Done in one ''[[The Fairly Odd Parents|Fairly OddParents]]'' episode where Timmy Turner's Dad's first time on the [[Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?]] spoof, "Are You Brighter Than A 6th Grader" had him answer "Sea Cucumber" to nearly all the questions until the last one, "What Kind of Cucumber Lives In The Sea" prompting him to say the wrong answer. Forcing himself to re-attend school, Timmy's dad retakes the competition and goes on a roll until the last question, "which sea vegetable would suit perfectly on an undersea salad", causes him to hesitate until he find it in himself to say the right answer. In spite of the name, sea cucumbers are NOT cucumbers or vegetables in general, but animals - specifically echinoderms, like starfish.
** REGULAR Cucumbers aren't technically vegetables, even.
* Combine that with [[Artistic License History]]: In [[Rankin/Bass Productions]]' ''The Easter Bunny Is Comin' to Town'', one music segment has the [[Everything's Better with Chickens|chickens]] tell a story [[Big Lipped Alligator Moment|in a song]] that makes fun of the riddle of "chicken or the egg": They explain that "the chicken came first" by retelling [[The Bible]] story of [[The Great Flood|Noah's Ark]], and comparing the riddle to who came first: "[[Mother Goose|the pussycat or the fiddle]]", "the [[wikipedia:Fountain of Youth|Fountain]] or [[wikipedia:Juan Ponce de
* 1973/74 ''[[Superfriends]]'' episode "The Watermen''. When the title aliens extract silicon from sea water, it causes the sea water to immediately turn into [[wikipedia:Red tide|red tide]]. Just one problem: red tide is caused by microorganisms, not a lack of silicon. This is Lampshaded when Professor Matey notes that it should be impossible.
* Among the many errors regarding animal physiology and behavior, one the more minor in [[Hero 108]] is the Deer King and his men, who neigh, grunt, and whinny like horses even though deer in real life make noises more like they have kazoos stuck in their throats http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=[[Xa Ph Vc Ldz 4 M]]&feature=fvwrel or barking http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EWzg4eiJnM&feature=related
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* 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 all but one of its own authors (and the one lost his medical license) and the medical journal that published it. 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. This belief resonates deeper than most people realize. Many of the "vaccines cause autism" crowd are convinced that the skeptics want to go back to the old days, when mothers were blamed for making their kids autistic by [[Evil Matriarch|being too cold]]. The skeptics don't even begin to recognize what's going on and assume the anti-vaccine crowd is just a bunch of irrational idiots, when in reality they're simply terrified beyond words that we'll go back to the "women are evil ice bitch monsters who destroy little boys" days.
** Similarly, the "refrigerator mother" theory was popular from about the 1950s through the 1970s, after which it fell out of favor, though there are still a few die-hard proponents. The scientific consensus for the last generation or so has leaned strongly towards autism being primarily genetic in origin.
* The common misconceptions about
** ''If Americans descended from Europeans then why are there still Europeans?!''
* [[Ray Comfort]] was filmed in [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfv-Qn1M58I 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 [http://www.expatintaiwan.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/wild-banana.jpg a small, turd-shaped fruit filled with huge seeds and little in the way of edible pulp.]
** [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0n0TK_dx-Y This video] humorously debunks Comfort's original claim by comparing the 'designed' banana with another fruit that God presumably also
* Similarly billed as "the atheist's nightmare" is an [[Narm|unintentionally hilarious]] creationist video in which they talk about how, if evolution was correct, you'd see life coming...[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZFG5PKw504 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. Particularly hilarious is the fact that just before the jar is opened, Chuck tilts it below the camera, apparently checking to make sure that life has ''not'' been spontaneously generated before he continues his point. Classic. That and what they're discussing is actually the theory of abiogenesis, not evolution, and just to add insult to injury, even if we assume Chuck's premise to be 100% valid (that occasionally jars of peanut butter should spontaneously generate new life) the assumption that unaided visual inspection of the jar's contents is sufficient to show that this has not occurred is ridiculous.
** [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VauSPWbOin0&feature=player_embedded The logical counterpoint].
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** And then there's [http://www.naturalworlds.org/thylacine/introducing/what_is_thylacine_1.htm thylacine], also known as the Tasmanian wolf and Tasmanian tiger. It's a marsupial, but the niche it filled was a nearly perfect mix of available prey, environmental issues, and so on. The niche was one similar to many canine predators, such as the wolf, so as the species evolved it looked more like canines, leading occasionally to somewhat understandable confusion over classifying it to this day amongst people who only see a skeleton or the like.
* According to legend, one night the students of [[wikipedia:Baron Cuvier|Baron Cuvier]] (one of the founders of modern paleontology and comparative anatomy) decided to play a trick on their instructor. They fashioned a medley of skins, skulls and other animal parts (including the head and legs of a deer) into a credibly monstrous costume. One brave fellow then donned the chimeric assemblage, crept into the Baron's bedroom when he was asleep and growled "Cuvier, wake up! I am going to eat you!" Cuvier woke up, took one look at the deer parts that formed part of the costume and sniffed "Impossible! You have horns and hooves (and are therefore not not a predator.)" The prank is more commonly reported as: "Cuvier, wake up! I am the Devil! I am going to eat you!" His response was "Divided hoof; graminivorous! It cannot be done." Apparently Satan is vegan.
* Minor but
* Due to the wording of a certain Florida bestiality law, [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/11/floridas-bestiality-law_n_860836.html#s277667&title=Dave_Grossman sex may have been outlawed all together.]
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3eUVjnhs1c This video] shows Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains in a public debate with some rather interpretive ideas about fetal development. Doubles as a case of failing sex ed forever.
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[[Category:Biology Tropes]]
[[Category:Tropes On Science and Unscience]]
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[[Category:Artistic License Biology]]
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