I never passed Biology class in high school. Until further notice I LITERALLY fail biology forever.

I see what you did there.

A buddy of mine had a terribly feminist professor who insisted that there was no difference between the sexes. He naturally raised the point of reproduction, and whether or not two women can produce a child without male assistance. Her response was "Maybe". This may be permitted, human parthenogenesis not being conclusively disproved and all that. He then asked whether two males can produce a child. Again, she said "Maybe". At that point he stopped asking questions and gave up entirely.

A female ex-classmate of mine was absolutely convinced that women are superior to men because a woman can have a baby by herself while a man cannot. When asked to provide an example, she replied "it happened once, about 2000 years ago."

It's a very good thing he didn't go into the average physical difference between the male and female brains then. People have got to learn it's about not expecting someone to be a certain way because of gender, not that we ignore differences. Just because the average woman is a certain way, doesn't mean that all women are a certain way. x.x

Well, considering trans people, it is very possible for two female-identified people to have a child or two male-identified people to have a child, but I might be reading too much into things.

Actually technically it is possible for two women to have a child read about it here because that was far better than I could describe it.

This troper's youth group leader (who otherwise seemed like a very nice person) made an aside one day during a discussion that said that music was the best argument he had ever heard against evolution and atheism because music has no evolutionary advantage an proves we have a soul.

Well, you can think of music as another form of showing worth to prospective mates. It's like our version of peacock feathers.

On the other hand, said troper had the great fortune to have an AP Biology teacher who was at the same time a fairly religious Baptist who spent an entire class period describing how the Biblical story of creation matches up perfectly with the scientific theory of evolution.

In the beginning, there was Darwin...

^The post above me is Made of Win.

This troper is not sure about a particular example. He remembers an anime movie involving an evil cancer monster which was once a little girl infected with cancer. The cancer grew out of control after she was put in hibernation and the girl became an evil fish thing with a penchant for attaching mecha parts to itself.

We get a good number of these over at {{FSTDT}}, most of which come from {{Conservapedia}}. (The owner must think science is anti-conservative.)

The thing is, you're not too far off with that guess. The wiki's page on its creator says almost that.

This troper remembers a quote from a Biology class... "[The greenhouse effect] is when it warms up. Therefore, when it warms up is the greenhouse effect. Examples: when it warms up."

This troper was once told by his entire class, ''including the teacher'', that sharks were mammals. They wouldn't hear anything to the contrary and it was severely depressing.

Sharks aren't mammals?

Whales are mammals. Sharks are fish.

Wait, I thought they were marsupials?

The same thing happened to me in fifth grade. My teacher was a complete idiot, though. When we learned about insects, we had a silly worksheet to fill out about the differences between a butterfly and Superman. One of my reasons was that Superman only had four limbs while a butterfly has six. She wrote a comment on my answer: "Do they have ''any''?"

This Troper's Human Biology Teacher is... well, a little strange. She's remarkably insistant on referring to reproduction as sex. Always. Even if she's refering to the high reproduction rate of single-celled organisms, she claims they "have sex all day." It's odd.

My mum and sister think dinosaurs are lizards, even when I have to tell them otherwise.

Seen on Facebook as an argument against homosexuality being genetic: "Genes are passed down from parents and well...gays don't have kids." Right, because recessive genes don't exist & no gay person has ever had a biological child with a beard spouse. Makes sense.

Although, with America and Canada's politics towards homosexuality changing massively over the last few decades, it makes sense that more gays will be coming out of the closest and never end up having children. A few generations and even the recessive genes could end up "going extinct" so to speak, and, well... That's only if homosexuality is genetic, of course, which I personally don't believe in, but it's interesting.

I don't claim to know whether it is or not; I was just pointing out the guy's complete misunderstanding of genetics.

It has been observed that promiscuous women have more homosexual male relatives than women who are not promiscuous, and an Italian biologist suggested that the two things are related. In other words: the same genes that make women more attracted to men, make men more attracted to men.

He seems to have a point. Homosexuality shouldn't be selected for, since it reduces the chance of one's genes being passed on to the next generation. The gene wouldn't die out after one generation, but it would die out after some time.

...couldn't it just be an exaggerated expression of whatever makes most people mildly to moderately bisexual? Or something like that?

There are actually interesting arguments that it does get selected for. Phenotypes aren't binary, after all, they're a combination of gene and environment (siamese cats for instance). It could be (not that I've researched it) that there's a gene that expresses when there's low availability of potential partners to make people comfortable with members of their own sex. There are certainly some advantages I could think of to part of a population being comfortable sexually and emotionally with their own sex.

This troper had a college professor who claimed that African-American women have greater variance in skin tones than African-American men because of the practice of white slave masters raping their female slaves. (In fairness she's a history professor, not a biology professor.)

There's an underclassman in our school's drama club who believes that men have periods. They're just called erections. He also believes that just the small intestine would be a mile long if it were stretched out.

Considering that your brain, if ''all'' the wrinkles were flattened out, would cover a tennis court, that claim, while false, is not entirely stupid.

This troper is part of a roleplay group in which one character had cancer. Due to some confusion, his player seemed to think that metastatic (tumours spread to different parts of the body than the origin), meant MIGRATORY, so said character's tumour actually MOVED AROUND his body, changing and having different symptoms as it encountered different organs. The amusement this caused the rest of us rather destroyed the angst of the scene. Granted, this was a sci-fi... but still...

This troper GM'd aforementioned game and thinks the answer is just as silly. It was time cancer.....

Too bad this was before May or Jun 2011. Then you could have had it move to the brain and give him Time Head.

Constantly mutating & shifting cancer? Did the character also have MediumAwareness?

My younger sister believes that some humans are "cold-blooded" meaning they are incredibly resistant to cold because of a low blood temperature or something, and that I must be that because I don't get cold easily.

This troper came across a fanfiction where somebody's spine was broken, before falling off of a cliff and getting away almost scott-free - save for partial blindness and deafness that HEALED using painkillers and the power of love. I deeply pity their science teacher.

In my college ecology laboratory class, the main assignment is an independent and original research project. We were looking at sample research proposals, both good and bad, from previous years. One of them include the line "Earthworms, which are bisexual organisms..."

My college Anthropology course had to do a lot of background in basic biology, and the teacher tried to compress the entire evolution of life, from the Precambrian to the Cenozoic, into one lecture period. This resulted in some real kickers. He went straight from flying reptiles to birds, although birds evolved from actual dinosaurs, not from small, flying reptiles that happened to be alive when the dinosaurs were. He also covered therapsids after the dinosaurs, making it appear as though they were a more recent development, although the Earth's surface was dominated by largish therapsids that mostly went extinct in one great disaster at the BEGINNING of the age of dinosaurs. He conflated this disaster with the one that wiped the dinosaurs out, and implied that true mammals did not evolve until the Cenozoic, when it's been known that small mammals existed throughout the Mesozoic since we still thought Apatosaurus snorkeled in swamps. Oh, and his slide projections were so out-of-date, there were illustrations of hadrosaurs with literal duck-bills, and Apatosaurus snorkeling in swamps. Again, this is a COLLEGE. SCIENCE. COURSE. Paleontology may not be his particular field of interest, but he should be able to get the basic timeline in order.

This troper saw a sign in a restaurant restroom reminding customers that drinking alcohol while pregnant is ill-advised and can cause birth defects, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, etc., so "if you are pregnant or trying to become pregnant, the wisest course is to avoid alcohol entirely." All pretty standard stuff, and it wouldn't seem like an example of this trope... until you realize that the sign was in the MEN'S restroom.

Well, seing as it's rather common for women to use the men's restroom, it could be seen as a rule of caution.

This Troper once overheard an argument between two girls on weather sharks were mammals or not. Make of that what you will.

I once taught a female, adult friend that we females do not urinate through our vaginas.

In this Troper's Biology class, while ''learning about genetics'', some guys asked me if somebody could get cancer by being injected with [=HeLa=] cells. Cue headdesk.

In another period of AP Biology, thankfully not mine, there was a girl who asked the teacher a question about whether we need two x chromosomes to survive. The teacher replied that was false since half of the people in the class were living despite lacking both. Not only was the question should have never been asked in the first place considering the contents were basic but also the males were the ones who went, "WHERE?!" Cue facepalm. If I were a guy, I would have been offended. It was amusing but pathetic.

This troper went to a Danish museum with a display of a whale shark, "the world's largest mammal." My head hurts.

Especially ironic since the worlds largest mammal (Blue whale) is about twice as large as a Whale Shark.

According to my Year 11 Biology teacher, cows eat mice. This wasn't the only gem she came out with, but it was certainly the most memorable. I went on to get an A in Biology. How does that work?

This troper got into an argument with a friend about whether or not dolphins are related to whales (I assured her that dolphins are, in fact, whales.) she supported herself with "Whales are mammals, dolphins are fish!" And when I said the contrary she Proclaimed "That's like saying sharks are fish!"

This troper had a boy in her class that insisted that her twin brother was her identical twin, because we both had brown hair and eyes, never mind the fact we are different genders. Yet again this was the same boy that believed that birds gave birth to live young and eggs were a type of fruit.