List of common misconceptions

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This list of common or popular misconceptions details various ideas described by multiple reliable sources as widely held, but which are false, misleading or otherwise flawed.

History

The Americas

• Christopher Columbus's efforts to obtain support for his voyages were not hampered by a European belief in a flat Earth. In fact, sailors and navigators of the time knew that the Earth was spherical, but (correctly) disagreed with Columbus' estimates of the distance to India (see Flat Earth). If the Americas did not exist, and had Columbus continued to India (even putting aside the threat of mutiny he was under), he would have run out of supplies before reaching it at the rate he was traveling. The intellectual class had known that the earth was spherical since Ancient Greece.
• Paul Revere was not the only American colonist who rode to warn the Minute Men of the British before the battle of Lexington and Concord of the American Revolutionary War. The story of Paul Revere is largely based on the poem "Paul Revere's Ride", written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1860 (see Paul Revere's Ride).
• George Washington did not have wooden teeth. According to a study of Washington's four known dentures performed by a forensic anthropologist from the University of Pittsburgh (in collaboration with the National Museum of Dentistry, itself associated with the Smithsonian Museum), the dentures were made of gold, hippopotamus ivory, lead, human and animal teeth (including horse and donkey teeth).
• Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation did not immediately free all American slaves, just warned the slaves will be freed in rebelling states on January 1. Since rebelling states did not recognize the power of the Federal government, few slaves were freed as a result of the Proclamation. Regions in the South that were under Union control when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued were not affected by it. These regions were: Tennessee, southern Louisiana, and parts of Virginia. The Thirteenth Amendment officially abolished slavery in all of the United States.
• The Pilgrims did not dress only in black, nor did they have buckles on their hats or shoes.
• Cinco de Mayo (May 5) is not Mexico's Independence Day. It is a regional holiday primarily celebrated in the state of Puebla, and commemorates the Mexican victory over the French in the Battle of Puebla. Mexico's Independence Day is on September 16.
• U.S. president William Henry Harrison did give a three-hour inauguration speech on March 4, 1841, with his jacket off during a wintry day, but he did not catch pneumonia or a cold that day. The pneumonia-like symptoms that eventually killed him April 4 began March 26, three weeks after his speech.

Europe

Napoleon on the Bellerophon, a painting by Charles Lock Eastlake depicting Napoleon Bonaparte, who was taller than his nickname may suggest

• Napoleon Bonaparte (pictured) was not especially short. After his death in 1821, the French emperor's height was recorded as 5 feet 2 inches in French feet. This corresponds to 5 feet 6.5 inches in modern international feet, or 1.686 metres, making him slightly taller than an average Frenchman of the 19th century. The metric system was introduced during his lifetime, so it was natural that he would be measured in feet and inches for much of his life. His nickname was "le petit caporal." There are competing explanations for why he was called this, but few modern scholars believe it referred to his stature.
• Italian dictator Benito Mussolini did not make the trains run on time. Much of the repair work had been performed before Mussolini and the Fascists came to power in 1922. Accounts from the era also suggest that the Italian railways' legendary adherence to timetables was more myth than reality.
• Vikings wore helmets, but not the horned helmets often depicted in media (Viking Helmet from Gjermundbu); horned helmets were used in Celtic religious rituals, but are unsuited for combat, the horns easily catching on weapons – the imagery of horned Vikings is believed to come from 19th century Scandinavism, a romantic nationalist movement. Nor did they drink from skull cups.
• Queen Marie Antoinette was not the first woman to whom the sentence "Let them eat cake" was ascribed. The phrase is first found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, of 1770, when Marie-Antoinette was fourteen (prior to marriage or revolution). Countess Madame de Boigne recalls in her memoirs that Madame Victoire was a woman of "very little wit and extreme kindness. It was she who said, her eyes full of tears, in a time of famine when one spoke of the suffering of the unfortunates who lacked bread: But, my God, if they would only resign themselves to eating paté crust!"
• During World War II, King Christian X of Denmark did not thwart Nazi attempts to identify Jews by wearing a yellow star himself. Jews in Denmark were never forced to wear the Star of David. The Danes did help most Jews flee the country before the end of the war.
• Adolf Hitler was not elected Chancellor of Germany in 1933. Germany under the Weimar Republic had a parliamentary system and it was only possible to vote in the general elections for candidates for the Reichstag; Chancellor was not an elective office. Hitler was appointed as Chancellor in January 1933 by the President, Paul von Hindenburg, after Hitler's Nazi Party won some 33% of the seats in the election of November 1932. The Nazi plurality increased to roughly 44% after another election held in March 1933, but the Nazis never secured a majority of the votes cast in any free and fair election. Hitler did run against Hindenburg for the office of President in 1932, and lost, Hindenburg gaining an absolute majority.

Politics

• Although many young people in the 1960s were actively opposed to the Vietnam war, evidence from opinion polling in the United States showed consistently that younger people were more likely to support sending US troops to Vietnam than were older people. A Gallup poll in March 1966 found that 21% of Americans in their 20s thought the US made a mistake sending troops, which rose to 30% of those over 50. Four years later the percentages had risen to 49% of those in their 20s (a statistical dead heat with supporters), but 61% of those over 50 (a clear majority regarding the war as a mistake).
• Al Gore never said he invented the Internet, though he did state that "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet"(emphasis added). Gore was the original drafter of the High Performance Computing Act of 1991, which provided significant funding for supercomputing centers, and this in turn led to upgrades of the Internet's precursor, the NSFNet, and development of NCSA Mosaic, the browser that popularized the World Wide Web; see Al Gore and information technology#Vice President and Information Superhighway.

Cooking

• Searing meat does not "seal in" moisture, and in fact may actually cause meat to lose moisture. Rather, meat is seared to create a brown crust and to add a rich flavor via the Maillard reaction.
• Mussels that do not open when cooked can still be fully cooked and safe to eat.
• All true teas, including black, green, and white teas, come from the Camellia sinensis plant, but herbal teas with no relation to the tea plant, such as those made from chamomile, peppermint, or rooibos, can also be referred to as "tea". Sometimes it is claimed that there is a common misconception to the effect that herbal teas contain tea in the strict sense of the word.
• Some cooks believe alcohol evaporates quickly when heated. However, it takes 3 hours or longer to dissipate or 'burn off' all the alcohol.
• It is a common misconception that Sushi is raw fish. In fact, the proper Japanese term for that would be sashimi. The term "sushi" actually refers to the way the rice is prepared with a vinegared dressing. Toppings for the rice may traditionally include raw fish but also cooked seafood or vegetarian toppings.

Law

• Entrapment law in the United States does not forbid police officers from going undercover, or from denying that they are police. It is a common misconception among persons engaged in low-level crime that if an undercover police officer is asked, "Are you a cop?" that the officer must reveal his identity to avoid an entrapment defense.
• When a person is arrested in the United States, there is no legal requirement that the police must "read him his rights" (i.e. give a Miranda warning), either at the time of arrest or anytime thereafter. The failure to give the warning will merely preclude the prosecution from using a confession (or other incriminatory statement) against the defendant; it will not preclude the criminal prosecution itself and it is possible that the defendant may be convicted without any introduction of an unwarned confession into evidence.
• The First Amendment to the United States Constitution did not, either by its express terms or as interpreted by the courts through the nineteenth century, prohibit one of the states from abridging a citizen's freedom of speech or freedom of religion or from establishing a state-sponsored and state-supported church. The first words of the Amendment are "Congress shall make no law..." (emphasis added), and this was intended only as a restriction against the national or federal government; state governments were simply not subjected to the limits set forth in the Amendment. The federal constitutional restrictions against state infringements came only after the courts deemed the Amendment "incorporated" into the Constitution via the Fifth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendments.

Science

Astronomy

A satellite image of a section of the Great Wall of China, running diagonally from lower left to upper right.

• It is commonly claimed that the Great Wall of China is the only man-made object visible from the Moon. This is false. None of the Apollo astronauts reported seeing any man-made object from the Moon. The misconception is believed to have been popularized by Richard Halliburton decades before the first moon landing. (See Great Wall's visibility from space.)
• There is no dark side of the Moon; every part of the Moon's surface (except perhaps deep craters near the poles) is illuminated by the Sun roughly half of the time. The phrase uses the word "dark" in the less-frequent sense of "unknown" or "obscure" to refer to the far side of the Moon, which because of tidal locking is never visible from Earth.
• Black holes, unlike the common image, do not act as cosmic vacuum cleaners any more than do other stars. When a star evolves into a black hole, the gravitational attraction at a given distance from the body is no greater than it was for the star. That is to say, were the Sun to be replaced by a black hole of the same mass, the Earth would continue in the same orbit (assuming spherical symmetry of the sun). Due to a black hole's formation being explosive in nature, the object would lose a certain amount of its energy in the process, which—according to the mass–energy equivalence—means that a black-hole would be of lower mass than the parent object, and actually have a weaker gravitational pull.
• When a meteor lands on Earth (after which it is termed a meteorite), it is not usually hot. In fact, many are found with frost on them. A meteor's great speed during entry is enough to melt or vaporize its outermost layer, but any molten material will be quickly blown off (ablated), and the interior of the meteor does not have time to heat up because rocks are poor conductors of heat. Also, atmospheric drag can slow small meteors to terminal velocity by the time they hit the ground, giving the surface time to cool down.
• The human body can briefly survive the hard vacuum of space unprotected, despite contrary depictions in much popular science fiction. Human flesh expands to about twice its size in such conditions, giving the visual effect of a body builder rather than an overfilled balloon. Consciousness is retained for up to 15 seconds as the effects of oxygen starvation set in. No snap freeze effect occurs because all heat must be lost through thermal radiation or the evaporation of liquids, and the blood does not boil because it remains pressurised within the body. The greatest danger is in attempting to hold one's breath before exposure, as the subsequent explosive decompression can damage the lungs. These effects have been confirmed through various accidents (including in very high altitude conditions, outer space and training vacuum chambers). Human skin does not need to be protected from vacuum and is gas-tight by itself. Instead it only needs to be mechanically compressed to retain its normal shape. This can be accomplished with a tight-fitting elastic body suit and a helmet for containing breathing gases, known as a Space activity suit.
• It is a common misconception that seasons are caused by the Earth being closer to the Sun in the summer than in the winter. In fact, the Earth is actually farther from the Sun when it is summer in the Northern Hemisphere. Seasons are actually the result of the Earth being titled on its axis by 23.5 degrees. As the Earth orbits the Sun, different parts of the world receive different amounts of direct sunlight. In July, the Northern Hemisphere is tilted towards the Sun giving longer days and more direct sunlight; in winter, it is tilted away. The seasons are reversed in the Southern Hemisphere, which is tilted towards the Sun in January and away from the Sun in July. In tropical areas of the world, there is no noticeable change in the amount of sunlight. See also Effect of sun angle on climate.
• The most common incorrect explanation of the lunar phases is that they are caused by the Earth's shadow. Instead, as the Moon orbits Earth, we see its illuminated half from differing angles in relation to the Sun. (Lunar eclipses, by contrast, are caused by Earth's shadow passing over the Moon.)

• The North Star, Polaris, is not the brightest star in the northern hemisphere night sky, as is sometimes supposed. The brightest star is Sirius, with an apparent magnitude of −1.47; Polaris in comparison is 1.97, barely making the top-50 brightest stars list (a lower number indicates a brighter star). Its importance lies in its proximity to the north celestial pole, meaning its location in the sky currently marks North.
• It is a common misconception[3] that it's easier to balance an egg on its end on the first day of spring. In fact, the ease or difficulty of balancing an egg is the same 365 days a year. This myth is said to originate with the "egg of Li Chun", an ancient Chinese folk belief that it is easier to balance an egg on Li Chun, the first day of spring in the Chinese lunar calendar. It was introduced to the western world in a Life article in 1945, and popularized once again by self-titled 'urban shaman' Donna Henes, who has hosted an annual egg balancing ceremony in New York City since the mid-1970s.

Health

A "tongue map" showing zones which taste bitter, sour, salty and sweet. In reality, all zones can sense all tastes.

• Different tastes can be detected on all parts of the tongue by taste buds, with slightly increased sensitivities in different locations depending on the person, contrary to the popular belief that specific tastes only correspond to specific mapped sites on the tongue. The original "tongue map" was based on a mistranslation by a Harvard psychologist of a discredited German paper that was written in 1901.
• People do not use only ten percent of their brains. This myth is thought by some to have emerged after the discovery of glial cells in the brain, or it could have been the result of some other misunderstood or misinterpreted legitimate scientific findings, or even been the result of speculation by self-help gurus. While it is true that a small minority of neurons in the brain are actively firing at one time, the inactive neurons are important too.
• There is no single theory that satisfactorily explains myopia—in particular, studies show that "eyestrain" from close reading and computer games does not explain myopia. There is also no evidence that reading in dim light or sitting close to a television causes vision to deteriorate.
• Shaving does not cause hair to grow back thicker or coarser or darker. This belief is due to the fact that hair that has never been cut has a tapered end, whereas, after cutting, there is no taper. Thus, it appears thicker, and feels coarser due to the sharper, unworn edges. Hair can also appear darker after it grows back because hair that has never been cut is often lighter due to sun exposure.
• Hair and fingernails do not continue to grow after a person dies. Rather, the skin dries and shrinks away from the bases of hairs and nails, giving the appearance of growth.
• Although there are hair care products which are marketed as being able to repair split ends and damaged hair, there is no such cure. A good conditioner might prevent damage from occurring in the first place, but the only way to get rid of split ends after they appear is by a simple hair cut.
• The number of human senses is often said to be five; however, this count is accurate only if the senses of balance, acceleration, temperature, proprioception and pain — all distinct senses — are grouped together as the sense of "feeling" or "touch".
• Snapping or cracking one's knuckles does not cause arthritis.
• Sugar does not cause hyperactivity in children. Double blind trials have shown no difference in behaviour between children given sugar full or sugar-free diets, even in studies specifically looking at children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder or those considered "sensitive" to sugar. In fact, it was found that the difference in the children's behaviour was all in the parents' minds.
• A disproportionate amount of heat is not lost through the head. This myth originated from a poorly undertaken military study that went on to suggest that "40 to 45 percent of body heat" was lost through the head. Recent studies have shown that heat loss from the head is completely proportionate.
• Eating at night does not cause any more weight gain than eating the same amount of food during the day. Some studies have shown a connection; however, it has since been shown that the "effects" were due to a confusion between correlation and causation.
• Prolonged exposure to cold weather such as rain or winter conditions does not increase the likelihood of catching a cold. Although common colds are seasonal, with more occurring during winter, experiments so far have failed to produce evidence that short-term exposure to cold weather or direct chilling increases susceptibility to infection, implying that the seasonal variation is instead due to a change in behaviors such as increased time spent indoors close to others. A lowering of body temperature can, however, reduce the body's resistance to an infection that is already present.
• It is a common misconception that sleepwalkers should not be awakened. While it is true that a person may be confused or disoriented for a short time after awakening, it is actually quite dangerous to not wake a sleepwalker as they may injure themselves if they trip over objects or lose their balance while sleepwalking. Such injuries are common among sleepwalkers.

Biology

• The indigenous people of North America can grow facial hair, contrary to the misconception that they cannot.
• Warts on human skin are caused by viruses that are unique to humans (Human papillomavirus). Humans cannot catch warts from toads or other animals; the bumps on a toad are not warts.
• The claim that a duck's quack does not echo is false, although the echo may be difficult to hear for humans under some circumstances.
• The notion that goldfish have a memory of only three seconds is completely false. They have been trained to navigate mazes and can recognize their owners after an exposure of a few months.
• Lemmings do not engage in suicidal dives off cliffs when migrating. They will, however, occasionally, and unintentionally fall off cliffs when venturing into unknown territory, with no knowledge of the boundaries of the environment. The misconception is due largely to the Disney film White Wilderness, which shot many of the migration scenes (also staged by using multiple shots of different groups of lemmings) on a large, snow-covered turntable in a studio. Photographers later pushed the lemmings off a cliff.
• Bats are not blind. While most bat species do use echolocation to augment their vision, all bats have eyes and are capable of sight.
• Mammal blood is bright red or scarlet when oxygenated and a darker red when not oxygenated. It is never blue. Veins appear blue through the skin because of the ratio of reflected colours by the skin and the blood.
• According to urban myth, the Daddy Long-Legs Spider (Pholcus phalangioides) is the most venomous spider in the world, but it is harmless to humans because its fangs cannot penetrate human skin. This is false as Pholcus phalangioides can pierce human skin, however, the toxicity of this spider's venom has just a weak effect on insects, let alone humans. In addition, there is also confusion regarding the use of the name Daddy Long Legs, because Harvestmen (order Opiliones, which are not spiders) and crane flies (which are insects) are also commonly referred to as Daddy Long Legs, and share (also incorrectly) the myth of venomousness.
• It is sometimes stated as a fact that "there are more people alive at this moment than have ever lived". Although there is no definite starting point for the human species, estimates of the total number of people who have ever lived have been made, and range from 45 to 125 billion people. Even the lower estimate of 45 billion far outnumbers the 6.6 billion people alive today. See also World population: Number of humans who have ever lived. This fact was well known to Arthur C. Clarke who remarked on it in the opening sentence of his 1968 novel 2001: A Space Odyssey: "Behind every man stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living."

Physics

• The centrifugal force an object moving in a circular path "feels" is actually simply the tendency of an object to move in a straight-line path. The centrifugal force is a pseudoforce which appears if you draw a force-body diagram from the frame of reference of the object, but since it is undergoing centripetal acceleration, it is not a valid reference frame. In fact, the only true force that exists in this case is the centripetal force, the force acting to keep the object moving in a circular path.. For example, the Earth revolves around the sun, and in the rotating frame of the Earth there is a centrifugal pseudoforce which pushes the Earth outwards. This is balanced against the centripetal force of gravity from the sun.
• The Coriolis effect does not determine the direction that water rotates in a bathtub drain or a flushing toilet. The Coriolis force is relatively small; it appears over large scales (like weather systems) or in systems such as the Foucault pendulum in which the small influence is allowed to accumulate over time. In a bathtub or toilet, the flow of the water over the basin itself produces forces that dwarf the Coriolis force. In addition, most toilets inject water into the bowl at an angle, causing a spin too fast to be affected by the Coriolis effect.
• Gyroscopic forces are not required for a rider to balance a bicycle. However, the stability of a bicycle is improved by gyroscopic forces as well as by its geometry and the rider's ability to counteract tilting by steering.

An illustration of the equal transit-time fallacy.

• It is not true that air takes the same time to travel above and below an aircraft's wing. This misconception, illustrated at right, is widespread among textbooks and non-technical reference books, and even appears in pilot training materials.
  Further information: Equal transit-time fallacy, List of works with the equal transit-time fallacy, and Lift (force)
• Some textbooks state that electricity within wires flows at nearly (or even exactly) the speed of light, which can give the impression that electrons themselves move almost instantly through a circuit. The electrons in a typical wire actually move at a drift velocity on the order of centimeters per hour (much slower than a snail). The random thermal motions of the electrons are much faster than this, but still much slower than light, and with no tendency to occur in any particular direction. It is the electrical signal that travels almost at the speed of light. The information that a light switch has been turned on propagates to the bulb very quickly, but the charge carriers move slowly.

Further information: Speed of electricity

• The blue color of lakes and oceans is not only a reflection of the blue sky. Water also looks blue because water is blue; the water molecules do absorb some light, and they absorb red frequencies more than blue. The effect is small, so the blue color only becomes obvious when observing layers of water many meters (or more) thick. (This effect is noticeable to a lesser amount in white-painted swimming pools.) In salt water or mineral-laden fresh water, the color of dissolved minerals can also be seen. Sky-reflection does play a role, but it is not the only factor. See Colour of water.
• It is commonly believed that airplanes flying long distances between two places usually take less time flying west-to-east than east-to-west because of the earth's rotation. This is false. The difference is accounted for by jet streams and trade winds, which usually flow in an eastward direction (because of the rotation of the earth).
• Some believe that the sky looks blue because it reflects the color of the ocean. The sky actually looks blue because the color of air varies with the viewing angle to the illumination source. Sunlight reflected (scattered) from the air is of shorter wavelengths toward the violet end of the visible spectrum, while the remaining transmitted sunlight has longer wavelengths of the red end of the spectrum. In fact, the sun appears reddish in the evening because the transmitted sunlight has lost much of its blue wavelengths because of scattering, leaving only the long wavelength red light to reach the observer. This phenomenon is referred to as Rayleigh Scattering.
• Astronauts in orbiting spacecraft are not in a location where there is zero gravity in an objective sense. They accelerate along with the spacecraft. The principle of equivalence shows that accelerating free-fall environment is exactly the same in every respect as zero-gravity. NASA refers to near free-fall conditions with low G-force acceleration as microgravity. Earth's gravitational effects are very strong at the low orbit altitudes used by the space shuttle, where the acceleration due to gravity is about 85% of what it is at Earth's surface. Gravity falls off rapidly as one leaves the Earth's surface, but one can never completely escape the gravitational pull even at vast distances, though the effect will become negligible. A free-fall situation is sometimes called "simulated zero-gravity", and can be experienced in any near-freefall situation, including extremely fast elevators. Astronauts ride inside free-falling airplanes for training (see Vomit Comet).
• While the Earth's north magnetic pole is near the geographic north pole, it is in physics terms a south magnetic pole. By accepted convention, a compass needle is a magnet whose north-seeking end is termed the "north" end of the magnet. Therefore, because magnetic poles are attracted to their opposites, the compass needle points to the magnetic south pole of the Earth's magnetic field. The Arctic pole is a south-type pole, while the Antarctic pole is a north-type pole. The poles have undergone geomagnetic reversal in the past, the last being the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal of 780,000 years ago. Earth also has a more complicated magnetic field than one might get from a simple dipole. The earth has a strong overall dipole which is superposed on a weaker quadrupole, as well as higher-order magnetic moments. Not only have the magnetic poles moved to opposite geographic poles in the past, but they also drift around more or less randomly, presumably because of the movements of the molten nickel-iron alloy in the Earth's core.
• Introductory science courses often teach that the period of a pendulum is independent of its amplitude (this is called isochronism), and students often mistakenly believe that is precisely true. It is only approximately true and only for small amplitudes, (see small angle approximation), for which a pendulum approximates simple harmonic motion.
• Putting a teaspoon in the neck of an opened bottle of champagne will not help it retain its fizz. The misconception may arise from the fact that few people have two bottles of champagne open and unfinished at the same time to perform an accurate comparison. and likely suffer from subjective validation bias.
• It is not true that paper can be folded in half a maximum of seven, eight, ten, or indeed any selected number of times. It is true, however, that there is a loss function associated with each fold, and thus there is such a practical limit for a normal sized (letter or A4) sheet of writing paper. (A football field-sized sheet of paper was folded in half eleven times on episode 72 of Mythbusters.)

A Crookes radiometer

• Several incorrect explanations have been circulated for what causes a Crookes radiometer (pictured) to turn. The earliest incorrect explanation – that its motion is caused by radiation pressure – was posited by its inventor, Sir William Crookes. A common subsequent explanation, still offered by references such as Encyclopaedia Britannica, is that its motion is caused by expansion of gas near the black side of the vanes, due to its absorbing more radiation and passing on that heat to gas molecules that strike it. This explanation only explains a part of the force exerted on the radiometer. A fuller explanation includes the effect of thermal creep – the tendency of a gas to flow from hot to cold areas (in this case, around the edges of the vanes).
• Glass is not a high-viscosity liquid at room temperature: it is an amorphous solid, although it does have some chemical properties normally associated with liquids. Panes of stained glass windows often have thicker glass at the bottom than at the top, and this has been cited as an example of the slow flow of glass over centuries. However, this unevenness is due to the window manufacturing processes used in earlier eras, which produced glass panes that were unevenly thick at the time of their installation. It is not uncommon to find old windows that are thicker at the sides or the top.

Evolution

• Biological evolution does not address the origin of life; for that, see abiogenesis. The two are commonly and mistakenly conflated. Evolution describes (and through the theory of evolution, endeavors to explain) the changes in gene frequencies that occur in populations of living organisms over time, and thus, presupposes that life already exists. Evolution likewise says nothing about cosmology, the Big Bang, or the origins of the universe.
• The word "theory" in "the theory of evolution" does not imply doubt in mainstream science regarding its validity; the words "theory" and "hypothesis" are not the same in a scientific context. While "theory" in conventional usage tends to denote a "hunch" or conjecture, a scientific theory is a set of principles which, via logical induction, explains the observations in nature in natural terms. Evolution is a theory in the same sense as the theory of gravity or the theory of relativity. (See Evolution is just a theory, not a fact.)
• Humans did not evolve from monkeys or from any current non-human apes. Rather, humans and other modern simians—chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, baboons, etc.—all share an extinct common early ancestor. It is believed that humans are more closely related to modern fellow apes than to monkeys, and humans and other apes share a later common ancestor that lived around 7 million years ago in the late Miocene epoch. However, fossil discoveries of "recently" (as in, only millions of years ago) extinct species are, in the experience of paleontologists, rarely direct ancestors of living species (cf. missing link).
• The process of biological evolution is not necessarily slow. Millions of years are not necessarily required to see speciation (a change in characteristics of a kind of organism, typically rendering offspring infertile with the previous species). Indeed, it has been observed multiple times under both controlled laboratory conditions and in nature.
• Evolution is not a progression from "lower" to "higher", and evolution does not require an increase in complexity (see Evolution of complexity). A population can evolve to become simpler with less genetic information, and have a smaller genome—often called "devolution", but that is a misnomer.
• The claim that "almost all mutations are harmful" is strictly speaking false. In fact, most mutations have no noticeable effect, mainly because most mutations do not occur within coding or regulatory regions of the genome. One study gives the average number of mutations that arise in a human conception to be around 128, with an average number of harmful mutations per conception of 1.3. However, most mutations that have an effect on phenotype are indeed detrimental to the organism.
• The claim that evolution makes no meaningful predictions is not true—for example the discovery of the relationship between chromosome 2 and chimpanzee chromosomes at the end of the completion of the human and chimp genome projects was predicted, and makes meaningful sense as evidence of a common ancestor.
• The characterization of evolution as the "survival of the fittest" (in the sense of "only the best-adapted organisms will prevail", a view common in social Darwinism) is not consistent with the actual theory of evolution. Any organism which is capable of reproducing itself before dying is considered "fit". If the organism is able to do so on an ongoing basis, it will survive as a species. A more accurate characterization of evolution would be "survival of the fit enough".

Earth science

• Claims that the number and intensity of earthquakes are increasing are unfounded. The number and intensity of earthquakes vary from year to year but there is no increasing trend.

Linguistics

• The Inuit do not have a large number of words for snow. In fact, English has many unrelated root words for snow, such as: snow, sleet, powder, flurry, drift, slush, whitewall, avalanche and blizzard. Each Eskimo-Aleut language has a similar number of unrelated root words. Since these languages are polysynthetic, arbitrarily complex thoughts such as "snow with a herring-scale pattern etched into it by rainfall" can be expressed in a single long word each, but this feature of the language is by no means restricted to snow.

Religion

• Albert Einstein's position on God has been widely misrepresented by people on both sides of the atheism/religion divide. In truth, Einstein was neither religious (in the traditional sense) nor an atheist. He did not believe in God in a "personal" sense and discounted the existence of a creator; rather, he was a rationalistic pantheist. Many people misinterpreted his words in public, to which Einstein himself responded by saying: "It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
• The phrase "separation of church and state" does not occur in the U.S. Constitution. It was first used in a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut, reassuring them that religious minorities (such as Baptists) would be protected under the Bill of Rights. His expression "wall of separation between church and state" was a description of an intended effect of the First Amendment's Establishment and Free Exercise provisions, not a quotation therefrom.

Judaism and Christianity

• Nowhere in the Bible is the fruit eaten by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden referred to as an apple. The fruit is called the "fruit of the tree" (that is, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil), and neither the fruit nor the tree is identified by species. In Middle English, as late as the 17th century "apple" was a generic term for all fruit other than berries but including nuts. However, in continental European art from that period representing the Fall of Man the fruit is often depicted as an apple. The apple myth comes from a Latin word likeness: Latin mălus = "bad", mălum = "an evil", mālus = "apple tree" and "mast of a ship", mālum = "apple (fruit)".

• Many people confuse the Immaculate Conception with the Virgin Birth of Jesus when in fact, they are two different things. Immaculate Conception is the belief that Mary was conceived without original sin and therefore her conception was immaculate. Virgin Birth is the belief that Mary gave birth to Jesus while remaining a virgin.

• Nowhere in the Bible is Mary Magdalene ever referred to as a prostitute. Before her seeing the risen Jesus, the only other mention besides the listing of her name is the mentioning in Luke 8:2 that she had been possessed by seven demons. In fact there are several sinful women mentioned in the gospels, one of whom is "caught in adultery". The earliest recorded mention of this connection was in a sermon of Pope Gregory.

• The canon of the New Testament was not selected by Constantine at the First Council of Nicaea. Constantine did not personally have a vote on the council, and the canon had been settled mainly by common consent among the clergy from the early second century. Furthermore, the council did not consider the matter of canon in its proceedings. (See Development of the New Testament canon.)

• Nowhere in the Bible does it say exactly three wise men came from afar to visit "Baby Jesus", nor that they rode on camels. It was assumed that there were three Biblical Magi because three gifts are described. Additionally, the wise men did not visit on the day Jesus was born, but they saw Jesus as a child, in a house. (Matthew 2:11)
• The Gospel accounts of Jesus' birth say nothing about a stable or an inn-keeper. The Greek word for an inn is pandocheion, while the word used to describe where Jesus was supposedly born is kataluma, which is better translated as "guestroom". What is mentioned is that Jesus lay in a manger but nothing else (Luke 2:7).

Hinduism

• Hinduism is not one distinct religion, but was considered to be so since at least AD 1323, as attested by South Indian and Kashmiri texts, and increasingly so during the British rule. Since the end of the 18th century the word has been used as an umbrella term for most of the religious, spiritual, and philosophical traditions of the sub-continent, excluding the distinct religions of Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism and Islam. Despite this, many traditions considered "Hindu" today draw their validity from core texts called the Vedas, though in various degrees; some traditions assert that their own texts supersede the Vedas. The traditions that reject the Vedas are considered nastika (heterodox), as opposed to astika (orthodox). Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma are now seen as trinity; that is, highest in the order of Hindu Gods (See Astika and Nastika). Nastika is often translated as "atheist", though it does not exactly correspond to the English word.

Islam

• The Qur'an promises martyrs will be awarded virgins in heaven but specifies no number. There is a Hadith attributed to Muhammad stating that there will be 72.
• The Niqāb veil (and by extension, Burqa) is not considered by all Islamic scholars to be obligatory. Some view it as a voluntary show of piety. The passage in the Quran instructing women to "…not display their beauty and ornaments except what (must ordinarily) appear thereof; that they should draw their veils over their bosoms and not display their beauty except to…" is interpreted by some to require covering off the hair, while others say it simply calls for modesty of dress.
• Allah does not refer to a Muslim, as opposed to a Christian, God. It is simply the Arabic word for "The God". Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews also refer to God as "Allah".
• Jihad is not an "Islamic war on the western world" but rather a verb meaning to struggle or to strive. One can have an internal jihad, family jihad, or religious jihad, which may or may not include violence towards non-Muslims. A comparison may be made with the term "crusade", which is sometimes considered by Muslims to mean Western violence against Islam, when it is more often used as a metaphorical struggle; for example, "a crusade against drugs".
• A fatwā is a religious opinion on Islamic law issued by an Islamic scholar, not a death sentence. The popular misconception likely stems from the death sentence pronounced as a fatwā on the author Salman Rushdie in 1989 by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran, when fatwās first gained widespread media attention in the west.

Paganism

• Not all pagans are polytheists: some are pantheists and others are monotheists.

Technology

Inventions

• Johannes Gutenberg was not the first to invent the printing press or movable type; these were in use in China and Korea centuries before (See History of typography in East Asia). Gutenberg was the first European to use movable type, and he probably invented it independently; the printing press did have a larger influence on Western than on Eastern culture.
• Thomas Crapper did not invent the flush toilet.
• Thomas Edison did not invent the light bulb. He did, however, develop the first practical light bulb, contemporaneously with Joseph Swan.
• Henry Ford did not invent the automobile or the internal combustion engine. He added conveyor belts to the assembly line for automobile production, and used it to bring the cost of automobiles into reach of many more people.
• George Washington Carver did not invent peanut butter, although he developed many other uses for peanuts. Other individuals of Carver's era had patents for peanut butter.

Computing

• ENIAC, (1946), was not the first digital computer; rather, it was the first general-purpose all-electronic computer. The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) (1942), was the first digital electronic binary computer. The partly-electromechanical Z3 (1941), was also among the earliest digital and general-purpose computers. The first computer was the colossus (1943), but was not general-purpose, being designed only for particular applications.
• The clock rate of a CPU is not a good measure of its performance. Computer performance is affected by many things, especially the design of the CPU's instruction pipelines, branch prediction, memory subsystem, and caches; the number of cores; and the ability of software to take advantage of a given CPU architecture's features. This is known as the megahertz myth, and was largely driven by marketing considerations.
• Most Internet traffic travels via fiber-optic cables, not satellites.
• A byte is not necessarily 8-bits, it simply refers to the smallest field that can be independently addressed in a particular system (though most current common place computer systems do use an 8-bit byte).
• Web cookies cannot execute code on a recipient's computer, nor can they modify or otherwise access files or settings on the computer (at least not in the absence of security flaws in the web-browser application, see for instance Buffer overflow). They can, however, be used for limited tracking of a recipients activity on the web.
• The Internet and World Wide Web are not synonymous. The Internet is a physical (albeit highly amorphous) entity composed of interconnected computer systems and other devices. The Word Wide Web is the non-physical collection of all hyperlinked content available from the Internet through the Hyper Text Transport Protocol. Properly, the Web is just one of many services accessible over the Internet.

Gaming

• Pong was not the first video game. In fact, OXO, created in 1952, was one of the first electronic games to use a graphical display, utilizing a cathode ray tube on the EDSAC computer. There are also patent records for an earlier game using a CRT, but no existing physical records of it. The first commercially sold coin-operated video game, Computer Space, was created in 1971 by the future founders of Atari. Fearing that Computer Space had not been popular because of its complexity, Nolan Bushnell and Allan Alcorn created Pong in 1972 after Bushnell had seen a similar game at a trade show.

Transportation

• The ship Mary Celeste was not called Marie Celeste. Arthur Conan Doyle used the Marie Celeste spelling in his fictional story J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement, based on the incident.
• The first heavier-than-air craft was not flown by the Wright brothers. Human-flown gliders and kites had been flown far earlier. The Wright brothers did fly the first heavier-than-air craft capable of controlled and sustained powered flight. There is even some evidence to show Clément Ader was the first to fly a heavier-than-air craft capable of controlled and sustained powered flight in 1890.
• Charles Lindbergh was not the first man to fly the Atlantic Ocean, although he was the first to have flown across it solo. The first flight had been done first in stages between May 8 and May 31, 1919, by the crew of the Navy-Curtiss NC-4 flying boat which took 24 days to complete its journey. The first truly non-stop transatlantic flight was made in 1919 by John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown in a modified Vickers Vimy bomber.
• The United States Interstate Highway System was not designed with airplane landings in mind. A common urban legend states that one out of every five (or ten) miles of highway must be straight and flat to allow emergency (or military) airplane landings, but this is not the case. However, several parts of the German and later the Swiss Autobahn system were indeed designed to be auxiliary military airports, both during World War II and the Cold War.

A "black" box

• The German Autobahn was not designed by Adolf Hitler or the Third Reich cabinet. It came into design 20 years before Hitler's reign, and was first implemented a year before he came to power.
• The Black box, used for aviation accident investigation, is actually painted bright orange as to aid in recovering it from the crash site.
• Toilet waste is not dumped overboard in aircraft. All waste is collected in tanks which are emptied on the ground by special toilet waste vehicles. A vacuum is used to allow the toilet to be flushed with less water and because plumbing cannot rely on gravity alone in an aircraft in motion.

Sports

• There are several misconceptions related to the colored belt ranking system in martial arts. First, the system was invented in the early 20th century, contrary to the myth that it is based on the ancient practice of students starting with a white belt and gaining a black belt through accumulated dirt, sweat, and blood on an unwashed belt. Second, receiving a black belt usually does not mean mastery, as there are always several levels of black belt for each martial art, and standards for attaining a belt can vary greatly. Third, a prevalent American myth is that black belts must register their hands as a deadly weapon with law enforcement agencies.
• Contrary to popular myth, Abner Doubleday did not invent baseball. (See The Abner Doubleday myth.)
• The ice hockey term "Original Six", contrary to its implication, does not refer to the six original members of the National Hockey League. It actually refers to the six teams which formed the entire league from 1942 to 1967. Only two of them were actually charter NHL members, but all six were founded within the NHL's first decade.
• Another common ice hockey misconception is that the game known as the "Miracle on Ice" in the 1980 Winter Olympics clinched the gold medal for the USA team. Even though Team USA stunned the heavily favored Soviet team in that game, it did not clinch the gold medal. Under Olympic hockey rules at that time, the medal round was contested in a round-robin format. Team USA went into its final game against Finland with the mathematical possibility of finishing in any position from first to fourth. The Americans defeated Finland to secure the gold medal.

Language

• The term "Romance Language" is not derived from the word "romance" in the sense of a "romantic relationship". It actually comes from the Latin "Romanus," meaning "Roman" or "of Rome."

See also

• Conventional wisdom
• Counter-intuitive
• Drug urban legends
• Factoid
• List of cognitive biases
• List of fallacies
• List of memory biases
• List of misquotations
• List of topics related to public relations and propaganda
• Misnomer
• Mythbusters
• Old wives' tale
• Pseudodoxia Epidemica
• Urban legend
• QI
• Straight and Crooked Thinking