6 Genetic Myths Still Taught in Schools (That Science Says Are Wrong)
7th May 2025
In biology classrooms across the world, students learn to roll their tongues. It’s almost a rite of passage, often folded into a lesson about Mendelian genetics. It’s supposed to be a simple demonstration: if you can curl your tongue into a tube, you probably have the “tongue-rolling gene.” If you can’t, you don’t. Blame your parents.
But what if that lesson is wrong? What if many other genetic myths are simply wrong as well (or at least misleading)? Simon Fisher, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen, recently pointed out just how persistent (and pervasive) some of these myths are. Let’s go through some of them.
Of course, ‘science’ can be just as wrong about these ‘myths’ as it often does about everything else. Whenever somebody says ‘science says’, feel free to not believe it without a lot of further proof.