Things that are widely believed, but not true

[JHG]

"Animals are stupid" bullcrap. Sorry, I'm just tired of hearing this.  I don't mean to sound aggressive... it's just frustrating, as someone that loves all animals, to hear these things. :<

"Chickens are stupid." Nope. They aren't. Here's why.

-"Chickens are behaviourally sophisticated, discriminating among individuals, exhibiting Machiavellian-like social interactions, and learning socially in complex ways that are similar to humans."
Lori Marino, Neuroscientist
-"As a trick at conferences I sometimes list {their} attributes, without mentioning chickens, and people think I'm talking about monkeys."
Dr Chris Evans, Professor of Psychology, Macquaries University, Australia

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"Sheep are stupid." Again, no, they are not. Here's why:

-"The popular stereotype is that sheep are docile, passive, unintelligent, and timid, but a review of the research on their behavior, affect, cognition, and personality reveals that they are complex, individualistic, and social."
-"Sheep have excellent general memory and learning abilities. Lambs show robust spatial memory (Nowack et al. 1994); they are able to learn basic tasks in as few as two trials (Bremmer, Baggins, & Kilgour 1980). Other studies show that sheep perform well on visual discrimination tasks (Morris et al. 2010; Sugnaseelan et al. 2013); under some circumstances, however, auditory discriminations might be more difficult (Morris et al. 2010)."
Lori Marino and Debra Merskin

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"Fish are stupid." Again, this is very wrong. They simply aren't stupid. At all.

"They [goldfish] ignored everybody else and they knew that in the morning when I came to feed them I’d put the food in a particular spot and they’d be there waiting," he says. "It was pretty obvious to me, even as a kid, that they were much smarter than people thought."
"An aspect of intelligence that has long interested Culum has been the way fish learn and remember. One experiment he did on rainbowfish, a popular aquarium species endemic to Australia and Papua New Guinea, involved a net that moved from one end of a fish tank to the other. The net had a single hole in it; to avoid getting trapped, the fish needed to find the hole quickly.
"It took them only five goes to master the test. Furthermore, larger groups did better than smaller ones, suggesting they learn from each other via a process known as social learning. And, even though rainbowfish live for only two years, the test fish still remembered the skill 11 months later."
Professor Culum Brown

"Sadly, the general poor perception of fish intelligence is not restricted to the broader public but it is also deeply imbedded in scientific dogma and can be traced back to the very beginnings of scientific investigation in the western world. The scientific study of animal brains and behavior (and by proxy intelligence) has been dogged by the deep rooted notion that the evolution of vertebrates follows a linear progression from inferior to superior forms, culminating in humans at the apex."
Culum Brown (link to his paper)

Aaand just to show that overcorrection is a thing, troodontids and dromaeosaurids probably most likely could not figure out how to drive cars or open doors as some more fantastical portrayals(i.e. Jurassic Park) would have them do. Even if a dinosaur by some miracle became smart as a human, there's no reason to assume it would look human. So if you're chased by a raptor, remember to just slam the door in its face.

[JHG]

NOT every Japanese sword is a katana! The modern katana is a recent invention from roughly 1392 and even then, exclusively for knights/samurai; Ashigaru would've been using the kodachi or wakizashi. Before the katana, the tachi(c. 800-14th century), chokuto(unknown-10th century), and tsurugi(Antiquity) would be the sidearm of choice. Also, after the Meiji revolution, the saber would be the sword in service with firearms being the go to weapon only for katanas to be revived in 1934.

[MamaFrankie]

'All scorpions are venomous'.

No. Of the 20,000 species currently in existence, only 30 actually are. Source: Guinness Book Of Records.

[Velocity Girl]

The Indonesian language is actually NOT called "Bahasa". "Bahasa" means "language" in Indonesian. So when a non-Indonesian says "Do you speak Bahasa?" they are literally asking "Do you speak language?". The Indonesian language is simply called "Indonesian".

[Jarkko]

It isn't just Bahasa on its own, it's Bahasa Indonesia, which could be translated as "Indonesia(n) language." So yeah. There is also Bahasa Malaysia, but most anglos just call it Malay. A bit too general, since Bahasa Malaysia is the national standard of Malaysia while Malay is a pluricentric language with multiple standards.

On the theme of language, while Swahili is a very broadly-spoken language overall, it is widely believed that it is widely-spoken as a mother tongue. This is actually not entirely true, as most L1 Swahili speakers are from (especially eastern) Tanzania. It is estimated that up to 150 million people total speak Swahili, but only 18 million at most speak it as a first language.

Something more blatantly false is that Swahili is a variety of Arabic. In spite of up to a fifth of the vocabulary coming from the same, Swahili is very much a Bantu, and more generally Niger-Congo, language, lacking the uniquely Semitic morphosyntactic feature of transfixation/non-concatenative morphology (where word roots are comprised solely of consonants and then grammatical and derivational features are added with vowels) as well as several sounds that are found in Arabic (primarily of the post-velar non-vowel persuasion), while having many more typically Niger-Congo morphological features such as a robust noun-class system (Arabic has a mere gender system like like many mainland Eurasian languages) and greater agglutination of both verbs and nouns, and also sounds more characteristic of Sub-Saharan Africa such as implosives and prenasalized obstruents (which are by no means restricted to Africa but are hard not to find there and both almost impossible to find in Arabic).

[Zerg Rush]

The Everest is the tallest Montain

Right, but only above sea level, measure from the base Hawaii's Mauna Kea has 9.330 m

SOS = Save our Souls or Save our Ship

False, SOS don't have any meaning, it was only agreed upon as an emergency morse sign because it was easy for anyone to remember,
3 Dots 3 Dashes 3 Dots

[Jarkko]

SOS = Save our Souls or Save our Ship

False, SOS don't have any meaning, it was only agreed upon as an emergency morse sign because it was easy for anyone to remember,
3 Dots 3 Dashes 3 Dots

At least it didn't. The etymology is right.

Then people made a backronym of it.

[Zerg Rush]

The war is the mother of invention

Not right at all, the mother of invention is the need of it. Although the war created the need for inventions, these as a rule were developed until they served to kill and future developments for other applications are normally parked until the war ends and the country has recovered from it, this can last many years or even decades .
In other words, war is more of a brake on invention, more than any other necessity.

[JHG]

The idea that swords are the main weapon of a soldier is not true for the most part. They prefer polearms and early gunpowder and modern warriors prefer long guns(i.e. muskets, rifles, and shotguns) tipped with bayonets.

[Zerg Rush]

In ancient Egypt slaves built the pyramids and temples.

False, free workers were employed, also in quite good conditions, although naturally in quite hard work.
8-hour day, 6 days a week
Exempt from having to pay taxes
Food, accommodation with garden for them and their families
Medical care, in disability and old age

The pharaohs knew very well, if they want well-made constructions, they needed expert and motivated workers, not slaves.