The title may be a little bit misleading, because this
problem is not only limited to Nigerian schools. It’s
a worldwide phenomenon occasioned by teachers,
lecturers and instructors who make no effort to
update themselves and add to what they already
know. These lies – at least some of them – were
facts at some point in time, but things have since
moved on. Truths become lies as new discoveries
are being made.
Here are 16 lies that are still dished out the world
over even as you read this:
There are six classes of food: I was taught – and I
know most of you were taught – that there are 6
classes of food, namely, proteins, carbohydrates,
vitamins, fats and oil, minerals and water. It is no
longer the case. Officially, there are now SEVEN
classes of food: proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins
(or vegetables), fibers, fats and oil, minerals and
water. Fiber is derived from plants and it was
initially left out by nutritionists because it seemingly
does not add any nutrient to the body. What fiber
does that it alters the way our gastrointestinal tract
absorbs food. Fiber itself is indigestible; it is broken
down in the large intestine not by the body’s
digestive system, but by the trillions of bacteria that
live there.
There are nine planets in the solar system:
Astronomers are regularly discovering new planets
all over the universe. However, the number of
planets in our own solar system has been reduced
from nine to eight. This is due to the declassification
of Pluto as a planet. Pluto was officially
downgraded by astronomers at the 26th General
Assembly of the International Astronomical Union
which was held in Prague, Czech Republic, in 2006.
It is now a dwarf planet. Astronomers found out
that it is merely a huge ball of ice and rock orbiting
the Sun in an area known as the Kuiper Belt. The
Kuiper Belt is located beyond the planet Neptune
(which is now the farthest planet in the solar
system) and it contains over 70,000 icy objects
similar to Pluto. Pluto happens to be one of the
biggest of these icy objects, but it’s not the biggest.
The biggest is Eris. Eris, a dwarf planet, is the largest
object in the Kuiper Belt. It’s about 25% more
massive than Pluto.
There are four oceans: That was until the year
2000 when the International Hydrographic
Organization concluded that a distinct body of sea
that completely surrounds the continent Antarctica
will be the Earth’s fifth ocean. The exact geographic
coordinates of the salty water are yet to be agreed
upon, but most sources will tell you that it lies to the
south of Australia, New Zealand and the tip of the
South American continent.
There are three states of matter: There are
several states of matter, in fact. According to
physicists, in addition to solid, liquid and gaseous,
plasma can be observed in everyday life. Actually,
scientists claim that plasma is the most abundant
form of matter in the universe, because most of the
stars, including our own Sun, are in a plasma state.
Other states of matter include the neutron-
degenerate matter, Bose-Einstein condensates,
liquid crystals, superfluids, quark-gluon plasmas,
quantum hall state, supersolid, string-net liquid,
superglass and dark matter. But these forms of
matter are very rare and some of them have not
been observed, but are believed to exist.
Humans have only five senses: It turns out that
sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste are not the
only sensory responses human beings exhibit.
Human sensory receptors can also respond to pain
(nociception), changes in temperature
(thermoception), changes in balance
(equilibrioception), position (proprioception),
magnetic direction (magnetoception) and the
passage of time (chronoception).
Humans evolved from apes: This is a great lie and
misconception that has been here with us since the
day Charles Darwin published his controversial “On
the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,
or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the
Struggle for Life.” According to this well-known
biological framework, human beings and the
modern-day apes evolved from a single, now-
extinct ancestor. As time passed by, these
ancestors of ours began to evolve differently based
on climatic, nutritional, geographical and social
changes.
Mount Everest is the highest place on earth:
Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world
quite alright, but it’s not the part of the world that is
closest to outer space. Here how it works: the Earth
does not have a perfectly round structure like the
world globes you’ll find in most schools.
Geographers call this anomaly an oblate spheroid,
which means that the earth has a bulge towards
the equator. As a result of this bulge, places close to
the equator are “further out” from the centre of the
Earth than places that are far away from it. Ethiopia,
Kenya, Gabon, Colombia, the Democratic Republic
of Congo and other countries that straddle the
equator are “further out” from the centre of the
Earth and are closer to outer space than countries
that lie towards the north and south poles, such as
the Scandinavian countries, Russia, Canada, the
United States and Greenland. Going by this
phenomenon, the title of the highest spot on Earth
belongs to a mountain in Ecuador that you may not
have heard of. The rather unspectacular Mount
Chimborazo in the Andes of South America has
been identified as the highest point on earth and its
closest part to outer space. The peak is in reality 1.5
miles “higher up” than Mount Everest because it sits
atop the Earth’s bulge, though it only measures
20,564 ft from sea level, while Everest measures
29,029 ft. But for the sake of clarity, Everest is still
the highest mountain in the world from sea level,
but if two objects are descending from outer space
from the same distance and at the same pace to the
two mountains, the one coming down to
Chimborazo will land before the one descending to
Everest. Everest is actually the fifth furthest place
from the centre of the Earth; Huascaran in Peru,
Cotopaxi in Ecuador, Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and
Chimborazo are all further.
Babies are born tabula rasa: For ages, arguments
and counterarguments have been made by
psychologists and philosophers over whether
human beings are born with the so-called blank
slate. But thanks to advancements in genetic
studies, most of us are now in the know that
humans transfer some of their characteristics
(known as traits) to their offspring. These traits go
a long way in determining how the offspring will
react when put in certain situations and subjected
to certain conditions.
Different parts of the tongue detect different
flavours : Even in my university days, I was taught
by professors that different parts of the human
tongue are specialized for detecting different tastes.
The so-called tongue map balkanized our taste
organ into areas responsible for detecting
sweetness, bitterness, saltiness, sourness and
unami. Per contra, it turns out that most taste buds
on the tongue and in other areas of the mouth can
detect any taste irrespective of their position.
Europeans brought Christianity to Africa and
Christianity is a Western Religion : Christianity is
the world’s largest religion and it originated from
Asia in the geographical East. The movement that
gave rise to Christianity was begun by Jesus Christ
who was born over 2000 years ago in Bethlehem
in present-day Palestine. The followers of the
teachings of Christ were first called “Christians” in
the town of Antioch which is now a historical site in
present-day Turkey. Antioch lies on the eastern
part of Turkey which is in Asia. It is not clear when
Christianity was brought to either Europe or Africa.
It is recorded in the Bible that Christ was taken to
Egypt as an infant by Mary and Joseph who were
fleeing from Herod the Great during the Massacre of
the Innocents. However, Christ’s ministry began
few years before He was crucified. It is not recorded
if He went to Africa or Europe during His ministry.
What is clear, though, is that one of His apostles,
Mark, established the first church in Africa twelve
years after the crucifixion, known as the Church of
Alexandria.
Some years before that, another apostle, Philip, was
recorded in the Acts of the Apostles to have
baptized an Ethiopian eunuch on the road leading
to Gaza from Jerusalem. The Acts, however, did not
tell us where the eunuch went afterwards or if he
spread the message in Ethiopia. A church was
established in Ethiopia some years after the Church
of Alexandria in Egypt and it is still in existence
today. Most present-day Ethiopians are Christians
and their own form of Christianity is not linked to
the ones spread by the Europeans.
The Bible, the Church and People in the Middle Ages believed that the Earth was flat : According
to the notion – which has been erroneously
published in some textbooks – Christians in the
Middle Ages believed that the Earth was flat. The
notion has it that it was not until Genoese explorer,
Christopher Columbus, had “sailed round the
world” without falling off the Earth's presumed
edge (and “discovered” what turned out to be
North America) that the Church leaders came to the
realization that the Earth is indeed spherical and not
flat. Contrary to this view, Greek astronomers and
pretty much everyone else then knew long before
the advent of Christianity that the Earth was
spherical. The early Greeks were renowned
astronomers who made predictions that are still
correct today. The Bible also alluded to a spherical
Earth. Isaiah 40:22 says that “He (God) sits
enthroned above the circle of the earth.” It was
only a handful of scholars in the Middle Ages who
claimed to be representing the whole Church that
believed in a flat Earth.
Michael Faraday invented electricity: No-one
actually invented electricity. The form of energy
now known as electricity has been there since the
beginning of the world. Electricity occurs in nature.
A lightning bolt, for example, releases electricity.
Thomas Edison invented the light bulb: While it is
not clear who invented light bulbs, they were being
used as electric lights more than 50 years before
Thomas Edison patented his famous invention in
1879. What Edison invented was the world's first
commercially viable incandescent light bulb.
Diabetes is caused by sugar: Sugar doesn’t
directly cause diabetes, but if you consume too
much sugar, you are likely going to get diabetes.
What sugar does is that it increases the quantity of
calories in the body. Too many calories in the body
lead to weight gain which significantly increases a
person’s likelihood to develop type 2 diabetes.
The Whites kidnapped Africans and sold them
into slavery : This is not entirely true. Most slaves
that were shipped into the Americas to work in
plantations were actually captured by their own
kinsmen and sold to the Europeans. When it all
began, the Europeans were the ones doing the
kidnapping. They organized abduction raids to
capture slaves from different communities. But in
no time, they realized that it was too dangerous a
venture for them since they were not familiar with
the inland terrains. What did they do? They
subsequently found people that will do their dirty
jobs. Then came the local chiefs and the greedy
merchants. They were given this responsibility in
exchange for money and other privileges. At the
height of the slave trade, this practice became a
lucrative business along Nigeria’s Atlantic coast.
The United States of America is the world’s
largest economy : That was until 2014; October to
be precise. The US is still the richest country when
measured by reserves and collective national
wealth, but it no longer has the world's largest
economy, according to the International Monetary
Fund’s Gross Domestic Product Purchasing Power
Parity (GDP PPP) estimates. China is now the world’s
largest economy. In the IMF's indices, China’s GDP is
now worth $17.63 trillion compared with the US’ $
17.55 trillion. The IMF makes its calculations based
on purchasing power parity, a measure which is
preferred by most economists. Purchasing power
parity adjusts a country’s GDP for inflation based on
the fact that the prices of goods and services as well
as cost of living vary from country to country. When
not measured based on purchasing power parity,
the United States is still the world’s number one
economy with a GDP of $16.8 trillion compared to
China’s $10.3 trillion.
http:///127vR76

Very educative article. Got carried away by the infos i was getting there.