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Artistic License Biology: Difference between revisions
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* [[Non-Mammal Mammaries]]
* [[Nuclear Nasty]] (Note, this only applies for the earlier un-ironic examples where they actually thought radiation worked that way instead of the [[Art Major Biology|later ones]] where it was done for sheer [[Rule of Cool]])
* [[Only Point Two Percent Different]]
* [[Patchwork Kids]]
* [[Perpetual Molt]]
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* A [[Fetish Fuel]]-crossed-with-disturbing ''[[Lord of the Rings]]'' fic featured the [[Mary Sue]] sustaining the Fellowship when they ran out of food by ''breastfeeding'' them. Human females do not produce enough milk to feed nine adult males at once. Someone on a badfic-sporking community pointed out that they'd do better to kill and eat her.
** Not to mention the fact that, even if the [[Mary Sue]] could produce enough milk, human breast-milk has very little nutritional value to a human older than, say, 8 years old (this being the absolute upper limit).
* Similarly to the above, [[Celebrian]] features the title character learning to [[Squick|subsist entirely on semen]]. Then again, maybe orc semen has a higher vitamin content than that of humans.
* Just about every aspect of ''[[For Your Eyes Only (fanfic)|For Your Eyes Only]]''.
* Yaoi fanfic that wishes to define a man as a virgin because his "asshymen" has been breached. As anyone who has ever taken a shit should know, [[Captain Obvious|there is no such thing as an asshymen]]. And besides, if such were the case, [[Anal Cunt|wouldn't that mean]][[Incredibly Lame Pun|...]]
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* Invoked in ''[[Shinji and Warhammer40K|Shinji and Warhammer 40k]]'', after Shinji's trip through the temple of trials. He emerges and calls out the monks on how giant scorpions and the like should not exist by any known physical law, quoting this page's title, word for word.
* [[Mister Seahorse|MPreg fics]]. Sometimes [[Hand Wave|hand waved]] by [[A Wizard Did It]] sometimes...not. The so called real biological justifications range from [[Squick|babies delivered anally]] to the character having a uterus. The latter example ignores the lack of ovaries, fallopian tubes, a menstrual cycle or any relevant opening with which to eject the baby. There's [[You Fail Biology Forever]] and then, there's this.
* The ''Digimon'' fanfic ''Red Digivice Diaries'' fails in two ways. First is, when Digimon have sex, the male grows a penis. Seriously, WTF? Second example is that Digimon don't give live birth. Instead, they have digitams develop and give birth to that.
* There is one Harry Potter fanfic that places Draco's penis at a minimum of ''forty-two inches long''<ref> IT COULD GET ON DISNEYLAND ATTRACTIONS BY ITSELF</ref>. Needless to say, the quantity of blood required to get something that long erect would cause the rest of the body to die from lack of blood pretty much instantly.
** Not to mention that he'd have it [[Groin Attack|dragging against the ground]] [[Nightmare Fuel|wherever he goes]]. And he better be asexual, or else he's going to live a life of forced celibacy, or have to romance giantesses.
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* Any Christmas movie which shows female reindeer without antlers, or male reindeer retaining their antlers into December, Fails Biology Forever. Females of the species need antlers to guard their young from predators, whereas males shed theirs after the rutting season, with one exception: males retain antlers in winter if they have a "special operation".
* The writers of ''[[Mission to Mars]]'' clearly had a lacking understanding of genetics. To start with, one of the characters constructs a model of a DNA molecule from supplied spacial coordinates, then [[Gary Sinise]] is able to ''look'' at a (very small) string of computer-generated DNA, and see that it "looks human". This is impossible, because a) you can't tell what species a sequence came from by looking at such a small sample and b) spacial coordinates that form a double helix say precisely jack shit about what bases (and, by extension, what genes) are contained in the DNA sequence. Then someone mentions it's missing "the last pair of chromosomes," when the simulation makes it readily apparent it's missing the last pair of ''bases''. To top it all off, the coloring of the bases appear to suggest that a base pair is made up of two identical bases, which is just wrong.
* A scene in the bad Canadian vampire B-movie ''Thralls'' features the lead villain vampire ''punch another man through his stomach, tear part of his spine out and show it to him as the now-spineless man merely '''stands there'''''. And then, rather than break in half where his spine used to be... he just collapses.
* In the [[James Bond (film)|James Bond]] film ''[[Goldfinger]]'', a Bond girl is asphyxiated by covering her entire body with gold paint. Bond explains that people need at least a small patch of bare skin at the base of the spine to "breathe." This isn't true. It was Dave Barry who remarked on the "remarkable recent discovery that people actually breathe with their ''lungs'', and not with their skin after all." This actually has a grain of truth, but the idea of ''asphyxiation'' due to painted skin is still 100% bilge. Death would be from heat exhaustion if the paint interfered with perspiration, or exposure to toxins if the paint were unsafe. And it would take a very very very long time.
** Overlapping with [[Science Marches On]]: At the time the novel was written, "skin asphyxiation" was taken seriously, at least by the public. The studio had a team of doctors on hand while shooting the death scene, and left actress Shirley Eaton's stomach unpainted to make sure she could breathe.
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**** What I think it ultimately comes down to is the fact that the Spleen wasn't exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer.
* In the a ''[[Final Destination]]'' movie, a girl is slowly pulled into the machinery of an escalator. As soon as her feet get crushed, she starts spewing blood all over her boyfriend. No reason for that, really. No digestive or respiratory organs in the feet.
** It is possible that getting her legs crushed between those cogs and gears caused her blood pressure to skyrocket, which would pop blood vessels (starting with the very weak ones, such as the capillary bed in the lungs). Imagine rolling a tube of toothpaste starting from the bottom up.
** Actually, every single movie is filled with ''[[You Fail Biology Forever]]'' moments. And a bit of ''[[You Fail Physics Forever]]''. C'mon, who gets crushed to death by a rocketed tank gas and a fence? Even if the fence is quite sharp, it should have be broken before reducing someone to confetti.
* A minor case in ''[[Mystery Team]]'', but it is somewhat unusual that Jason can bike several miles with one flat tire without showing any signs of fatigue.
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*** Actually, given Godzilla's mass, the amount of force generated by falling at that speed would have been less "splatter" and more "[[Earthshattering Kaboom]]."
* In ''[[Showgirls]]'', does Kyle MacLachlan's penis [[The Nostalgia Chick|exist in the midst of his stomach]]? A double case of this and [[Anatomically-Impossible Sex]].
* In ''[[The Matrix]]'', Agent Smith gives a [[Hannibal Lecture]] on how humans are viruses, because they don't instinctively develop an equilibrium with their environment like other mammals and instead breed until they can't support themselves and have to move on. In reality, mammals do not instinctively do that, and equilibrium is something forced on them.
* When Major Cain tries to persuade Alice to cooperate with Umbrella in ''[[Resident Evil: Apocalypse|Resident Evil Apocalypse]]'', she calls herself a freak. Cain's reply? "No. You're not mutation, you're evolution!". If Alice were to breed and pass on her mutation, then it would be evolution.
* One would hope that Trevor Reznick/Christian Bale of [[The Machinist]] is exaggerating when he claims not to have slept a wink for [[The Insomniac|over a year]] - Unless he was taking little 5-10 minute naps without realizing it, he'd have been dead after a month.
** That film did a darn good job establishing Reznick as an [[Unreliable Narrator]], so it seems likely he caught cat naps without realizing it.
* This could be applied to the majority of vampire movies which try to sound "scientific." While it would be possible to rely on a blood-only diet similar to the vampire bat, the vampire in question would have to take half their weight in blood and become enormously bloated since blood contains about 90 percent water and only 10 percent in protein without any fats or carbohydrates. [[A Wizard Did It|Magic]] vampires, of course, can handwave all of this.
** In addition, vampire bats after a feeding are usually too heavy to fly and must accomodate this by digesting the blood quickly and releasing most of it through their urine.
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** [[Bill Bailey]] said "Spiders are not insects, but if there was a War, they would side with the insects."
*** [[Ear Worm|Traitors, traitors, spider traitors...]]
* ''[[In Time]]'' The premise of the movie is that the aging gene is switched off, resulting in effective immortality. Aging is not the result of a gene. Aging is caused by the degradation of telomeres. Telomeres are repeated strings of meaningless DNA sequences at the ends of chromosomes. Every time cells divide, the chromosome lose some base pairs, necessitating these telomeres. They function in quite a similar way to the aglets on the end of your shoelaces.
* The second [[X-Men]] movie has a scene where a mutant comes out to his parents about it. His father turns to his wife and says, "This is all your fault!" Wolverine speaks up, saying "Actually, the mutant gene is carried on the Y chromosome, so it's really your fault." No mention is made of the fact that Jean Grey, Storm, Mystique, and Rogue apparently now don't exist, or at least aren't mutants, because females only have X chromosomes. Of course, this is Wolverine. [[Word of God]] is that the line was solely intended to aggravated the jerk.
** The [[X-Men]] series has a whole collection of offenses. Mutants cannot be called another ''species'', given that they can still interbreed freely with normal humans. Even if you don't have a biology diploma, it ought to be obvious that there could be no universal "cure" that suppressed all the flashy mutations (but not "regular" ones like, say, heterochromia?) on any given mutant without affecting anything else, and certainly not in a matter of seconds.
** The one speaking up is Pyro, not Wolverine.
* Oh so very much in the killer snake movie ''[[Anaconda]]'', all in the name of the [[Rule of Scary]]. Among other things:
** Anacondas don't grow that damn big.
** They don't move at the speed of a cheetah in chase.
** They don't predominantly prey on humans, especially after [[Super-Persistent Predator|encountering life-threatening resistance each time]].
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** In "The Creeping Man", the eponymous character "devolves" into an ape by shooting up with monkey blood, or brain juice, or something. Just... no. (An episode of ''Mystery'' based on this story had to put a disclaimer at the beginning of it explaining this fact, lest the audience treat the story's events as pure [[Narm]]. It is instead claimed that the character has been driven mad by the adverse effects of the hormones so that he ''thinks'' he is a monkey.)
** In "The Speckled Band", the villain controls a snake by whistling, which a snake would be unable to hear. This one was lampshaded in a Russian miniseries. Watson points out that the snake couldn't possibly hear its master's call. Holmes replies that the villain wasn't sure in his method either, and also tapped his cane on the floor.
*** The man also tempts the snake with milk (a common misconception). Holmes calls it "a swamp adder, the deadliest snake in India", a name which does not correspond to any species of the snake's characteristics.
*** In the same story, a man who collects Indian wildlife is said to have a pet cheetah and pet baboon. While cheetahs hadn't yet been driven to extinction in India in Doyle's day, baboons come from Africa: large ground-dwelling monkeys from the Indian subcontinent are properly called "macaques".
* [[Wayne Barlowe]] does a pretty good job of maintaining consistent and possible alien biologies in ''[[Expedition]]''... except for the Daggerwrists. Pregnant Daggerwrists are cannibalistic and are executed by their tribes when their single offspring is born. If you can't do the math, this means that ''at least two Daggerwrists will die for every one born''.
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** Both [[Harry Potter/Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone|the book]] and [[Harry Potter (film)|movie]] of ''Philosopher's Stone'' feature a snake that winks at Harry. ''Snakes can't wink''.
* In the ''[[Replica]]'' series of YA novels, the bad guys repeatedly try to get hold of Amy's super-DNA by ''cutting her hair and fingernails''. The installment where her DNA reverted to "normal" after getting her ears pierced ... wait, what?
* In ''[[The Stand]]'', the explanations given for the operation of the superflu virus are sketchy at best, and it seems highly unlikely that the disease would have resulted in such massive destruction. (Among other things, a plague is deadliest if it has a ''long'' incubation period, giving it maximum lead time in which to spread before the victim becomes too sick to move around.) Still, there aren't any obvious screw ups... until the end. {{spoiler|Up until this point, the superflu had been a binary proposition: Either you got it and died, or you didn't get it. At the end, however, a baby born to one immune and one non-immune parent gets the superflu and then recovers; which leads the thoughtful reader to ask, what the hell happened to the children of immune and non-immune parents born before the flu? As a bonus, the explanation given for how the baby recovered is a load of crap}}.
** The explanation for why {{spoiler|the baby recovers and the children of immunes and non-immunes don't before the plague seems implicitly to be that the babies not born until after the plague have acquired protection from the plague by being in their immune mothers' uteruses at the time of the plague; those born before the plague are no longer connected to the mother and thus don't have the ability to catch it and recover.}}
** In ''[['Salem's Lot]]'' Dr. Cody, who is not depicted as an ignorant quack but an at least semi-competent professional, says, "Why should your head hurt? Your brain doesn't have any nerves." First off, if your brain had no nerves then it would functionally be useless. He means that your brain doesn't have ''nociceptors'', which is true, but doctors universally knew very long before the book was written that there are all sorts of reasons why your head still hurts. For example, while the gray matter ''itself'' doesn't feel pain the blood vessels that run through the brain do. Ice cream headache is one example of this type: the sudden rush of cold to the head makes the vessels temporarily painfully retract. Also, sinuses can cause headaches, as can the inner scalp. Very often it's the back of the eyes (which are less round and go further back into the skull than they look from the outside) hurting due to eye strain or what not. The skull can feel pain too, but probably only if you've suffered serious cranial damage. No one with an M.D. wouldn't know all this.
* In ''[[Prince Caspian]]'', Reepicheep the talking mouse has lost his tail in battle, and he argues with Aslan over whether it needs to be regrown. Both of them seem to think a mouse's tail has no practical value, and is of use only as a badge of honor or vanity, but the tails of mice and rats are actually important thermoregulatory structures, without which he'd be quite vulnerable to heat stroke.
** A mouse the size of a domestic cat would have problems with that anyway. It's moot for purposes of the story.
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** ''[[Star Trek: Voyager|Voyager]]''
*** In the episode "Macrocosm" we have viruses(!) which can grow in size - up to a meter, fly, and hover in the air - something tells me the word "virus" was completely misunderstood...
*** 'Virus' was only what everyone was calling them. They had features of many different forms of life, viruses included.
*** The Occampans (Kes' race) In ''Voyager'', can only reproduce ''once'', and have ''one child''. What kind of species would evolve such a trait and thrive? You'd need EVERY member of your race to reproduce to have 0 population growth. If any member of the race dies, then the race as a whole has taken a blow it cannot recover from! Heck, ''how'' did the Occampan race come about? Since they can have only one child, and thus cannot grow in numbers, how are there so many of them?
*** It was actually explained in a novella that twin and triplet births were extremely common among Ocampans, so it depends how you look at it.
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** Finn was persuaded that he had impregnated Quinn by ejaculating into a hot tub they were sharing, while both of them were wearing bathing suits.
** In the episode "Sexy," [[The Ditz|Brittany]] thought she was going to have a baby because she saw a stork building a nest atop her garage. Not only do storks not drop off babies, but they also [[wikipedia:Wood Stork|do not nest in Ohio]].
* The 1995 Outer Limits remake's Season 7 "Flower Child" was a flagrant offender in this category, featuring Violet, a plant lifeform taking the form of a hot chick via stealing human DNA. At the end of the episode and when her plans are questioned, she reveals her plans for Earth - to the human male who "fathered" her family of spores, no less - with the words "A new species, part you but more of me. To spread across this land, to become many. To become dominant." Correct this troper if he's wrong, but isn't the whole point of inherited genetic characteristics that each parent contributes HALF of their DNA to the child, and not more than half?
** But even more so, since Violet's human form isn't 100% E.T. by default, isn't the new species going to be more him?!?
* [[The X-Files]] has a bit of this with most monsters-of-the-week.
** Human-flatworm hybrids can happen on their own with enough [[Nuclear Nasty|radioactive sludge]].
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**** That dove straight into [[Voodoo Shark]]; it makes even less sense.
** The Kroot. Mostly blank DNA, and they evolve very rapidly by incorporating DNA from everything they eat into their genetic structure.
*** So what makes them develop into the organisms they are if their DNA is 'blank' (whatever that means)? Definately a case of 'well, it sounded cool when I wrote it''.
**** Most DNA in a human is "blank" junk DNA. Besides the genes proper, there are small sequences which label the genes and tell cells when to turn them on, short sequences which are basically viruses that moved in with us, small protective sequences, and a whole lot of nothing. More accurately, it has no known function and can be lost without adverse effect.
*** Could be worse. Major changes still take several generations. The repercussions of the "DNA theft" ability are shown in other things from the same planet: there's really only one linage of creatures that ATE everything and took over their niches. There's even some FUNGUS in kroot digestive processes, cribbed from Orks. We are talking about alien physiology here.
** Ork DNA, in past editions, contained an "algal base" that explained their resilience. This made no sense whatsoever and was dropped.
* In FGU's ''Space Opera'', a character who has died can be injected with "TKM"; a drug that stops cell decomposition. But the drug reaches the whole body via circulation, a function that stops at the moment of death.
* [[White Wolf]]'s ''Aeon Trinity'' contains the following gem: "[Psions are] the product of natural human evolution, not genetic mutation." This was later reconed to refer to mankind's ''spiritual'' evolution.
* Two specific cases in ''[[Rifts]]'', listed separately:
** In the Atlantis Sourcebook, a parasite called a Brain Feeder is said to "...excrete a chemical that anesthetizes the area of the brain it is eating..." This would be unnecessary, as there are no pain receptors in the brain, and therefore it can't feel pain.
** This one could well be a case of [[Science Marches On]]. There is an animal race in the books called an Ostrosaurus, which is not a dinosaur but "a large featherless bird." According to modern paleontology, that is exactly what dinosaurs were.
* ''[[FATAL]]'' allows for completely out-of-whack character biology. Would you like to have nipples the size of your head and an anus with negative circumference? Equally silly is being able to hit a very specific internal organ AND NOTHING ELSE on the enemy; to quote [http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/14/14567.phtml one of the more infamous reviews]:
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** Even more, Mammals also have hollow bones. In fact, a bird's bones are '''heavier''' than a same sized mammal's, since they have to hold all the muscles needed for flight.
* A staggering [http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2009/02/41_of_museums_d.php 41% of museums don't know how dogs walk.]
* Similar to the [[Chick Tracts]] example under Comic Books, some pro-abstinence church groups claim that condoms are made of porous material that allows viruses to pass through. This is only true "skin condoms" which are made out of things like lambskin and are porous enough to pass viruses, and the packaging is quick to point out that these are '''ONLY FOR CONTRACEPTION''', and suggest the manufacturer's latex and nitrile options are a much better alternative if the potential customer is worried about VD. Promoting the idea that they are all like that borders on criminal, since studies exist showing that 'abstinence only' curricula that emphasizes the fallibility of protection '''strongly''' tends to be correlated with increased rates of VD, as students' thought processes rapidly approach something along the lines of 'why bother'.
* At this post [http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/lady-gaga/lady-gaga-has-a-d-k/t.62893045_13/ here], people argue about [[Lady Gaga]]'s sex. Scroll down to SolaceConversion.
* A surprising number of people believe the human heart is on the left side of a person's chest, to the extent that some symbolic tattoos are placed over the left lung in support of this belief. While it is positioned ''slightly'' to the left (due to the left ventricle being larger than the right ventricle), it is much more central, located between the two lungs under the sternum in a part of the body called the mediastinum.
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