If you like this article you may also want to check out my previous list: Myths That Need Busting.

Here are more myths that need busting based upon current research or my opinion.

You Can Get Non-Genetically Modified Food

Even Europeans who ban genetically modified food are eating exactly that.  Very little food is natural and its genes have been manipulated by humans for thousands of years.  Wheat is a hybrid of three varieties of plant.  Corn started out as a grass.  Many crops are hybrids that are sterile.  Some food varieties have been created by chemical or radiation bombardment to create genetic mutations that are then artificially selected by man.  To say that humans hybridizing or artificially selecting mutations created by nature is natural and that new forms of gene manipulation that are less intrusive is somehow less natural is silly.   My 8 pound poodles are closer to a natural wolf than much of the food we eat is natural.

Disease Does Not Discriminate Based on Race

Yes it does and besides the obvious environmental or socio-economic reasons, there is clear evidence of genetic causes for both the rate and the way different races sometimes respond to various treatments of some disease.  And yet this is such a political hot potato that some people are willing to ignore the science and let people die rather than allow that there could be any such differences.

Criminal Profiling Works

Regardless of it’s popularity on TV shows or in the news media, the evidence is that profilers aren’t any better than a typical college student in coming up with a profile of a criminal.  What they produce is either too vague to help or simply baseline statistics available to anyone such as the fact that most serial killers are male.

JFK Was Murdered by a Conspiracy

The quality of evidence for Oswald acting alone is 1,000 times better than any conspiracy theory.  Read “Reclaiming History” by Vincent Bugliosi for the most exhaustive treatment.

Venting Works

It seems like it helps, but a large amount of research shows venting makes you feel worse not better.  I wrote an article on this: To Vent or Not To Vent.

Athletes Don’t Get “Hot”

Basketball players don’t get on shooting streaks because they get “hot”.  The streaks that occur in basketball and sports generally are clusters that do not exceed what is expected by pure chance (like coin flipping).  There may possibly be some streak somewhere in some sport, but if it exists it has been extremely hard to demonstrate.  It certainly isn’t the widespread phenomena that we think.  As a sports fan I find this hard to accept, but the evidence is pretty clear: Basketball Players and The Hot Hand.

Government Drug Wars Are Effective

Ok, this may not exactly be a myth too many people believe, but since so many people support it for whatever reason, it is important to say it anyway.  Whatever you believe about the use of drugs, whatever impact they may have had on you and your loved ones, the question remains has the war on drugs worked?  The only reasonable answer is “no” and even the drug czar admits it.  Another trillion down the drain.

After 40 years, the United States’ war on drugs has cost $1 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what? Drug use is rampant and violence even more brutal and widespread….

Even U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske concedes the strategy hasn’t worked.

“In the grand scheme, it has not been successful,” Kerlikowske told The Associated Press. “Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified.”…

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Tagged as: false beliefs, myth busting, myths, urban legends