This is how I felt as a kid when my peers insisted the thumb is not a finger. Like what are you talking about bro? If I asked before this came up, you'd have said you have ten fingers, not eight.

It's wild to me... And then to get mad? Like "how dare you make me learn something"

Proud ignorance is basically a religion in the US now.

I'm able to understand conceptually that "meat" doesn't literally mean any animal's muscle tissue in every language. Sometimes it's a more vague concept of a large mammal's meat and excludes fish, poultry, etc. And that's okay. But I also hate it.

They are kind of right ... there is no such thing as a fish.

I had a teacher in 6th grade who told us that God placed the earth the perfect distance from the Sun; a few inches closer and we'd all burn, and a few inches further and we'd all freeze. I got detention for standing on top of my desk and asking why I wasn't on fire yet.

That kinda shattered my view of teachers being arbiters of knowledge.

Silimar, I had a teacher ask us to write down the first animal that came to mind and I wrote, "wolf spider" because to an 8 year old, there are few more bad ass sounding animals.

She said "really? That's the First animal you think of?" Eye roll

Me: looks down at doodles of giant spiders battling tanks that shoot lightning, "it's the only animal I'm thinking of right now..."

Or that we are quite literally apes.

Today I learned about a whole new type of stupid I didn’t even know existed 😩

mutters to self don't take the bait

i envy you. i've met people who don't thrnk birds are animals, including one veterinarian.

A lot of people appear to think that animal=mammal or animal=vertebrate. I remember when in history class we had to discuss differences between humans and other animals. The girl I had as my partner told me fish and dolphins weren't animals.

Animals are one group or "kingdom" of life. Plants (such as trees) and fungi (such as mushrooms) each have their own kingdoms, and so do bacteria and a few other forms of life. They're organized this way to represent how closely related they are. Every single living thing in the animal kingdom is more closely related to every single other thing in the animal kingdom than to anything in any other kingdom.

As an example, chimpanzees, starfish, and earthworms are more closely related to each other than to a sunflower, so we call chimpanzees, starfish, and earthworms animals but not sunflowers. This is called "taxonomy" and there's a ton of different levels of how related things are, ranging from very distantly related to so closely related you can barely tell them apart. Kingdom isn't even the most broad!

You might have also heard that fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants, but that doesn't mean that fungi are animals, just that the lifeform that branched into fungi and animals did so a lot later than the one that branched into plants. In the end they're still distinct enough that we call them different kingdoms!