6'facts' you learned in school that have since been proven wrong

When you're trying to teach dozens of students the finer points of history and science, sometimes it's just easier to provide a simpler narrative.
But as James Loewen chronicles in his classic book "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong," teaching simplistic narratives of history doesn't do anyone any good.
The same issue exists in other subjects as well. No, Isaac Newton didn't "discover" gravity when an apple fell on his head. And yes, Pluto is still a planet — it's just a special kind of planet.
Like many myths, these stories often have a kernel of truth to them — it just isn't what you learned. Here are 14 things you may have learned in school that have since been proven wrong:


MYTH: Chameleons change colors to camouflage themselves.

In pop culture, chameleons are thought of as spiky lizards that change their skin to fit any color or pattern in their surroundings. This belief makes them metaphors for things like disguisable military technology and talented actors.
But while their color-changing abilities are prodigious, they mostly use it to maintain a certain body temperature and as a way to communicate with other chameleons, not to hide from predators.
In any case, cuttlefish are much better at changing colors to fit their surroundings.


MYTH: Christopher Columbus discovered America.

The belief that Christopher Columbus discovered America is apparently widespread. In a 2005 survey from the University of Michigan, 85% of Americans believed that Columbus discovered the continent while only 2% of respondents were able to correctly answer that Columbus couldn't have possibly discovered America because Native Americans already lived here.
In any case, the first European to land in America is widely accepted by historians to be the Viking explorer Leif Erikson, who sailed from Greenland to Newfoundland in Canada in around 1,000 A.C.
Columbus is historically significant because, in his 1492 voyage to the Americas, he brought diseases that killed a massive portion of the Native American population — some suggest as much as 90% — and paved the way for European imperialism in the Western Hemisphere.


MYTH: You can only taste certain things on certain parts of your tongue.

According to the tongue map myth, different parts of your tongue are for different sorts of tastes. The back of your tongue detects bitter tastes, the front takes in sweet tastes, and so on.
This is wrong. Taste receptors are all over your tongue, and they all pick up all kinds of tastes.
It's true that some taste buds are more receptive to certain kinds of tastes than others, but the difference is slight, according to the University of Florida Center for Smell and Taste, and the locations of those taste buds aren't in accordance with the "tongue map."


MYTH: Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.

The historical interpretation of Lincoln emancipating slaves in the United States isn't so wrong as it is simplistic. In that narrative of history, Lincoln fought the Civil War over slavery, and the Emancipation Proclamation and Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution were his legal tools for ending slavery.
But that narrative displaces slaves from the center of the narrative and focuses only on the actions of one white man. While Lincoln, significantly, chose to wage the Civil War rather than not, and took legal steps to grant former slaves citizenship, slaves themselves struggled for centuries to be recognized as people under the law and escape their bondage.
"Lincoln moved more slowly and apparently more reluctantly toward making it a war for freedom than black leaders, abolitionists, radical Republicans, and the slaves themselves wanted him to move," James McPherson, a Civil War historian, wrote in "Who Freed the Slaves?"


MYTH: Slavery was confined to the South.

America always had its abolitionist movements, but slavery existed in every colony. Massachusetts, in the northern United States, was the first colony to legalize slavery. And in 1720, around a fifth of New York's population were slaves. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, among other founding fathers, owned hundreds of slaves.
It wasn't until after the Revolutionary War that the abolitionist movement began to be a significant political force. At that point, it was up to each individual state to outlaw slavery. Vermont was the first state to abolish the institution, and more northern states followed soon after that. By the Civil War, it was only the states under the Mason-Dixon line that hadn't abolished slavery.


MYTH: Sir Isaac Newton "discovered" gravity when an apple fell on his head.

Newton's apple legend isn't true, but like many urban legends, it's an embellished version of something that actually happened. An apple didn't fall on Newton's head, but Newton did start theorizing about gravity when he saw an apple falling from a tree and started thinking about it.
The very event was inscribed in Sir Isaac Newton's memoir, where he recalls going outside after dinner with a friend.

we went into the garden, & drank thea under the shade of some appletrees, only he, & myself. amidst other discourse, he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. "why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground," thought he to him self: occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a comtemplative mood: "why should it not go sideways, or upwards? but constantly to the earths centre? assuredly, the reason is, that the earth draws it. there must be a drawing power in matter. & the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the earth must be in the earths center, not in any side of the earth. therefore dos this apple fall perpendicularly, or toward the center. if matter thus draws matter; it must be in proportion of its quantity. therefore the apple draws the earth, as well as the earth draws the apple."

Of course, today our account of physics is far more precise than Newton's notion of gravity. He didn't account for General Relativity, theorized by Albert Einstein more than 200 years after Newton died, and developing ideas in Quantum Mechanics problematize Newton's theories even more.