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04 Dec 2008 15:53
I found the article about air resistance very interesting, and, like the authors of one of the texts quoted, I was surprised at how big the effect is.
A similar (more elementary) case in biology where the textbooks say something that contradicts the everyday experience of some readers is the description of human eye colour in elementary accounts of Mendelian genetics. The general idea is that brown eyes are dominant over blue, so if both parents have blue eyes then so do their children; if either parent is homozygotic for brown eyes then the children have brown eyes, but if either or both parents are heterozygotic the child's eyes may be either brown or blue. All that is true enough if we confine attention to people whose eyes are bright blue or dark brown, but that leaves out a lot of people who will read the textbook account and wonder how it applies to them. My eyes are neither brown nor blue, and there are plenty of other people who can say the same. Of course, it's fine for a textbook to describe the simplest case, but it's important to say that it is the simplest case and that real life is often more complicated.
-- Athel Cornish-Bowden (email), December 4, 2008
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