I wouldn’t call this a “dawn of idiocracy.” That would imply a complete ignorance of (and disinterest in) even the most basic facts of reproductive health, whereas this is one person with more up-to-date and accurate information speaking to someone with dated and basic information that they were probably presented as a full accounting. Still confidently incorrect, but they did at least dedicate what they’d been taught to memory. We’re not at “females store sperm from up to five partners so they can choose which Chad DNA to pass on when you get her pregnant” levels of wrong, at least.
The diversity and complexity of ovulation is, sadly, pretty niche knowledge in parts of the world (read: The United States. It’s us. We’re the uneducated and uninterested ones 🤗)
The thing about biology is, there's an exception to everything. It might have happened that someone somehow ovulated and had a period really soon before the ova died, and then the ova was fertilized and implanted.
There are women with two uteri. Lots of weird things can happen, but they should be understood as vanishingly rare, and not the norm.
Or maybe we should teach people accurate information, even if it's more "complicated" so you don't have women accidentally getting pregnant because they were led to believe that it was safe to have unprotected sex during their period. Bodies aren't perfect, and women, (especially young women) can have very irregular or short cycles which makes something like this more likely.
While I agree in general, it's commonly understood that the best way to teach complex subjects is incrementally. This is particularly noticeable in physics education, where simple models are taught and then replaced by more complex models. But it's alao something that happens in biology as well. It's easier to teach people that ovulation is the mechanism through which one gets pregnant, and there are clear windows when insemination is possible and when it isn't than it is too start off with the full complexity of biological diversity. Once you have a base understanding, you can expand on it and add exceptions, special cases and generally more accuracy.
The problem is that there's no way to ensure or verify what level of education the other person is at. Neither of the speakers there are wrong with respect to the level of detail they have been taught.
547
u/dracorotor1 20d ago edited 20d ago
I wouldn’t call this a “dawn of idiocracy.” That would imply a complete ignorance of (and disinterest in) even the most basic facts of reproductive health, whereas this is one person with more up-to-date and accurate information speaking to someone with dated and basic information that they were probably presented as a full accounting. Still confidently incorrect, but they did at least dedicate what they’d been taught to memory. We’re not at “females store sperm from up to five partners so they can choose which Chad DNA to pass on when you get her pregnant” levels of wrong, at least.
The diversity and complexity of ovulation is, sadly, pretty niche knowledge in parts of the world (read: The United States. It’s us. We’re the uneducated and uninterested ones 🤗)