The theme song to Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady's 2007 sitcom The Big Bang Theory was written and performed by the Canadian rock group Barenaked Ladies. The world at large knows the band best from their 1998 quadruple-platinum-selling record Stunt, which featured the hit single It's All Been Done and, of course, the ultra-awesome One Week. If you want to hear a Gen-Xer recite something sharply for two minutes and 48 seconds, simply walk up to them and sing "That's..." I 100% guarantee, they'll respond with "a week after you looked at I bowed my head to one side and told me I was mad Five days after he laughed at me, saying, "Pull yourself together, come back and see me." etc. etc.

The Barenaked Ladies' performance of "The Big Bang Theory" theme song was characteristically seskipedal, speeding through its lyrics while describing the formation of the universe. Like The Big Bang Theory itself, the song is suitably snarky, making a rapid-fire litany of mostly easy-to-understand references to science and history.

As it turns out, however, he's not nearly edgy enough. Some hair-splitting triggers (read: all of us nerds) can point to a specific scientific error: "Our entire universe was in a hot dense state," sing the Barenaked Ladies, "then nearly 14 billion years ago the expansion began (wait! )." The next paragraph contains several problems. "Earth began to cool, autotrophs began to drool. Neanderthals developed tools."

Autotrophs, as you may remember from high school biology, are organisms that can convert abiotic materials—like carbon, say, or sunlight—into nutrients. Plants, algae and bacteria are autotrophic. Autotrophs do not drool.

Of course, Barenaked Ladies can be given some leeway here, as "drooling" could have been used in a metaphorical sense. "Dribbling" can be used to describe any kind of appetite, not just the type that activates the salivary glands of hominids. You may have heard the word 'drooling', for example, to describe lust, ie: drooling over a crush on a celebrity. One might not literally drool at the sight of, say, Idris Elba. When the "autotrophs started drooling" then they may just have been starving for the sunlight they need to survive. It's a cute little personification for seaweed.

Another error, however, describes the development of tools by the Neanderthals. Neanderthals, as we all know, are a species of Homo sapiens that lived in Asia about 400,000 years ago during the Pleistocene epoch. Shortly after this time early humans developed clothing and art. However, tools were developed much earlier than the Neanderthals. The earliest known paranthropic tools discovered by anthropologists date from about 3.2 to 3.5 million years ago, during the Pliocene epoch. It is, as we probably all know, the Stone Age. It is more accurate to say that Australopithecus afarensis or Australopithecus africanus, Stone Age humans, developed tools. Neanderthals were already using tools from the jump.

The Big Bang Theory lyrics go on to say that “We built a wall! We built the pyramids!” This makes it sound like history happened in that order, which of course it didn't. The Great Wall of China was built gradually from about the 7th century BC, made of fragments joined together by the Qin Emperor Shi Huang in about 200 BC. The known parts were not built until the Ming Dynasty more than 1500 years later. Construction of The Great Pyramids of Gizameanwhile, it started around 2600 BC, before the earliest parts of the Great Wall by a long shot.

Barenaked Ladies should have done a little more research before they started writing songs so recklessly.