If there were only those two issues you could be right. But I have to draw the line somewhere. I pretty much knew what kind of silliness I was in for at the very beginning when one of the scientists said that breathing the planet's atmosphere of 3% carbon dioxide was like sucking on a tailpipe.
Well yes, but you could also view the tailpipe comment as 'realistic', in the sense that there are a lot of people *in our reality* who blow smoke and state blatant untruths. I mean, you could walk down the street or anywhere and hear non-scientists profess knowledge on a certain topic that they know nothing about. Or even more educated people stating things that aren't true, whether willfully, b.s.ing, to try to make themselves look more knowledgable to those around them than they actually are, or they're ignorant and don't know they're slipping up on a fact.
Also, what I edited into my first response re. the Stupidity factor in general --even the 'stupidity' element could be viewed as realistic, depending on the psychology of those involved; i.e. heightened stress, panic mode, utterly foreign and potentially life-threatening environment, causing people to lose their more rational side and therefore be... stupid. lol.
But yeah, I'm not sure why in this movie they went the route of having a higher # of non-scientist scientists than your typical sci-fi film.
Re. the genetics talk -- I am not overly bothered by distant aliens not following genetics/evolution as we know it here, because I'm of the opinion there could be very different processes elsewhere, the building blocks/metabolism elsewhere not needing to be how it is here, thus why should I expect or require the aliens/biological processes in sci-fi movies to follow that of Earth?