When is a whale not a whale but just a water enthusiast mammal?
And I pointed out that that’s not how taxonomy works. It’s all about the last common ancestor and it’s obviously not possible to pinpoint this to a single individual. All I said was, from a taxonomic point of view, being a whale isn’t about being aquatic but about sharing a common ancestor with all whales.
I know, I wrote the comment. My point is that even that same definition is flawed and doesn’t work on an evolutionary scale. Because most of human categories exist out of convenience and not strict material objectivity. I chose whales, not at random, but very intentionally. At one point we have something we call a whale, that turned into a hippo. We don’t call hippos whales, but it came from a whale, and our modern whales look nothing like that whale, and it doesn’t matter, because it’s ok to use whatever works for the purposes at hand in the moment. We just need to accept that binary thinking and hard classifications are made up human constructs and nature doesn’t care.
Well, the comment above me was like:
And I pointed out that that’s not how taxonomy works. It’s all about the last common ancestor and it’s obviously not possible to pinpoint this to a single individual. All I said was, from a taxonomic point of view, being a whale isn’t about being aquatic but about sharing a common ancestor with all whales.
I know, I wrote the comment. My point is that even that same definition is flawed and doesn’t work on an evolutionary scale. Because most of human categories exist out of convenience and not strict material objectivity. I chose whales, not at random, but very intentionally. At one point we have something we call a whale, that turned into a hippo. We don’t call hippos whales, but it came from a whale, and our modern whales look nothing like that whale, and it doesn’t matter, because it’s ok to use whatever works for the purposes at hand in the moment. We just need to accept that binary thinking and hard classifications are made up human constructs and nature doesn’t care.