Re: Who classified the whales?
- From: bobg@xxxxxxxxx (Robert Grumbine)
- Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 17:44:27 -0000
In article <2047943.rXARbgTqFO@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Tristan Miller <psychonaut@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>Greetings.
>
>In article <ddfu1b$ace$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Paul J Gans wrote:
>
>> John Wilkins <j.wilkins1@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>Serge Paccalin wrote:
>>>> Le mercredi 10 ao?t 2005 ? 16:21:18, Tristan Miller a ?crit dans
>>>> talk.origins :
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>Who was the first to classify whales and dolphins as mammals and not
>>>>>fish
>>>>>or some other group? Was the cetaceans' mammalhood recognized by
>>>>>Carolus Linnaeus, or did this realization come later in the history of
>>>>>zoology?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Somme useful answers you've got there, Tristan...
>>>>
>>>> Anyway it seems that Linnaeus indeed did it:
>>>>
>>>> http://edwardtbabinski.us/whales/introduction.html
>>>>
>>>Be very careful - classifications based on Aristotle, whose works on
>>>Animals were not rediscovered in Europe until the 13thC or so, are based
>>>on *habitat* not *structure* and so it is easy to misread Aristotle and
>>>his followers. For example, Aristotle says this:
>>
>> I've left it in below because everyone should read it. It marks
>> Aristotle as a careful and competent observer and reporter.
>
>I admit I was quite surprised when I read the text John quoted. Aristotle
>is often derided as an armchair philosopher who believed that all
>knowledge could be obtained by reasoning alone, without any observation.
>Indeed, he is notorious for making such stupid claims as that heavier
>bodies fall faster than lighter ones, and that women have fewer teeth than
>men--both of which can be easily disproved by simple observation. How the
>same man who made such outrageously false pronouncements could also make
>such meticulous descriptions and insightful classifications of the
>cetaceans boggles my mind.
It'd be a good idea to not trust terribly far what 'everybody knows'
about Aristotle, not even, or especially, the stupid claims attributed
to him.
As a recently mentioned, I've read his Meteorologica. (Better
translation of the title than 'meteorology' is 'earth sciences',
by the way.) There was a passage of outrageous stupidity ... in
the english side. It averred that the primary colors, which
painters mixed in order to obtain all the rest, were red, orange,
and blue. Orange! Where did that come from? What is he doing
acting as if he'd done some sort of observation (at least to
ask painters about primary colors, if not to mix up his own paints)
and then saying something so absolutely impossible!?
Then I read more Greek, and got more familiar with translation.
I'd already suspected that the translator had made some poor choices
based on other stretches. Finally, I encountered a source that gave
wide usages of Greek, and english translations. The word that the
translator had rendered as 'orange' is about equally often translated
as 'yellow'. Red, yellow, blue work as primary painter's colors,
as many a child with crayons has verified.
It wasn't ignorant, unobservant, armchair philosophizing Aristotle.
It was ignorant, unobservant, armchair philosophizing translator.
(Well, not even that. Just sufficiently unobservant to fail to
come down with the alternate translation of xanthos.)
Somthing to keep in mind is, we don't have Aristotle's science
writings, or any, really. We have texts attributed to him that have
been recopied many times with, in some cases, obvious insertions by
intervening people. Other cases may not be so obvious. In the science
texts, certainly Meteorologica, we also don't have a work of science
so much as class lecture notes as taken by the students. One characteristic
of this is that the level of rigor varies enormously from point to
point. Some are dealt with in great apparent care, others are
pretty much tossed off. I could see this happening in a lecture,
and also as a matter of what a student chose to note.
A different side to keep in mind is that, as with 'those dummies believed
in a flat earth', there's been some reinvention of the past w.r.t.
Aristotle. Not to say that everything he wrote, or had attributed,
was good, careful observational work that would be admired today as
well. The situation then was different. But Aristotle as the _last_
word was certainly a later invention. His writing, or at least the
reportage thereof, doesn't look like that to me. More like someone
presenting some observations, and some reasoning, forcefully but with
efforts at clarity so that flaws could be found and more could be
done. i.o.w., back to being a good science lecture.
In any case, what we have is not J. Aristotelean Science, or
Transactions of the School of Aristotle, as carefully written
and proofed by the author. Incompleteness and inconsistent level
is to be expected. It's also a rather human thing.
--
Robert Grumbine http://www.radix.net/~bobg/ Science faqs and amateur activities notes and links.
Sagredo (Galileo Galilei) "You present these recondite matters with too much
evidence and ease; this great facility makes them less appreciated than they
would be had they been presented in a more abstruse manner." Two New Sciences
.
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- From: Tristan Miller
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