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If you ever get a chance to read Moby Dick, you will both a) read one of the greatest works of American literature and b) learn more about the biology and behav

If you ever get a chance to read Moby Dick, you will both a) read one of the greatest works of American literature and b) learn more about the biology and behavior of whales and the 19th-century whaling industry than you can possibly imagine. Great book.

busfahrer 6y ago
I was about to post that I recently read it and felt all smug that they didn’t even know all the species of whale back in 1851. So much for that! But of course I wholeheartedly second the recommendation.
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bigbubba 6y ago
Chapter 32 (Cetology) is excellent. In it, the narrator explains the contemporary scientific understanding of whales and describes all their varieties then known. My favorite bit is the part where he explains the numerous differences between whales and fish (they have lungs, are warm blooded, they breast feed, have eyelids, etc.) The narrator explains that men of science have decided whales are not fish for these reasons. Then the narrator delightfully argues that despite all these differences, fish are animals that live in the water, and therefore whales are fish. I love this; it is common knowledge today that 'whales aren't fish' but few ever stop to think twice about that. There is no contesting that whales are surely mammals, but who says some mammals can't be fish? In the traditional biological nomenclature, 'fish' is a paraphyletic classification with arbitrarily excludes tetrapods (those lobe-finned fish that climbed out of the sea and became the four limbed animals we see today, including ourselves.) Why does fish exclude tetrapods? For cultural reasons clearly, it seems obvious to us that humans, dogs, lizards, birds, etc are not 'fish', because they lack the distinctly fishy quality of living in the water. So we say the tetrapods, the fish that left the water, are no longer fish. But some tetrapods returned to the water, regaining that distinctly fishy attribute. These are the whales. Tetrapods are not fish because they aren't aquatic, but whales are tetrapods which are aquatic, and I therefore declare them fish. (And in the cladistic system of biological classification, we are fish too.) Incidentally, when you make this sort of argument people tend to get pretty cross. It seems important to many people that whales not be called fish. Why is this? Is it because they think people will empathize with whales more if their mammalian nature is emphasized and their fishy nature is denied? Probably they're right about that, but it's hardly a scientific argument. Then again, 'fish' is hardly a much of a scientific classification since it has an exception carved out of it to accommodate our cultural 'knowledge' that people are 'not fish'.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  When it recently became popular knowledge that birds are dinosaurs, I asked why birds are dinosaurs for merely descending from them, but we wouldn’t argue that people are fish despite also descending from them. It seems like a somewhat arbitrary semantic argument, but I’m not an expert by any means.
  - shakna 6y ago
    The very simple answer is because dinosaur is a scientific term that covers a very narrow band of fauna, and that bit of popular knowledge is _wrong_... Depending on who you speak to. Dinosaurs are "terrestrial reptiles of the orders Saurischia and Ornithischia that existed during the Mesozoic Era, including but not limited to megafauna." There are plenty of other megafauna that the public think of as dinosaurs, that aren't, because they're not part of the clade 'Dinosauria'. So of course anything descended from extinct creatures from roughly the right age are "dinosaurs" to the common person. However! Recent changes in the way we classify species, moving to phylogenetics, says that for a group to be natural, all descendants must be part of said group. Making birds, dinosaurs. Whilst this reclassification (which whilst popular also has popular detractors), wouldn't say people are fish, it would say that both fish and people are Eukaryotes.
    - bigbubba 6y ago
      Speaking of dinosaurs that aren't dinosaurs, and fish that aren't fish, there are the Ichthyosaurs. Marine reptiles that lived alongside the non-avian dinosaurs, but were not dinosaurs. Being a reptile, it wasn't a fish either. They did however looked remarkably like dolphins, which is interesting because like dolphins, ichthyosaurs are tetrapods that returned to the water.
- keiferski 6y ago
  Thanks for the this long comment. I had a similar thought the other day and your remarks reminded me of it, so I'll share. It was something like this: the way we categorize and conceive of objects in the world is very much influenced by our overall cultural/civilization worldview. We seem to be very tied to this Platonic ideal/form of what something is inherently and then building the world up from there, rather than other ways of categorization; i.e by our emotional reaction to the object, or our sensory experience of it. For example, both an orange and the Sun are round, orange-colored objects. If our primary way of organizing the world were based on pure visual perception, we might group them together in a fundamental way as orange things or round things. But since we're concerned with what oranges and stars are as concepts, we don't group them together at all. Instead oranges are fruits and the Sun is a star, which in biological/physical terms have essentially nothing to do with each other. Our metaphysical structure of the world has separated them entirely, but this is only because we've built it upon a foundation of concepts rather than direct sensory input. I'm not sure if that made any sense, or if I've simply had too much coffee today. I think you're essentially saying the same thing RE: whales. How we categorize them as mammals or fish is more-or-less completely arbitrary.

busfahrer 6y ago

I was about to post that I recently read it and felt all smug that they didn’t even know all the species of whale back in 1851. So much for that! But of course I wholeheartedly second the recommendation.

deleted 6y ago

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bigbubba 6y ago

Chapter 32 (Cetology) is excellent. In it, the narrator explains the contemporary scientific understanding of whales and describes all their varieties then known. My favorite bit is the part where he explains the numerous differences between whales and fish (they have lungs, are warm blooded, they breast feed, have eyelids, etc.) The narrator explains that men of science have decided whales are not fish for these reasons. Then the narrator delightfully argues that despite all these differences, fish are animals that live in the water, and therefore whales are fish. I love this; it is common knowledge today that 'whales aren't fish' but few ever stop to think twice about that. There is no contesting that whales are surely mammals, but who says some mammals can't be fish? In the traditional biological nomenclature, 'fish' is a paraphyletic classification with arbitrarily excludes tetrapods (those lobe-finned fish that climbed out of the sea and became the four limbed animals we see today, including ourselves.) Why does fish exclude tetrapods? For cultural reasons clearly, it seems obvious to us that humans, dogs, lizards, birds, etc are not 'fish', because they lack the distinctly fishy quality of living in the water. So we say the tetrapods, the fish that left the water, are no longer fish. But some tetrapods returned to the water, regaining that distinctly fishy attribute. These are the whales. Tetrapods are not fish because they aren't aquatic, but whales are tetrapods which are aquatic, and I therefore declare them fish. (And in the cladistic system of biological classification, we are fish too.) Incidentally, when you make this sort of argument people tend to get pretty cross. It seems important to many people that whales not be called fish. Why is this? Is it because they think people will empathize with whales more if their mammalian nature is emphasized and their fishy nature is denied? Probably they're right about that, but it's hardly a scientific argument. Then again, 'fish' is hardly a much of a scientific classification since it has an exception carved out of it to accommodate our cultural 'knowledge' that people are 'not fish'.

throwaway894345 6y ago
When it recently became popular knowledge that birds are dinosaurs, I asked why birds are dinosaurs for merely descending from them, but we wouldn’t argue that people are fish despite also descending from them. It seems like a somewhat arbitrary semantic argument, but I’m not an expert by any means.
- shakna 6y ago
  The very simple answer is because dinosaur is a scientific term that covers a very narrow band of fauna, and that bit of popular knowledge is _wrong_... Depending on who you speak to. Dinosaurs are "terrestrial reptiles of the orders Saurischia and Ornithischia that existed during the Mesozoic Era, including but not limited to megafauna." There are plenty of other megafauna that the public think of as dinosaurs, that aren't, because they're not part of the clade 'Dinosauria'. So of course anything descended from extinct creatures from roughly the right age are "dinosaurs" to the common person. However! Recent changes in the way we classify species, moving to phylogenetics, says that for a group to be natural, all descendants must be part of said group. Making birds, dinosaurs. Whilst this reclassification (which whilst popular also has popular detractors), wouldn't say people are fish, it would say that both fish and people are Eukaryotes.
  - bigbubba 6y ago
    Speaking of dinosaurs that aren't dinosaurs, and fish that aren't fish, there are the Ichthyosaurs. Marine reptiles that lived alongside the non-avian dinosaurs, but were not dinosaurs. Being a reptile, it wasn't a fish either. They did however looked remarkably like dolphins, which is interesting because like dolphins, ichthyosaurs are tetrapods that returned to the water.
keiferski 6y ago
Thanks for the this long comment. I had a similar thought the other day and your remarks reminded me of it, so I'll share. It was something like this: the way we categorize and conceive of objects in the world is very much influenced by our overall cultural/civilization worldview. We seem to be very tied to this Platonic ideal/form of what something is inherently and then building the world up from there, rather than other ways of categorization; i.e by our emotional reaction to the object, or our sensory experience of it. For example, both an orange and the Sun are round, orange-colored objects. If our primary way of organizing the world were based on pure visual perception, we might group them together in a fundamental way as orange things or round things. But since we're concerned with what oranges and stars are as concepts, we don't group them together at all. Instead oranges are fruits and the Sun is a star, which in biological/physical terms have essentially nothing to do with each other. Our metaphysical structure of the world has separated them entirely, but this is only because we've built it upon a foundation of concepts rather than direct sensory input. I'm not sure if that made any sense, or if I've simply had too much coffee today. I think you're essentially saying the same thing RE: whales. How we categorize them as mammals or fish is more-or-less completely arbitrary.