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Chapter 32 (Cetology) is excellent. In it, the narrator explains the contemporary scientific understanding of whales and describes all their varieties then kno

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.
- Turing_Machine 6y ago
  I believe there is at least one tribe that classifies animals as (more or less) a) harmless animals b) dangerous animals c) animals that are good to eat I'm not finding a citation at the moment, but it's certainly believable. In a subsistence/survival situation, pragmatism tends to win out. :-)
walrus01 6y ago
It's my understanding that the further back you go in time, in the English language etymology and origins of the word "Fish", the more it simply means any creature that lives in the ocean. If you were to ask somebody living in a coastal town in England from the year 1600 what is a Fish...
- bigbubba 6y ago
  Indeed, I think there are vestiges of this in our language today. A starfish is not a fish, at least not in the 'proper' sense, but since they're star shaped animals that live in the water they are logically called 'starfish.' Jellyfish, cuttlefish, and shellfish are more examples. You may find it interesting that Melville/Ishmael uses walruses as an example of an animal that isn't a fish, because they are amphibious.
  - Turing_Machine 6y ago
    In the Ozarks, very old-timers used to refer to scorpions as "stingin' lizards". Of course they're not lizards, but they're vaguely lizard-like in habitat and behavior, and definitely sting.
lisper 6y ago
> when you make this sort of argument people tend to get pretty cross Because this argument has a lot of problems. To quote Tom Stoppard: if there is any point to using language at all it is that words are taken to stand for certain thoughts and ideas and not for other thoughts and idea. The word "fish" has a well established meaning, and it has nothing to do with being "fishy". It has to do with being a member of a class of creatures that share certain characteristics, like having gills. It has nothing do with living in the water, except insofar as having gills constrains you from getting too far from water. But not all fish live in the water. Mud skippers, for example, are fish (by virtue of having gills ) but spend quite a bit of time outside of the water. There are a lot of things besides whales that live in the water but aren't fish: sea cucumbers, anemones, sea jellies (which are not fish notwithstanding that people sometimes refer to them, incorrectly, as jellyfish), mosquitos (as larvae), frogs (as tadpoles), barnacles, hippopotami, seals, sea lions, beavers, otters, and manatees.
- bigbubba 6y ago
  > The word "fish" has a well established meaning But that is precisely the matter of contention. Even in the domain of biology, you have two systems of nomenclature, traditional and cladistic, in which animals may be classified differently. Furthermore, some animals that are not considered fish under either the traditional or cladistic systems have gills, so fishiness is clearly not a simple matter of gilliness. Crabs are an obvious example, as crustaceans they are certainly not fish, yet they have gills, live in the water (often, though not always) and are called shellfish. Hermitcrabs are an example of crabs with gills that are primarily terrestrial... or are they? Are hermit crabs actually crabs? Like fish, there is a wide variety of animals which are casually called crabs, but which are not 'true crabs' according to biologists today. Many popular crabs fall into this category, for instance king crabs. When is the last time you heard somebody go off on a "Well actually, that's not crab you're eating" rant? Not often, not nearly as often as 'whales aren't fish' rants anyway. Why is the fish/whale dichotomy emotionally important to people while the crab/crablike distinction is something almost nobody knows or cares about? I am pretty sure it's because people want to protect whales by disassociating them from food (fish.) Regardless, these non-crabs are called crabs because they have the distinctly crabby qualities people look for in crabs; claws, exoskeletons, and a generally spidery body shape (disqualifying lobsters.) The term to describe the phenomenon of non-crabs becoming ''crabs'' is 'carcinisation', a term described by it's creator as "one of the many attempts of Nature to evolve a crab" For this concept to have any coherence, we must have some notion of crab that transcends the true crab. We could call that 'crabbiness', similar to the way I can call a whale 'fishy'. > It has to do with being a member of a class of creatures that share certain characteristics The selection of which traits to consider is where human culture leaves it's mark. In a different culture, you might make the claim that some fish have gills and some do not. In a different culture you might say that only bony fish with swim bladders are 'true fish' and that cartilaginous swimming creatures without swim bladders aren't fish at all. If having a swim bladder is what our culture considers fishy, then sharks are no longer fish. But in our extant culture, some fish have swim bladders and some fish do not.

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.

Turing_Machine 6y ago
I believe there is at least one tribe that classifies animals as (more or less) a) harmless animals b) dangerous animals c) animals that are good to eat I'm not finding a citation at the moment, but it's certainly believable. In a subsistence/survival situation, pragmatism tends to win out. :-)

walrus01 6y ago

It's my understanding that the further back you go in time, in the English language etymology and origins of the word "Fish", the more it simply means any creature that lives in the ocean. If you were to ask somebody living in a coastal town in England from the year 1600 what is a Fish...

bigbubba 6y ago
Indeed, I think there are vestiges of this in our language today. A starfish is not a fish, at least not in the 'proper' sense, but since they're star shaped animals that live in the water they are logically called 'starfish.' Jellyfish, cuttlefish, and shellfish are more examples. You may find it interesting that Melville/Ishmael uses walruses as an example of an animal that isn't a fish, because they are amphibious.
- Turing_Machine 6y ago
  In the Ozarks, very old-timers used to refer to scorpions as "stingin' lizards". Of course they're not lizards, but they're vaguely lizard-like in habitat and behavior, and definitely sting.

lisper 6y ago

> when you make this sort of argument people tend to get pretty cross Because this argument has a lot of problems. To quote Tom Stoppard: if there is any point to using language at all it is that words are taken to stand for certain thoughts and ideas and not for other thoughts and idea. The word "fish" has a well established meaning, and it has nothing to do with being "fishy". It has to do with being a member of a class of creatures that share certain characteristics, like having gills. It has nothing do with living in the water, except insofar as having gills constrains you from getting too far from water. But not all fish live in the water. Mud skippers, for example, are fish (by virtue of having gills ) but spend quite a bit of time outside of the water. There are a lot of things besides whales that live in the water but aren't fish: sea cucumbers, anemones, sea jellies (which are not fish notwithstanding that people sometimes refer to them, incorrectly, as jellyfish), mosquitos (as larvae), frogs (as tadpoles), barnacles, hippopotami, seals, sea lions, beavers, otters, and manatees.

bigbubba 6y ago
> The word "fish" has a well established meaning But that is precisely the matter of contention. Even in the domain of biology, you have two systems of nomenclature, traditional and cladistic, in which animals may be classified differently. Furthermore, some animals that are not considered fish under either the traditional or cladistic systems have gills, so fishiness is clearly not a simple matter of gilliness. Crabs are an obvious example, as crustaceans they are certainly not fish, yet they have gills, live in the water (often, though not always) and are called shellfish. Hermitcrabs are an example of crabs with gills that are primarily terrestrial... or are they? Are hermit crabs actually crabs? Like fish, there is a wide variety of animals which are casually called crabs, but which are not 'true crabs' according to biologists today. Many popular crabs fall into this category, for instance king crabs. When is the last time you heard somebody go off on a "Well actually, that's not crab you're eating" rant? Not often, not nearly as often as 'whales aren't fish' rants anyway. Why is the fish/whale dichotomy emotionally important to people while the crab/crablike distinction is something almost nobody knows or cares about? I am pretty sure it's because people want to protect whales by disassociating them from food (fish.) Regardless, these non-crabs are called crabs because they have the distinctly crabby qualities people look for in crabs; claws, exoskeletons, and a generally spidery body shape (disqualifying lobsters.) The term to describe the phenomenon of non-crabs becoming ''crabs'' is 'carcinisation', a term described by it's creator as "one of the many attempts of Nature to evolve a crab" For this concept to have any coherence, we must have some notion of crab that transcends the true crab. We could call that 'crabbiness', similar to the way I can call a whale 'fishy'. > It has to do with being a member of a class of creatures that share certain characteristics The selection of which traits to consider is where human culture leaves it's mark. In a different culture, you might make the claim that some fish have gills and some do not. In a different culture you might say that only bony fish with swim bladders are 'true fish' and that cartilaginous swimming creatures without swim bladders aren't fish at all. If having a swim bladder is what our culture considers fishy, then sharks are no longer fish. But in our extant culture, some fish have swim bladders and some fish do not.