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The thing about the natural world is that “Nature does not practice OOP.” Our nice hierarchies of animals reflect our desire to build hierarchies. Those hierarc
by a4isms 4y ago
The thing about the natural world is that “Nature does not practice OOP.” Our nice hierarchies of animals reflect our desire to build hierarchies. Those hierarchies are tools that are useful for many purposes, but they weren’t blueprints for constructing life.
I speculate that if we think of our hierarchies as tools, they say at least as much about our own brains and the problems we’re trying to solve as the do about the domain.
Which is fine, tools exist as levers for the mind. But we shouldn’t confuse them with reality. The map is not the terrain.
- jhbadger 4y agoI disagree. Nature does practice OOP and taxonomic hierarchies are real things in nature if they are based on their evolutionary history. People say penguins are "flightless birds", but look how they swim. They don't swim like fishes. They basically are flying in water because they share the same genetic programming as other birds, just slightly modified to use a different medium. Nature doesn't re-implement things from scratch but is great at code reuse.
- igouy 4y agoNature doesn't do design, period.
- jhbadger 4y agoTrue but irrelevant. The fact is nature "subclasses" (in the OOP sense) animals all the time in evolution even if it is an unintelligent process ultimately due to chance modification.
- Jcowell 4y agoI think I understand what your saying. In this context a penguin is implementing a quality it’s inherited from the gene it has as a bird. A Penguin may not be a bird in the same way we may thing a fly method should work , but it’s fly method derived from the fact that it’s genetically a bird.
- igouy 4y ago> The fact is… Perhaps you mean — The analogy is…