Clearly there is a need and justification for a technical language of
science designed to best capture scientifically significant conceptual
contrasts, etc. However, most of the time scientists are just being
normal people and birders nearly always are. In that role we use
"natural language," whichever one we learned as a child. My argument is
that natural languages universally "digitize" reality by naming a few
thousand discrete nominal, verbal, and adjectival categories which then are
employed as the conceptual building blocks of phrases, sentences,
speeches, poems, conversations, and theories. However analog the
reality, the verbal representation of it will be in terms of discrete
conceptual units. This worked fine for describing the significant
biological entities of a local human habitat for hunter-gatherers and
peasant farmers, which are temporally and spatially limited... thus
clinal variation and evolutionary continuities are irrelevant to human
experience in those contexts. My contention is that our brains and our
natural languages are designed to deal with such a world, not a world of
cladistic continuities. It is not reasonable to expect people to abandon
those ways of thinking except in the specialized contexts of scientific
argument.

Gene Hunn.

On Mon, 5 Feb 1996, David Wright wrote:

> Hmm, I still think it is more likely to be resistance to change from an
> old, familiar way to a new, foreign way of thinking. That seems to be a
> fairly common trait among humans as well. Cladistic sytematists have made
> the shift to "tree-thinking," after all, and the last time I looked even
> traditional systematists (most of them, anyhow) still classify us as humans.
> And as to efficient classification, the cladistic system is *more*
> efficient than the classic Linnaean system, as the cladistic system is
> purely hierarchical, whereas the Linnaean system is a quasi-hierarchical
> system of "pigeonholes" (i.e., the categories). This pigeonholing
> distorts the way we see biodiversity. It does seem that resistance to
> thinking cladistically is greatest among those who already know the
> Linnaean system well, as one might predict.
>
> David Wright
> dwright at u.washington.edu
>
> On Mon, 5 Feb 1996, Eugene Hunn wrote:
>
> > David et al.,
> >
> > It's possible the persistence of "tradition" here is rooted more in human
> > psychology that resistance to "rational innovation." The human mind has
> > evolved to efficiently classified the elements of experience. Our minds
> > did not evolve to do "Science," with a capital S. The Linnean system is a
> > systematization of the contemporary European vernacular classifications &
> > nomenclatures and shares basic features with folk systems of most if not
> > all cultures and languages, including binomial names and a hierarchy of
> > ranks. You can program your computers to operate according to different
> > principles, but I suspect you will find it exceedingly difficult to
> > program the human mind to operate in ways foreign to its nature.
> >
> > Gene Hunn.
> >
> > On Fri, 2 Feb 1996, David Wright wrote:
> >
> > > Oops. My previous message on this topic went out inadvertantly before
> > > I had a chance to proofread it (someone walked into the office; I
> > > intended to postpone the message, but hit the wrong key on autopilot
> > > and mailed it instead). I hope the numerous typos and glitches are
> > > obvious as such.
> > >
> > > The last part of that message was about how a system of naming taxa
> > > without assigning them to ranked categories (family, genus, species, etc)
> > > would do away with the host of problems associated with our antiquated
> > > (literally pre-evolutionary) Linnaean system. Binomials are only part of
> > > the problem; the myriad comparative analyses published each year at the
> > > "generic" "familial," etc. "levels" -- when such "levels" do not exist --
> > > are another part; splitting and lumping of taxa are yet another artifact
> > > of having categories; and there's even more. But don't hold your breath.
> > > Moving to a saner system has been proposed, but people scream bloody murder
> > > about breaking with tradition (kind of like DOS living on). Looks like
> > > we'll be using 18th century classification and its attendant foibles well
> > > into the new millenium. It's important to maintain a sense of humor.
> > >
> > > David Wright
> > > dwright at u.washington.edu
> > >
> >
>