From: gil@tillage.DIALix.oz.au (Gil Hardwick)
Newsgroups: sci.environment
Subject: objective environment? (was Save the Planet)
Distribution: world
Date: Sun, 03 Jan 93 04:35:09 GMT
Organization: STAFF STRATEGIES - Anthropologists & Training Agents


In article <1993Jan02.235018.17774@watson.ibm.com> andrewt@watson.ibm.com writes:

 > You don't seem to appreciate that biologists use not one type of "box"
 > (category) but a number of categories applied hierarchically.  Traditional
 > levels of the hierarchy, in decreasing order of diversity, are: kingdom,
 > phylum, class, order, family genus and species.

I thought I would get a solid bite here, from no less than our current
resident biologist in fact. Marvellous, the efficacy of this medium.

 > It is not surprising the order Monotremata contains the Platypus and the
 > Echidnas.  An order is a high level category.  They are however, placed in
 > separate families.  Even the two Echidna species are placed in separate genera.
 >  
 > How do you suggest biologists deal with the million of species on the planet
 > without placing them in categories?  Why do you make assertions about complex
 > subjects of which you apparently know very little?

Oh yes, we know about biological hierarchies, but complex arrangements
of boxes are no less boxes. I am somewhat intrigued, however, by an
entry in Alan Bullock and Oliver Stallybrass's Dictionary of Modern
Thought (Biosystematics pp.64-5) you may wish to expand for us:

     Taxonomic characteristics, ie, those upon which a systematic
     allocation may be made, are wherever possible structural,
     since physiological and behavioural criteria are of little
     use to the museum taxonomist who normally has to handle dead
     specimens. Similar difficulties restrict the use of immunological
     criteria (see Immunology) in determining blood relationships.
     They have, however, helped to show that whales are more nearly
     akin to pigs than to other mammals that have been alleged to be
     their relations. (p.65)

Now, say for example we are concerned with managing a *living* system
(not classifying a dead one) and have finally succeeded in preventing
children and teenagers from vandalising a particular forest by having
them believe that within that area certain places are bad, and that
certain trees are not trees at all, but ancestors. Now you biologists
come along taking your specimens, including a few human skeltons and
heads pickled in jars (we yet wish to have returned BTW), placing them
into strange categories to suit your curator, and then before trucking
everything back to your museum telling everyone they are had it all
wrong to start with.

Now we have a situation where the teachers have been discredited and
the kids don't take any notice of them any more. There goes the forest
and its entire ecosystem, as well as the effectiveness of any further
efforts to teach them anything.

How would we go about monitoring the *behaviour* of the system, which
includes humans, without clashing with your biological taxonomy? What
would happen were we to show that a particular entity simply refuses
to stay in the one box (even within its complex hierarchy)? Or that
the relatedness of pigs to whales is just meaningless to people who
raise pigs for a living, but will most probably never even see a whale
in their entire lives (ie, the one central to their existence and the
other entirely irrelevant)?

Do we just keep on making the hierarchy more and more complex, and so
more and more inaccessible to the laity out there? Or do we work on a
new system people other than museum curators can relate to?

These are highly relevant and important contemporary questions, if you
would seek to do them some justice. I have plenty of literature here
at hand to sustain a discussion.

Thanks,

Gil

Newsgroups: sci.environment