From: hubey@pilot.njin.net (Hubey)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Adventures of Omega Man
Keywords: What's wrong ?
Date: 6 Jan 93 14:10:37 GMT
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.


Difficulties in Taxonomic Classification or the Adventures of Omega Man.
		---------------

	DON't MAKE LIFE UNNECESSARILY COMPLICATED BUT DON'T MAKE IT
	SIMPLER THAN IT IS.. anonymous
	----------------------

An adventurer from the one of the planets of alpha-centauri makes
an unexpected trip to earth. When he goes back he writes a 
report on life forms here. He uses some very simple criteria
to divide up the life-forms into only several clasess (ignoring
plants, and insects, bacteria etc).

He pays particular attention to a subset of life forms, which
he divides into only two classes--again based on a very simple,
very easily observable and  seemingly superficial characteristic.

Some time afterwards, when he presents his report at the local 
scientific academy, the committee which studies the report, its
conclusions and the voluminous raw data, rejects the conclusions 
of the report. Omega Man leads the attack on the findings of
the report and decides to use other characteristics (metrics)
to reach different conclusions and classifications.

------

Now the committee decides that it was incorrect. Let's listen to
the attack from the mouth of the attacker himself;

"It's certainly a ridiculous idea to use such a simple
superficial criteria as X. We can see now that it divides up
the millions of inhabitants of earth into only several 
categories, which is clearly insufficient and wrong.  How can
a system that produces such simple results be correct ?

Furthermore, it divides up the most important inhabitants into
only two groups. Since all of the inhabitants which belong to
this most important group subsequently fall into only two
groups, it seems purposeless to use this criterion to divide it
up into only two groups. That puts over 5 billion inhabitants
into only two groups and especially a very large segment into
only one group; clearly a useless idea.

I will now present a much more refined and more complicated 
technique to divide up the groups in question into better
defined groups. I propose that we use, very easily observable
and measurable quantities such as eye color, hair color, size,
hairiness, skin color as the more fundamental quantities and that we
create a new subdivisions of the type than those originally 
proposed by Beta Man. And here are the new divisions which are clearly
different and more correct."


Our story ends here.

----------

Divisions according to Beta Man:

#1.Water Animals
#2.Those that fly
#3.Those that are land animals

Furthermore #3 gets broken down into four-legged, two-legged.
He can't be sure about one group (apes) because, they seem to be 
half way between the two-legged and four-legged.

#1 misplaces the mammals but it gets probably 99% right since they're
mostly fishes (ignoring the shellfish).

#2 misplaces the bats but it gets probably 99.99% correct since the
rest belong to the bird family.

#3 is much better since in this family, most of them are mammals
(except for the small reptile group). The simple division which
he used to divide up primates into homo sapiens and apes is
a very reasonable one too.

------------
Omega Man rejects all of this because it produces only a few
groups. He specifically rejects the last sub-division (#3) into
those standing upright (homo sapiens) and the semi-upright (apes).

His proposal to use eye color, hair color, size, and hairiness
results in a more fine division;  Apes are more closely related 
to the hairy semites & caucasians than they are to Chinese; 
orangutans are more closely to Germans and Swedes than they are to
chimpanzees; pygmies are more closely related to chimps than
to say Watusi, while the Watusis are closely related to gorillas
than they are to Italians.


--------------
Moral of the story; What seems superficial and obviously superficial
may in fact have greater merit. If it were not so, it would not
have been so obviously visible to even the untrained eyes/ears/mind.

If Omega Man had started off by applying his fine-tuned
criteria to humans only, he would have been better off. Otherwise
if this kind of silliness is continued, we'd be relating birds
of one color to fishes of similar color.

More on taxonomic structure and producing linearly-scaled
numbers in another post.
-- 

	mark	

   hubey@amiga.montclair.edu         hubey@apollo.montclair.edu
   hubey@pilot.njin.net               ...!rutgers!pilot!hubey