Is the whale a fish? MagicMoments: Well, one thing you can be certain of is if you give an affirmative answer to the question "Is the whale a fish?" in a science test, you're not gonna score any points. Having said that, though, is there a "correct" answer to this question which defers to more than simply convention, but to the facts of Mother Nature herself? Joseph LaPorte in his "Natural Kinds and Conceptual Change" argues, in defiance of conventional wisdom, that there is not. Better recap conventional wisdom first then. Here we go... 1. We start off in the good old prescientific days of yore with our traditional, vernacular categories such as fish, whale, cow, rodent, predator, bird, reptile, vermin, and so forth. 2. Science comes along and "discovers" (note these scare quotes) that certain creatures have been lumped in the wrong category; the whale providing the quintessential example. (We also discover that certain categories -- e.g. "vermin" -- are scientifically meaningless). The ancients were simply wrong to call the whale a fish. Whales get kicked out, and the category "fish" shrinks by one member. Another example offered by LaPorte is that of the guinea pig, which it turns out is not as closely related to the other paradigmatic rodents as we had thought. On conventional wisdom our less enlightened forebears were -- as a matter of brute fact -- incorrect in classifying the guinea pig as a rodent, and as a result, the poor guinea pig received the same ostracization as the whale. Through all this, the meaning of the terms "fish" and "rodent" did not change. The ancients were just confused about what they meant. Here endeth conventional wisdom. LaPorte wisdom now: 1. Agreed 2. Science does indeed discover that certain creatures are not as closely related as we once believed, but it is no "discovery" that whales were miscategorized. As things turned out, the systematists (dominated these days by the schema known as "cladistics" wherein organisms are classified according to evolutionary lineages) chose to contract the category "fish" and give whales the boot. But they might just as well have gone the other way. They could have EXPANDED the category "fish" to include whales and everything else that evolved from fish. The ancients were not wrong to call the whale a fish; the MEANING of the term "fish" has been changed. Where it was vague before, it is now more sharply defined. Sound far fetched? Think of dinosaurs. When the discovery was made that birds evolved from dinosaurs, the scientists chose the alternative route: they massively expanded the category "dinosaur" to include eagles, sparrows, chickens, and all our other feathered friends. So now there are a lot more dinosaurs than previously thought. And, if the coin had fallen the other way, there might have been a lot more fish too! Here's the man himself to explain: "Guinea pigs would still merit the label "rodent" according to a couple of reasonable responses to the discovery that they are not as closely related to mice and rats as people had thought. After things called by a label like "rodent" are found not to constitute an exclusive clade, scientists generally have two options for adjusting the use of the label in order to assure that the term is assigned a scientifically respectable clade. They can pare the unacceptable taxon down or they can extend it. They can either say that some things formerly believed to belong to the extension do not belong to it, or they can say that some things formerly believed NOT to belong to the extension belong to it after all. Scientists who have urged that the traditionally recognized rodents do not form a historical group have suggested that guinea pigs be ousted from the rodent camp. They have suggested paring down. But extending would have been another option. Scientists could have urged that in fact the "rodents" are far more inclusive than was previously realized and include horses, seals, and primates. On this resolution, we are all "rodents"! " (Edited by MagicMoments)  lori100: I would say no....... ---- Why are whales mammals and not fish? What ... - UCSB Science Line scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=2536 Whales are warm blooded, which means they keep a high body temperature that does not change in the cold water. Fish are cold-blooded, so their body temperature changes depending on the temperature of their environment. Whales actually breathe air with lungs using their blowholes to breath out! -----------Whales are mammals because they give birth to live young, they have fur (although it is very sparse on their body), they have lungs and breath air and they provide milk for their young. ----------Answer 5: Whales are mammals because they share the characteristics of other mammals (like us!). These characteristics include being able to regulate their own body temperature (unlike cold-blooded animals, like lizards), growing hair and producing milk to feed their young (who are born live, not in eggs). Because of all of these traits, even though whales live in the ocean and are generally much bigger than us, just like people, they are mammals. MagicMoments: Yes, Lori, all that is true, but it misses LaPorte's point. If the systematists had chosen to EXPAND the range of the category "fish", rather than contract it (to exclude whales), then ALL mammals would fall into the category "fish" now. (I think  ) (Edited by MagicMoments) MagicMoments: Sounds plausible. Hear about Bill Maher's bet with Trump that his mother was an orang utan? You'll find it on Youtube I'm sure.  lori100: Haa...no I hadn't ...Trump threatened to sue I see , but dropped it... Donald Trump Drops $5 Million Orangutan Lawsuit Against Bill Maher ...www.eonline.com/.../donald-trump-drops-5-million-orangutan-lawsuit... E! E! News has confirmed that Donald Trump has dropped his $5 million lawsuit against Bill Maher over an orangutan joke (no really, we can't make this up). MagicMoments: Speaking of lizards, LaPorte has this to say: " ... Yet another illustration is found in the term 'lizard'. To make 'lizard' a monophyletic group, snakes would have to be counted as lizards. Scientists have decided, rather than to depart from or revise earlier use so drastically, to abandon the use of 'lizard' as a natural kind term. Cladistic systematists still use the term 'lizard', but with the clarification that it stands for an artificial group. Speakers do not always adjust the use of terms when they are found to designate unnatural groups, like the group consisting of whales plus gilled fish. And it is no error not to so adjust the use of such terms." lori100: anyway back to our alleged fish relatives........did whales evolve from fish?... still doesn't seem they did... How Did Whales Evolve? | Science | Smithsonian www.smithsonianmag.com/.../how-did-whales-evolve-7327... Smithsonian Dec 1, 2010 - Blubber, blowholes and flukes are among the hallmarks of the roughly 80 species of cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) alive today. But, because they are mammals, we know that they must have evolved from land-dwelling ancestors. -----------------oh ,there were fish that went from land to sea...idk... (Edited by lori100) lori100: ^^^ It's a mudskipper ...and there's a walking catfish... wiki ---The walking catfish (Clarias batrachus) is a species of freshwater airbreathing catfish native to Southeast Asia, but also introduced outside its native range where it is considered an invasive species. It is named for its ability to "walk" across dry land, to find food or suitable environments. lori100: give a fish the ability to walk and he's going to wreak havoc..... wiki----In Florida, walking catfish are known to have invaded aquaculture farms, entering ponds where these predators prey on fish stocks. In response, fish farmers have had to erect fences to protect ponds. Authorities have also created laws that ban possession of walking catfish. MagicMoments: To recap the opening post: Received wisdom holds that scientists come along and discover that our pre-scientific taxonomies are, in many cases, flawed. Scientists discover the "essences" of natural kinds such as "fish", "whale", "gold", "water", and so on. Our pre-scientific forebears were simply wrong, as a matter of brute fact, to call the whale a fish. The meaning (or more correctly, the "extension"; i.e., all those organisms that fall within the purview of the category) of the term "fish" has not changed through the ages - fish have always been fish; what has changed is our recognition of which organisms do, and which do not, fall within this purview. LaPorte argues, to the contrary, that scientists do indeed discover previously unsuspected relationships (or lack thereof) obtaining between various entities, but any announcement of the kind "The whale is not a fish" is properly seen as a matter of convention, not a discovery. Scientists have not DISCOVERED that the whale is not a fish; they have MADE IT THE CASE that the whale is not a fish, thereby altering the meaning of the term "fish". They might just as well, in light of their improved understanding of whale anatomy and phylogeny, have concluded that whales ARE fish -- and so is everything else that evolved from primitive gilled fish (assuming they adopt the cladistic approach to biological taxonomy). That our forebears considered the whale a fish is by no means a matter of factual error. Whatever position you take on this yourself, it's important to see that both sides require support from theories of reference in the philosophy of language. There are no simple be-all-end-all answers in this domain. Were you to insist that scientists excluding whales from fishhood was a DISCOVERY, you would be right only insofar as your philosophy of language is. The received wisdom (contra LaPorte) outlined above derives, whether you know it or not, from the pioneering work of Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam into the essence of so-called "natural kinds". On this account, the referent of any putative (observable) natural kind term such as "water" is initially secured by ostension, i.e. someone points at the stuff and names it "water". Thereafter the name "water" refers to anything sharing the same ESSENCE as the substance just identified, irregardless of whether that essence is known at the time. That essence, on the Kripke-Putnam account, has now been recognized as H2O. We may now state the identity relationship "water = H2O" -- a scientific discovery. Anyone past, present or future applying the name "water" to a substance sharing the superficial properties of H20, but without the chemical structure H20, is simply wrong. Consider Putnam's most celebrated example: the Twin Earth thought experiment. Twin Earth is a distant planet, molecule-for-molecule identical with Earth -- with one exception; the clear, colorless, odorless, thirst-quenching liquid that falls from the skies and fills the rivers and lakes is not H2O, but has a very complex chemical structure that we'll call XYZ. Now, supposing a team of Earth astronauts lands on Twin Earth, finding to their delight that "water" is abundant, only later, after chemical analysis, to discover that this liquid is not H2O. The essentialist account (Putnam, Kripke, at al) insists that the astronauts will correct themselves: "We've discovered that what we'd been calling "water" is not, in fact, water, even though it is superficially indistinguishable from Earth water." And, so the story goes, the rest of humanity will follow suit. And I'm guessing your own intuitions will accord with that of Putnam -- that's why it's received wisdom, after all. But based on what? In virtue of what fact or facts in nature does "water" designate H2O and only H2O? What's to stop us -- scientists included -- from announcing, instead, that we now know there are two kinds of water?  Why would it be "wrong" to say such a thing? Now, if your answer is "Because water is H2O and only H2O" I hope it's clear we'd be going round in circles.  (Edited by MagicMoments) | Science Chat Room 4 People Chatting Similar Conversations |
...would make a great movie.. 