Delaware students can now choose their own race (Yes, RACE!) under new regulations.

[Final-Fan]

o_O.Q said:

Final-Fan said:

1.  You didn't address my analogy to bats.  If it's true that penguins have "adapted wings" and not flippers, doesn't it also have to be true that bats have "adapted legs" and not wings?  If not, why not?  If so, doesn't that seem like a ridiculous position to you?  

To answer your "aquatic creature" question, I'm not sure—what do you define as an "aquatic creature"? 

2.  He speaks of two sorts of groups:  hypothetical "strict groups" that he asserts are not naturally generated, and human-made groups that "scientists made up" to organize the diversity of life into a structure that makes sense to humans, but which is not 100% perfect. 

You say you can satisfy the claim "he made the blanket assertion that there exist no groups" by pointing to the post where he said "scientists made these groups up".  At the very least, there is a serious miscommunication that is occurring somewhere here.  (Identifying what that miscommunication might be, so as to move past it to understanding, is more important than laying blame on one of the three of us for it.)

3.  Once again you simply reiterate your question as if you were using some kind of retard-mode Socratic method.  I will indulge you and answer your questions as requested.  Elephants do not swim with fish because elephants have evolved to be land dwellers, and fish have (for the most part, I think) evolved to be wary of large creatures splashing towards them.  Elephants do not reproduce with lions because their common ancestor is very far in the past and they have become genetically too different to produce offspring with each other. 

"You didn't address my analogy to bats.  If it's true that penguins have "adapted wings" and not flippers, doesn't it also have to be true that bats have "adapted legs" and not wings?  If not, why not?  If so, doesn't that seem like a ridiculous position to you?"

i didn't say that you were wrong... if you want to say that bats have adapted legs then so be it since its a fact

 

"He speaks of two sorts of groups:..."

look the point i'm making, is that this:

"Living creatures aren't inherently divided into strict groups"

is an absolutely insane claim to make, because we can see for example that elephants do not swim in fish schools...

there is a strict division between fish and elephants, get it?

i made such a ridiculous example because i couldn't really believe i was seeing what he was posting

and obviously you are quite clearly wrong here : "I don't think you'll find that he made the blanket assertion that there exist no groups into which animals can be sorted."

 

" At the very least, there is a serious miscommunication that is occurring somewhere here."

no there's not, i quite clearly laid things out 

if you're still having difficulty parsing things, well at this point i can't help you... i can't really make it any simpler

 

"I will indulge you and answer your questions as requested."

to begin with i never had any questions for you, from the beginning you started this conversation with a misunderstanding of its context

that's how we got to where we are now

 

"Elephants do not swim with fish because elephants have evolved to be land dwellers, and fish have (for the most part, I think) evolved to be wary of large creatures splashing towards them."

congratulations, you finally got the point... i think

1.  OK, so if bats have evolved legs instead of wings, then birds have evolved legs instead of wings, too, correct?  After all, they evolved their so-called wings from legs as well. 

2.  What exactly are your "strict groups" defining?  What is being separated and delineated? 

3.  Although there are certainly populations that have been separated morphologically, genetically, reproduction-wise, etc., it is important to remember that they are all part of a continuum connected in the past via common ancestry.  So the elephant doesn't swim with the fish, but perhaps the hippopotamus's great-to-the-millionth grandfather and the whale's were the same creature.  So if you say you can identify natural groups that 100% separate these creatures, surely this must be applicable to past species as well, right?  Where do you draw the line on the continuum? 

Where is the line between red and yellow? 


Or do you just mean that because of the built-up differences over time, you are fine with the human-oriented groupings?  (In other words, a lot of the "reddish-yellowish" stuff is safely in the past, so there are many cases where we can get away with saying this bunch is "red" and this bunch is "yellow".)