So @your-biology-is-wrong wrote this excellent post, which attracted some wrongheaded comments and a lengthy, well-documented, frankly stunning rebuttal by @millenniumvulcan. I recommend you go read them.
But the whole conversation got me thinking.
I’ve been saying for some years now that we’re teaching science terribly wrong in schools, and quite possibly the wrongest thing we’re doing is making no distinction between “facts about the universe that we have observed” and “categories and models that we have constructed in order to organize the facts we have observed”.
Essentially, kids are being taught that “cats are mammals” is the same kind of scientific fact as “cats give birth to live young,” and it isn’t. At all.
Which is why we get discussions like the one linked above. Or like the ones about Pluto being declared a dwarf planet instead of a planet, where people assert that the change in nomenclature is because “we understand better now what a planet is” and not because we’ve chosen to narrow the definition to (disputably) better organize our constructed categories of Things In Space. Or, for that matter, like the ones that call out “scientific error” in the Bible by citing references to calling a bat a “bird,” or calling a whale a “fish,” as though the classification system we use today is objective scientific fact instead of constructed model.
Because nobody is teaching kids how to tell the difference, or even that there is a difference.
@fredweasleyfreak said: i am very confused. giving birth to live young is a criteria for being a mammal? so what is wrong with teaching them both as scientific fact?
What’s wrong with it is that the definition of mammal isn’t scientific fact, it’s nomenclature. Which is to say, a thing we made up as a way of organizing scientific facts.
“Does/does not give birth to live young” is observed data. “Mammal” is a name we attached to a particular collection of observed data.
They’re both facts, but they’re not the same kind of fact at all. And in most grade-school science classes, they’re taught as though they are. To the point where it can be really difficult for most of us who were taught that way to get our heads around the difference.
Also, giving birth to live young is NOT a criteria for being a mammal. There are egg-laying mammals. We thought, at one point, that all mammals must give birth to live young; then we found mammals that didn’t. Our understanding of the natural world is constantly changing, because of discoveries just like this one.
Yep, Australia has egg-laying mammals!
Also some reptiles give birth to live young, here – see, blue-tongued skinks.
Seriously, go look blueys up, they’re adorable. They’re like the labradors of the reptile world.
knitting in the dark 