Tag: seananmcguire
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.
I’m so glad Thomas is doing better. My partner and I have the October Daye books at the top of our wishlist, but being just after Christmas we couldn’t afford to buy them right away and we figured sending you some cash via Paypal meant you’d be able to just dump all of it onto your credit card (or into buying chocolate or Lush products to recover – self-care is important!) without waiitng for royalty cheques. All our love – iamshadow & kath-ballantyne, Sydney, Australia
Thank you so very, very much.
I am so glad to have my baby boy home.
A lot of people–a gratifying number of people, really; it was like reaching the actual apocalypse cleared a lot of puritan bullshit out of everybody’s heads, so that their response to “we’re married” became “congrats,” and not a frantic game of “which one is your husband, which one is just a friend,” or worse, “oh, you’re gay, how nice, is she going to be your surrogate”–a lot of people assumed, when they walked into a hanger, that they were like those Chinese triplets. Three pilots. Triple the strain but triple the connectivity, the control.
(”How amazing,” those people murmured, in their own dialects, in their own ways. “They’re not related, you know. They can run a drift that close on love.”)
Except that they couldn’t.
When No Encores woke, she woke with Eliot on her left and Parker on her right, and Hardison back in the control room, monitoring their vitals, dying a little bit inside from the fear, coming back to life from the pride. He never stepped into the cockpit, never saw what they saw, never had to hold up the weight of the world as they knew it. That was for the best. He kept them safe in so damn many ways, in all the ways that counted, and their Jaeger danced like a thief and hit like a trained professional, and they came home. They came home every time.
Sometimes those same people, the ones who had assumed, would see Hardison on base when No Encores was running the waters. They would treat him so gingerly then, assuming he was hurt, neglected, left behind. And he would only smile, and maybe touch the inside of his left arm (”one show only” tattooed there, black on brown, small and meant for him and his and no one else), and say, “Nah. You think I want to punch a kaiju? Those things are full of germs.”
The drift wasn’t love. It was similarity in the broken places. Hardison didn’t envy them that.
Someone has to be the harbor.
Someone has to lead them home.
Thanks @seananmcguire, I wasn’t using my feelings today.
I am a surgical strike of pain. I AM THE GODDESS OF LOVE.
look seanan i love you but sometimes i kind of want to murder you just a little.
For we will be wicked and we will be fair And they'll call us such names, and we really won't care, So go, tell your Wendys, your Susans, your Janes, There's a place they can go if they're tired of chains, And our roads may be golden, or broken, or lost, But we'll walk on them willingly, knowing the cost - We won't take our place on the shelves. It's better to fly and it's better to die Say the wicked girls saving ourselves.
- Seanan McGuire, Wicked GirlsWow.
knitting in the dark 