Thank you. Sympatric speciation is actually useful here. It helps clarify
why localized behavioral or ecological divergence doesn’t automatically
produce stable new species. When populations remain large enough, or when
the divergent group doesn’t stay reproductively isolated, the new lineage
tends to get reabsorbed as the two groups wax and wane.
That fits my point: without a strong, persistent barrier or a severe
population crash that forces unusual behavior or traits to dominate the
survivors, most incipient “new species” don’t persist. They collapse back
into the parent population because the selective pressures aren’t extreme
enough to maintain separation.
Some of the examples of sympatric speciation even involve behavior driven
assortment, which is exactly the kind of mechanism I’m talking about.
Behavior can create temporary divergence, but unless the bottleneck is
strong or the isolation is durable, the divergence doesn’t last.
I don’t claim to be an “expert” in anything. It’s not a matter of everyone else being “wrong” because being wrong is the natural state of life. We all see patterns and try to use these patterns to live longer more productive lives.
The problem here isn’t that science is “wrong”. It’s that the formatting of science is obscuring reality because it forces a perspective from which reality can be nearly invisible. Biologists aren’t wrong, they are merely missing the forest for some fungus that grows on the back legs of bark beetles.
I’m telling you how to zoom out and what the forest looks like.
The lack of self awareness is amazing. You can’t say I’m wrong, because everyone is wrong about everything, and always will be! I’m just as right as anyone, which is to say, completely wrong!
Well, sure, but by their own (internally inconsistent) definition, they also have to be wrong about everybody being wrong. And then, it’s turtles all the way down
I’m saying life is a lesson in becoming less wrong. Science attempts to become less wrong through using experiment to recurse categories but hit a stumbling block in 1925 by confusing constraints for forces just as they had confused behavior for nature in living things. Rabbits act like rabbits because their DNA defines them. It defines how they develop from long before they are zygotes for all eternity because their behavior reverberates through time. The butterfly that flaps its wings in China might no longer exist when the hurricane spawns.
Ancient science failed because it became too complex and modern science is stalled because our categorical understanding is becoming more complex and more removed from reality.
We are wrong because we will never be able to predict. We will never be able to clap our hands to remove the deleterious effects of the butterfly or create a wondrous structure. Reality is too complex. It occurs everywhere at once regardless of your time zone or the era one chooses to live.
My point isn’t that prediction is impossible or that science is stalled.
It’s that certain kinds of complexity, the kind that emerges from
interacting constraints across time, don’t show up cleanly when you slice
reality into discrete forces or discrete traits. You can miss the large
patterns because the framework highlights the small ones.
It’s all syntactically correct, it’s just that the actual content is nonsense, like “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” (hat tip to Steven Pinker).
ETA: Pinker actually got it from Noam Chomsky. Learn something new every day, just not from the OP.
Thank you for this contribution! I’ve made this observation and comment, but I was unaware someone coined a term for it.
“Fish” is a term from deep past, so naturally it has little connection to the underlying structure of biology. It’s a broad generic concept. And it has multitude uses, from “fish-shaped” fish to fishlike things such as rays and eels to any animals from the water.
Trying to use a term like that in scientific classification is just asking for confusion. Mapping generic vague categories to clades is an exercise in creating terms for the distinctions, e.g. shellfish.
It’s human nature to think about the categories and lump and separate to try to understand. The challenge is to separate one type of category from a different type of category. Grade is a useful term for doing that.
I often use my AI to translate my posts into something symbolic thinkers can understand but I get the idea that’s frowned upon here. My AI says the exact same thing in terms most understand. Homo sapiens used to think just like every other species and merely used a complex language that was manipulated by higher brain functions by means of the arcuate fasciculus but fewer and fewer people could speak it as it became ever more complex with increasing human knowledge so language changed and changed cognition with it. We categorize reality and use induction as made possible by the homo circularis rationatio brocas area. My thinking is much more procedural than symbolic and it doesn’t translate well.
This is where most people are missing a bet: AI is remarkable at translation and elaboration because it operates strictly procedurally and can then translate into almost anybody’s language. It can answer questions only if the question is properly formatted and it shares the same frame. I wager you could put this post into your own AI and get a good translation but people don’t want to bother and don’t want to question their premises and definitions.
I predict you’re going to win this argument (by your measure of winning). Eventually, Dopers will realize they’re figuratively banging their heads against a wall and give up.
So, to summarize all your posts in this thread – and it’s amazing how so much insight can be summarized in so few words – reality is comprised of patterns that only you can see.
Are you saying that categorization inhibits full understanding by flattening the dimensionality of a concept and when attempting to communicate an idea that language itself distorts mutual understanding?