Science: seeking examples of distinctions that are useful but spurious

[Diceman]

There’s no easy way to define a continent (other than “Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Australia, and Antarctica”), but it’s still a useful concept to have.

[DrDeth]

@C_K_Dexter_Haven

I think the point is that, while there are clear distinctions between races, it fails as a classification system. First, we have many mixings. Second, there are huge differences between (say) Nigerian blacks and Ethiopians blacks, as there are between Norwegian whites and Italian whites, or Japanese Asian and Thai Asian. What we think of as “race” is better classified as “national” (or tribal), and we have today enough marriages between groups that the distinction gets blurrier and blurrier. Hence, it fails as a classification system.

Not to say anything about why someone with one black parent and one white parent is considered “black.” They’re half-and-half.

In much the same way that the example of “hot” and “cold” is a spurious classification. Sure, 200 F is clearly “hot” and -30 F is clearly “cold,” but as a classification system it fails miserably: how about 45 F? There are conditions under which you’d call it “warm” (coming from Chicago’s couple of weeks below zero, say) and conditions under which you’d call it “cool” (in mid-August, say.)

Right. Sure, from a skeleton a expert can often determine most likely "race’- but not by any means always.

It’s a poor and simplistic system, that is still useful at times, no doubt. For example, for a short description of a wanted person where there is no photo available. Even there, it could be misleading and worse than useless.

[SimonMoon5]

@njtt

A related view is that there is really no such thing as free will, but that we have to pretend that it does in order for society to function; in order to be able to hold people responsible for their actions (including crimes), for instance.

Well, either free will exists, so it’s okay to punish people for their actions, or free will doesn’t exist in which case we have no choice but to punish people for their actions since we can’t choose not to do so.

[Voyager]

To some degree the branches of science are spurious. When you boil it down, it is all physics. Distinguishing biology from chemistry is useful though, but the existence of biochemistry shows that there is not a solid line between them.

[sundog66]

Thank you all for disabusing me of my naive categorical view of the world. In all seriousness though of course I understand that things are fuzzy in the real world; I should have clarified that my interest is more in theory-internal distinctions. You’ve all provided me with some good examples but I think my favorite is robby’s on electromagnetic radiation, where the money line on Wikipedia is (bolding mine):

Electromagnetic radiation interacts with matter in different ways across the spectrum. These types of interaction are so different that historically different names have been applied to different parts of the spectrum, as though these were different types of radiation. Thus, although these “different kinds” of electromagnetic radiation form a quantitatively continuous spectrum of frequencies and wavelengths, the spectrum remains divided for practical reasons related to these qualitative interaction differences.

[Keeve]

@Diceman

There’s no easy way to define a continent (other than “Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Australia, and Antarctica”), but it’s still a useful concept to have.

[del]The planet[/del] Pluto understands and agrees.

[jtur88]

There is no scientific evidence that Homo sapiens is different from other mammals or primates in any qualitative biological way, but it seems very useful to regard humans as being somehow distinct from species deemed “lower”.

[DrDeth]

@jtur88

There is no scientific evidence that Homo sapiens is different from other mammals or primates in any qualitative biological way, but it seems very useful to regard humans as being somehow distinct from species deemed “lower”.

Umm, no, Homo Sapiens is pretty obviously a species distinct from any other living species.

[RealityChuck]

Bode’s Law, which seemed like it was just playing with numbers until planets were discovered where it predicted them. It’s still useful as a mnemonic for the distances from the sun to the planets.