Vashgun writes:
I don't know what "biologically useful" means, and why it isn't useful to identify birds as things in the sky, and fish as things in the sea, and animals as things on the land and humans as the fallen masters of this world.
Because birds aren't always in the sky (emus, kiwis etc), animals aren't always on land (fish, for example, are animals) and how does anyone determine that humans are 'fallen masters'?
Vashgun writes:
Quantifying it anymore seems a waste of time. I am ready to change my opinion if you can supply me with a reason to believe the Linnean model is "biologically useful."
Well, with the above examples, we determine what things are by characteristics that only they have. Humans can go under water, but we don't become fish when we do. So, identifying things by habitat isn't wise, as you don't know whether that species is 'just visiting'.
So, you define birds as vertebrates with feathers, animals as mobile multicellular organisms and so on. You don't identify a human by whether they are a 'fallen master'. Instead, the way you determine that something is a human is if it looks and acts like what you call a human - a thinly-furred, bipedal and intelligent ape (it's more complicated than that, actually, at least for a specific genus, like 'human').
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