caffeine writes:
Well they didn’t really get anywhere by looking at the outside, of course.... Traditional classifications based on just looking at the outside of beasts tend to be either blindingly obvious (you don’t need special training to figure out that lions and tigers are both cats); or wrong (such as putting pangolins with xenarthrans because they vaguely resemble armadillos).
Don't chuck it away that quickly; for example the keys that entomologists still use to distinguish between seemingly identiical species of hairy flying things were all built on detailed drawings but sure, just counting legs and wings narrows things down farly quickly.
Of course the more we are able to see, the more complicated things become but it's still quite important to point out that the discovery of DNA and molecular genetics fully supports the original theory which was built primarily on observation and lists of parts.
It's obvious that it should be that way but it didn't actually have to be. In the human world we build houses out of radically different materials and use different methods than cars; given the task, we probably would not make a an ant using the same building blocks as a whale a tree or a mushroom. The discovery of DNA could easily have disproved the ToE, but it didn't.
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