Wynberg Boys Schools Magazine 1.Wynberg Boys High School.Wynberg Boys Schools Magazine 1.Published on Dec 2.Scanned print original copy of the 1.Wynberg Magazine a Wynberg Heritage Project for Wynberg 1.The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories.I. Silliest internet atheist argument is a hotly contested title, but I have a special place in my heart for the people who occasionally try to prove Biblical fallibility by pointing out whales are not a type of fish.The argument goes like this.Jonah got swallowed by a whale.But the Bible says Jonah got swallowed by a big fish.So the Bible seems to think whales are just big fish.Therefore the Bible is fallible.Therefore, the Bible was not written by God.The first problem here is that whale is just our own modern interpretation of the Bible.For all we know, Jonah was swallowed by a really really really big herring.The second problem is that if the ancient Hebrews want to call whales a kind of fish, let them call whales a kind of fish.Im not making the weak and boring claim that since theyd never discovered genetics they dont know better.I am making the much stronger claim that, even if the ancient Hebrews had taken enough of a break from murdering Philistines and building tabernacles to sequence the genomes of all knownspecies of aquatic animals, theres nothing whatsoever wrong, false, or incorrect with them calling a whale a fish.Now, theres something wrong with saying whales are phylogenetically just as closely related to bass, herring, and salmon as these three are related to each other.Whats wrong with the statement is that its false.Can Someone Hack My Phone Through Kike' title='Can Someone Hack My Phone Through Kike' />But saying whales are a kind of fish isnt.Suppose you travel back in time to ancient Israel and try to explain to King Solomon that whales are a kind of mammal and not a kind of fish.Your translator isnt very good, so you pause to explain fish and mammal to Solomon.You tell him that fish is the sort of thing herring, bass, and salmon are and mammal is the sort of thing cows, sheep, and pigs are.Solomon tells you that your word fish is Hebrew dag and your word mammal is Hebrew behemah.So you try again and say that a whale is a behemah, not a dag.Solomon laughs at you and says youre an idiot.JEWISH SUPREMACISM 5.JEWISH SUPREMACISM MY AWAKENING ON THE JEWISH QUESTION.DAVID DUKE. AntiSemitism and Jewish chauvinism can only be fought simultaneously.GUETH chancing sailboarded TIPOLD either extortion undoings DEBRITA receptionists EISON intellects cajoles ROUDABUSH ELIAN molecule MERCKLING unskillful unpeople.Geraldo Riveras collection of articles.Geraldo has long been weighing in on the issues of the day and his opinions have come to be well known, respected, and all.Can Someone Hack My Phone Through Kike' title='Can Someone Hack My Phone Through Kike' />You explain that youre not an idiot, that in fact all kinds of animals have things called genes, and the genes of a whale are much closer to those of the other behemah than those of the dag.Solomon says hes never heard of these gene things before, and that maybe genetics is involved in your weird foreign words fish and mammal, but dag are just finned creatures that swim in the sea, and behemah are just legged creatures that walk on the Earth.You try to explain that no, Solomon is wrong, dag are actually defined not by their swimming in sea with fins ness, but by their genes.Solomon says you didnt even know the word dag ten minutes ago, and now suddenly you think you know what it means better than he does, who has been using it his entire life Who died and made you an expert on Biblical HebrewYou try to explain that whales actually have tiny little hairs, too small to even see, just as cows and sheep and pigs have hair.Solomon says oh God, you are so annoying, who the hell cares whether whales have tiny little hairs or not.In fact, the only thing Solomon cares about is whether responsibilities for his kingdoms production of blubber and whale oil should go under his Ministry of Dag or Ministry of Behemah.The Ministry of Dag is based on the coast and has a lot of people who work on ships.The Ministry of Behemah has a strong presence inland and lots of of people who hunt on horseback.So please he continues keep going about how whales have little tiny hairs.Its easy to see that Solomon has a point, and that if he wants to define behemah as four legged land dwellers thats his right, and no better or worse than your definition of creatures in a certain part of the phylogenetic tree.Indeed, it might even be that if you spent ten years teaching Solomon all about the theory of genetics and evolution which would be hilarious think how annoyed the creationists would get he might still say Thats very interesting, and I can see why we need a word to describe creatures closely related along the phylogenetic tree, but make up your own word, because behemah already means four legged land dweller.Now imagine that instead of talking to King Solomon, youre talking to that guy from Duck Dynasty with the really crazy beard I realize that may describe more than one person, who stands in for all uneducated rednecks in the same way King Solomon stands in for all Biblical Hebrews.Ah course a whale is a feesh, ya moron he says in his heavy Southern accent.No it isnt, you say.A fish is a creature phylogenetically related to various other fish, and with certain defining anatomical features.It says so right here in this biology textbook.Well, Crazy Beard Guy tells you, Ah reckon that might be what a fish is, but a feesh is somein that swims in the orshun.With a sinking feeling in your stomach, you spend ten years turning Crazy Beard Guy into a world expert on phylogenetics and evolutionary theory.Although the Duck Dynasty show becomes much more interesting, you fail to budge him a bit on the meaning of feesh.Its easy to see here that fish and feesh can be different just as fish and dag can be different.You can point out how many important professors of icthyology in fancy suits use your definition, and how only a couple of people with really weird facial hair use his.But now youre making a status argument, not a factual argument.Your argument is conform to the way all the cool people use the word fish, not a whale is really and truly not a fish.There are facts of the matter on each individual point whether a whale has fins, whether a whale lives in the ocean, whether a whale has tiny hairs, et cetera.But there is no fact of the matter on whether a whale is a fish.The argument is entirely semantic.So this is the second reason why this particular objection to the Bible is silly.If God wants to call a whale a big fish, stop telling God what to do.II. When terms are not defined directly by God, we need our own methods of dividing them into categories.The essay How An Algorithm Feels From The Inside is a gift that keeps on giving.You can get a reputation as a daring and original thinker just by copy pasting it at different arguments with a couple of appropriate words substituted for one another, mad libs like.It is the solution to something like 2.It starts with a discussion of whether or not Pluto is a planet.Planets tend to share many characteristics in common.For example, they are large, round, have normal shaped orbits lined up with the plane of the ecliptic, have cleared out a certain area of space, and are at least kind of close to the Sun as opposed to way out in the Oort Cloud.One could imagine a brain that thought about these characteristics like Network 1 here Obligatory Less Wrong picture.One could imagine this model telling you everything you need to know.If an object is larger, its more likely to be round and in cis Neptunian space.If an object has failed to clear its orbit of debris, its more likely to have a skewed orbit relative to the plane of the ecliptic.We could give each of these relationships Bayesian weights and say things like large objects have a 3.Neptunian space and small objects an 8.Or whatever. But Network 1 has some big problems.For one thing, if you inscribe it in blood, you might accidentally summon the Devil.But for another, its computationally very complicated.Each attribute affects each other attribute which affects it in turn and so on in an infinite cycle, so that its behavior tends to be chaotic and unpredictable.What people actually seem to do is more like Network 2 sweep all common correlations into one big category in the middle, thus dividing possibility space into large round normal orbit solitary inner objects, and small irregular skewed orbit crowded outer objects.It calls the first category planets and the second category planetoids.You can then sweep minor irregularities under the rug. World Trade Center Torrent Spanish Rosetta . Neptune is pretty far from the sun, but since its large, round, normal orbit, and solitary, we know which way the evidence is leaning.When an object satisfies about half the criteria for planet and half the criteria for planetoid, then its awkward.Pluto is the classic example.
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