January 17, 2024
In “Organic diversity” by Dobzhansky discusses how organic diversity and various other kinds of scientific classifications are man-made concepts. Humans use rational systems such as biological classification to make sense of the world. Because many of these scientific concepts, while based on reality are man-made navigational tools, it is essential that we do not take certain theories to be truths or without careful consideration. For example, while humans never witnessed evolution in the way that scientists understand evolution to be true, by analyzing the past, we can piece together what evolution is. Regardless of what biological concept is at hand, there is always more to be done. We cannot take anything for granted and should remain inquisitive if we are to be fully-informed rational agents.
In class we talked about the importance of “clusters”. Chandler and I worked together in order to create clusters for land vs sea organisms and polar vs tropics organisms, for example. Dr. Jantzen posed several questions regarding the importance of categorization. For example, How do we decide what goes in each cluster? Chandler and I had trouble deciding what it meant to sort things by “color” for example, do we only use colors from “ROYGBIV”, at what point is something crossing the line between one category and another. I found that there were several questions we posed as a class that there was no clear answer to, demonstrating the synthesis between philosophy and biology.
My main takeaway from both the reading and the in-class discussions and activities was that while there is some objectivity involved in classification, there is also a great deal that is subjective and even misunderstood. I found it interesting that some students chose to cluster items based on totally different qualities than Chandler and I. At the end of the day, I think it’s about what helps you make sense of the world around you. The importance of objectivity is really a matter of continuity and being able to communicate ideas in a universal way. But how do we decide which metrics are superior?
