July 29, 2019 Monday
Bedtime Story
Missing Intermediates Allows Taxonomy
Tonight we shall continue with Dawkins’ exposition
on speciesism:
“Humans are nowadays not supposed to be
anybody’s property, yet the rationale for discriminating against chimpanzees is
seldom spelled out, and I doubt if there is a defensible rationale at all.
Such is the breathtaking speciesism of our
Christian-inspired attitudes, the abortion of a single human zygote (most of
them are destined to be spontaneously aborted anyway) can arouse more moral
solicitude and righteous indignation than the vivisection of any number of
intelligent adult chimpanzees!
The only reason we can be comfortable with
such a double standard is that the intermediates between human and chimps are
all dead.”
It is indeed true that the absence of both
the “transitional forms” fossils and absence of living intermediates of so many
existing species has shaped our world view and has saddled our cranial vaults
with “discontinuous minds” thereby allowing us readily to classify the living
world – even if not totally satisfactorily – but at least conveniently into
neat taxonomical tables.
Such neat pseudo distinctions then allows
one to built further hypotheses that are in discordance with the reality of the
complexities of life forms.
Today, perhaps unknownst to most, the
system of classification of the living world and its taxonomy that is being
followed is not that of Carl Linnaeus – the Swedish botanist but that of
currently living British Evolutionary Biologist who is Professor at the
Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford Thomas Cavalier-Smith.
Carl Linnaeus had divided the natural world
into three kingdoms (the second highest taxonomic rank just below domain and
followed by smaller groups called phyla): animal, vegetable and mineral.
Modern evolutionary biologists are more comfortable
with just two kingdoms: animal kingdom and plant kingdom.
Cavalier-Smith on the other hand did not
find this satisfactory enough and has divided all life forms into eight
kingdoms:
Plantae
Animalia – multicellular eukaryotes
Protozoa – single celled eukaryotes
Fungi -
Eubacteria - prokaryotes
Archaebacteria – single celled prokaryotes without
nucleus
Chromista – all algae with chlorophylls and
which most biologists earlier would have placed them under plantae
Archezoa – eukaryotes that diverged before
the origin of mitochondria
Even this classification is not universally
recognized to its complete totality and yet taxonomy is possible because of
absence of intermediates between various life forms.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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