Re: Birds and pornography

["philidor11" <philidor11@snet.net>]

I said:
<Your job is much easier if you look at Classes.
Does it have feathers?  Bird...>
Tim replied:
<Again, the Pornographic Guide to Classification: I can't define a bird, but
I know it when I see it.>

And you see it (them) a lot.
That is a definition, maybe not of the sort that you would prefer, but a
definition.
Somebody else suggested, 'Those feathery flying things.'  Well, okay, but
making allowances, 'Those feathery flying (or secondarily flightless)
things.'
And to acknowledge your valid point:  'Those feathery flying (or secondarily
flightless) things and their extinct feathery flying (or secondarily
flightless) cousins.'
There are going to be arguments about where particular species fit in.
Luckily, these important arguments will not affect the definition.

HP Marjanovic had made an essential point:
<Of course phylogenetic _taxonomy_ is not a science.>
I had explicated this point:
<Taxonomy is a naming convention.  Its purpose is ease of communication.
To both scientists and the public.>
HP Williams observed:
<Silly me, I thought the purpose of science was accuracy and precision when
discussing concepts, not simplifying everything to a level everyone can
*easily* understand.>

That's okay, we're all here to learn.

He continued:
<In that vein (so to speak)...  From now one, I propose that all medical
practitioners should refer to any bacterial or viral disease as "plague" (if
it's contagious) or "ague" (if it's not).>
Still recovering from a really vicious flu 'ague', I'd say the difference
between that misery and a 'plague' is not important enough to be central.
Your statement does include a distinction important enough  that doctors do
want the public to 'get' it:
There are viral infections, on which antibiotics do not work,
and bacteriological infections on which antibiotics do work.
(And somebody somewhere has probably fine-tuned this distinction out of
existence.)

Would you really want to change the bird definition to:  'someone's current
best guess about which known fossils probably most resembled what the most
almost non-bird ancestor of a bird looked like.' ?