Re: Aquatic Animals
H. M. Hubey (hubey@pegasus.montclair.edu)
21 Oct 1995 11:02:12 -0400
bbur@wpo.nerc.ac.uk (Bill Burnett) writes:
>>elephants 80-90
>>hippos 100
>Without wishing to partake in this farce any further I would just like to ask
>where you think whales fit on this scale. Probably higher than hippos would
>be my guess. My point being that your posting either demonstrates that
>1) you are ignorant of the existence of whales. Unlikely but not unfeasible.
YOu seem to have problems either with reading comprehension or
are bothered too much with your emotionalism to be objective.
It was already stated that this is not for fully-aquatic animals
otherwise I would have put the fishes there too. It's for
primarily non-aquatic animals (ones still spending time in other
places). And it's not for all animals, otherwise I could have
put sea turtles there too. And no it's not perfect. The sea otter
is there as a kind of a scale marker.
Since the whole point is to be able to make correlations among
animals that don't look like fishes (at least morphologically)
and that because it's difficult enough to use analogical
reasoning as it is without having to go through this all the
way back to whales it doesn't serve any purpose to include
all animals. But in a more thorough attempt of this sort (ones
that are over taxonomy and trees) they'd have to be included.
This is just a small cross section of animals which seem more
germane.
>2) you haven't thought this through very carefully.
Give us your thoughts.
>No I'm not going to offer a revised scale.
OK.
--
Regards, Mark
http://www.smns.montclair.edu/~hubey
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