tisdag 15 maj 2012

The "true tree of life" must be a fuzzy set

Biological systematists have been searching for the "true" classification since the dawn of man. They are convinced that every biological organism belongs to one and only one "true class" (or "true set of classes"), which is also the "natural group" (or "natural groups") for the organism. For them, classes are not something we allocate organisms to, but something organisms are. They just try to find out which classes every organism is (or which "natural groups" it belongs to). The approach is strictly typological, and has also been practically applied as "race cleansing" from time to time.

Never has it struck these biological systematists that the classes reside in their own eyes, although they have changed their minds about the specifics of these "natural groups" for about two and a half millenia by now. On the contrary, the post-war German entomologist Willi Hennig asserted (claimed, defined) that such "natural groups" are to be found practically by reversing our own classification !!! His suggestion led these biological systematists to assert (claim, define) that they have found "the natural groups" every time they have classified and reversed the classification (whichever classification it is) over and over again. The only difference to before Hennig is that they now also reverse their classification arriving to what they started with. That is, they think they have derived the "natural groups" instead of simply classified them, although they derive exactly what they classify.

One wonders how long they can continue with these stupid practices resting on the erroneous axiom that classes are real? Bertrand Russell showed that this axiom is paradoxically contradictory already 1901 and Einstein revealed some years later that time is relative to space, which falsifies this axiom, so when will these biological systematists acknowledge these facts and discard their erroneous axiom? When will they give up for facts and discard their erroneous idea of a single true tree of life?

I said it before and I say it again: there is no "true" classification of biological organisms to be found. None of us (organisms) can be pidgeon-holed into a single set of "natural groups". Instead, all of us are a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and can thus be pidgeon-holed into many different sets of "natural groups". It isn't that "natural groups" do not exist, but that every single set of "natural groups" is contradictory. If "natural groups" actually do exist, they they must thus be fuzzy sets.

It means that the idea of a "single "true tree of life" must be a fuzzy set.

   



 

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