Comments on: Boundaries of Categories, Categories of Boundaries, and Evolution http://evmedreview.com/?p=135 ... bridging the gap Thu, 02 Sep 2010 18:06:34 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 hourly 1 By: Mike from Ottawa http://evmedreview.com/?p=135&cpage=1#comment-2136 Mike from Ottawa Tue, 07 Apr 2009 18:18:11 +0000 http://evmedreview.com/?p=135#comment-2136 From the POV of a different profession than science, the use of different definitions in different contexts is mother's milk in the legal world. Definition sections typically say, for example, "In this Act/contract/agreement: ... "goods" means ...". Even though you can in the legal world to some extent create your own 'reality' with definitions and thus aim for an arbitrary level of certainty, it is common to accept an amount of uncertainty in a definition rather than circumscribe it too closely and end up excluding something that, once the facts and specific circumstance are developed, you'd want to have included. The same considerations would seem to me to apply a fortiori to definitions in science where you don't create your reality and especially in biology where there is fuzziness inherent in a world of evolved and evolving organisms. Trying to have sets of organisms well-defined is playing Procrustes to nature's Theseus. Excellent blog and I'm pleased that I've just, unwittingly, been 'bridging the gap' among law, biology, math and my arts electives in the Classics. What's the smilie for smug? From the POV of a different profession than science, the use of different definitions in different contexts is mother’s milk in the legal world. Definition sections typically say, for example, “In this Act/contract/agreement: … “goods” means …”. Even though you can in the legal world to some extent create your own ‘reality’ with definitions and thus aim for an arbitrary level of certainty, it is common to accept an amount of uncertainty in a definition rather than circumscribe it too closely and end up excluding something that, once the facts and specific circumstance are developed, you’d want to have included. The same considerations would seem to me to apply a fortiori to definitions in science where you don’t create your reality and especially in biology where there is fuzziness inherent in a world of evolved and evolving organisms. Trying to have sets of organisms well-defined is playing Procrustes to nature’s Theseus.

Excellent blog and I’m pleased that I’ve just, unwittingly, been ‘bridging the gap’ among law, biology, math and my arts electives in the Classics. What’s the smilie for smug?

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