= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Romashka comments on Open Thread, Aug. 22 - 28, 2016 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (67)
It seems to me that the history of biological systematics/taxonomy is a great source of material for a study on dissolving the question (but I am neither a systematicist nor a historian). Are there any popular intros into the field that don't focus on individual botanists of the past? Serebryakov's "Morphology of plants", printed half a century ago, has a nice section on history, but it is limited in scope (and not quite "popular"). Other books often just list the people and what they did without interconnecting them, which is boring.
Naming Nature is focused on animals, but it or some of the books receommended with it might be the sort of thing you're looking for.
Why do you think that reading a history of how people who didn't know what DNA was thought about taxonomy will help dissolving the question?
Why DNA? For most of taxonomy's existence, DNA "didn't exist". Just because genotyping changed the game doesn't mean there was no game before.
Of course there was taxonomy before. There was taxonomy at the time where people believed in spontaneous generation. On the other hand studying the biological theories of the time doesn't help us much to solve contemporary problems.