• baropithecus@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      The shitpost is correct. Bony fish, or the superclass Osteichtyes, absolutely is a scientific classification, and by the way modern cladistics work, every single thing descended from them, which includes all terrestrial mammals, reptiles etc. are also bony fish.

      In other words, if the common ancestor of tuna and squirrels and whales is a bony fish, they are all bony fish. The squirrel and whale cannot be demoted from their bony fish status.

  • tabularasa@lemmy.ca
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    6 months ago

    Good evening. The last scene was interesting from the point of view of a professional logician because it contained a number of logical fallacies; that is, invalid propositional constructions and syllogistic forms, of the type so often committed by my wife. ‘All wood burns,’ states Sir Bedevere. ‘Therefore,’ he concludes, ‘all that burns is wood.’ This is, of course, pure bullshit. Universal affirmatives can only be partially converted: all of Alma Cogan is dead, but only some of the class of dead people are Alma Cogan. ‘Oh yes,’ one would think. However, my wife does not understand this necessary limitation of the conversion of a proposition; consequently, she does not understand me, for how can a woman expect to appreciate a professor of logic, if the simplest cloth-eared syllogism causes her to flounder?

    For example, given the premise, ‘all fish live underwater’ and ‘all mackerel are fish’, my wife will conclude, not that ‘all mackerel live underwater’, but that ‘if she buys kippers it will not rain’, or that ‘trout live in trees’, or even that ‘I do not love her any more.’ This she calls ‘using her intuition’. I call it ‘crap’, and it gets me very irritated because it is not logical. ‘There will be no supper tonight,’ she will sometimes cry upon my return home. ‘Why not?’ I will ask. ‘Because I have been screwing the milkman all day,’ she will say, quite oblivious of the howling error she has made. ‘But,’ I will wearily point out, ‘even given that the activities of screwing the milkman and getting supper are mutually exclusive, now that the screwing is over, surely then, supper may now, logically, be got.’ ‘You don’t love me any more,’ she will now often postulate. ‘If you did, you would give me one now and again, so that I would not have to rely on that rancid Pakistani for my orgasms.’ ‘I will give you one after you have got me my supper,’ I now usually scream, ‘but not before’-- as you understand, making her bang contingent on the arrival of my supper. ‘God, you turn me on when you’re angry, you ancient brute!’ she now mysteriously deduces, forcing her sweetly throbbing tongue down my throat. ‘Fuck supper!’ I now invariably conclude, throwing logic somewhat joyously to the four winds, and so we thrash about on our milk-stained floor, transported by animal passion, until we sink back, exhausted, onto the cartons of yogurt.

    I’m afraid I seem to have strayed somewhat from my original brief. But in a nutshell: sex is more fun than logic. One cannot prove this, but it ‘is’ in the same sense that Mount Everest ‘is’, or that Alma Cogan ‘isn’t’.

    Goodnight.

  • aname@lemmy.one
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    6 months ago

    I agree. With same logic:

    • Water is not mercury
    • Water is liquid
    • Liquid is mercury
    • Water is mercury
  • atomicorange@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    If both trout and sharks are fish, then so are whales. Mammals are more closely related to trout than trout are to sharks.

  • Scaatis@feddit.de
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    6 months ago

    Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 32:

    The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology is in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters it still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish. In his System of Nature, A.D. 1776, Linnaeus declares, “I hereby separate the whales from the fish.” But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the year 1850, sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnaeus’s express edict, were still found dividing the possession of the same seas with the Leviathan.

    The grounds upon which Linnaeus would fain have banished the whales from the waters, he states as follows: “On account of their warm bilocular heart, their lungs, their moveable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem intrantem feminam mammis lactantem,” and finally, “ex lege naturae jure meritoque.” I submitted all this to my friends Simeon Macey and Charley Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine in a certain voyage, and they united in the opinion that the reasons set forth were altogether insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they were humbug.

    Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me.