Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

That's Rungwecebus with a C. (Poor old Linnaeus - bad enough importing Ws into taxo-Latin without putting in a double E...)

And how are you going to handle this in your book? Since species obviously ARE NOT miscellaneous and have a natural order which is indeed marvellously explained by the big DNA and random mutation story. Doesnt the 'everything is miscellaneous' tag run the risk of being inherently trivialised.

So long as you stay on the surface everything is indeed serendipitous.....like the patterns of oil on a liquid surface with which marbled papers are made, But when you get into the warp and weft of the actual paper the fibre, texture, structure and physics of the situation becomes irrefutable.

Adam, there is, as you know, serious disagreement among scientists over what constitutes a species. Darwin himself at one point denies that species are a "joint of nature," although Darwin isn't the final authority on this topic. It's not quite as cut and dried as you state.

On the larger point: There is no doubt that there are regularities in how attributes are bundled. Which attributes we choose to attend to has everything to do with our interests and assumptions. Some are more obviously interesting than others (for biologists, species are a lot more interesting than races), some are more easily divisible than others (you only need one property to divide matter into elements), and some look obvious at first but turn out to be far more based on convention and history than we'd (= I'd) thought (the planets). The question the book opens with (for now) is: If everything is miscellaneous, then why didn't it stay that way?