Whales are Fish
Don't let some 19th-century egghead tell you any different
What is a whale? It's a fish, at least until the mid-nineteenth century. That's when eggheads issued a decree: NO VIVIPAROUS, MILK-PRODUCING, WARM-BLOODED ANIMAL CAN ALSO BE A FISH.
It caught on so well, it could be a two-hundred-dollar question on Jeopardy.
But it was kinda bullshit. "Fish" is only a vaguely defined category, the decree wasn't a recognition of objective facts imposed by nature, and even today, we have the coelacanth and other lobe-finned species that we call "fish," even though they're closer to mammals (and whales) than, say, a tuna.
Big deal? Yeah, kinda, because it's part of the big modernist picture, which is all dashed-up (to adapt Wodehouse's favorite versatile slang word).
Look what happened: Everyone up to that point knew what a "fish" was, and it included whales. Just ask Jonah. And then eggheads decided that the category of "fish" excludes whales based on . . . what? Nothing more than their decree.
Why did fish need to be taxonomically separated to exclude whales, especially when the taxonomy doesn't hold up (just ask the coelacanth)?
Because the eggheads said so.
Eggheads": fragile rationalized thinking machines. They're "fragile" in the Nassim Taleb sense: they look solid but they're fragile, and when they break, they make a f'ing mess.
The Venn diagram of the "egghead" and "expert" is like the Venn diagram of "queer" and "gay": they don't entirely overlap but they might as well, and no sane person wants to look closely enough to see what exactly doesn't.
The mid-nineteenth century celebrated the arrival of experts, which was kinda like celebrating the arrival of plague. They'd been around for centuries, but somewhere in the nineteenth century, they gained widespread acceptance, opening the door to snake oil salesmen and other frauds who hawked goods created by the experts.
The thing is, all expert conclusions are, at some level, fraudulent. Their testimony is, in Marshall McLuhan's famous formulation, like a bright light aimed directly at one's eyes. I like the sun, but I don't want to look at it with binoculars.
That's kinda how we ought to treat the testimony of experts: like the sun. Let it shed light, sure, but don't forget that it makes more shadows than it gives answers and always--always--eventually gives way to darkness, though normally not until their testimony has created a mess.