orca-covenant
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User ID: 1931
orca-covenant
1yr ago
The use of articles varies subtly even between languages who generally use them; Romance languages use articles in many situations in which English does not, and vice versa.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
Gonna take the chance to plug my own animal brain size graph. Brains need to fit the body therey're in (a larger body means more sensory data, more nerve terminations to manage, can supply more energy, &c), but most body structures don't scale linearly with the overall body size; it boils down to some variant of the square-cube law. I have some reflections on the data in that link; a brain can only become so small before it stops working at a brain at all, and presumably there are diminishing returns above a certain size.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
The drama of creation, according to the Hawaiian account, is divided into a series of stages, and in the very first of these life springs from the shadowy abyss and dark night... At first the lowly zoophytes and corals come into being, and these are followed by worms and shellfish, each type being declared to conquer and destroy its predecessor, a struggle for existence in which the strongest survive. Parallel with this evolution of animal forms, plant life begins on land and in the sea--at first with the algae, followed by seaweeds and rushes. As type follows type, the accumulating slime of their decay raises the land above the waters, in which, as spectator of all, swims the octopus, the lone survivor from an earlier world.
-- Roland Dixon, Oceanic Mythology, 1916
Indeed. By the nature of evolution, closely related species blur at the edges. Interfertility remains the main criterion to distinguish species, but it's neither binary (there are many degrees of non-interfertility: won't mate > will mate but not conceive > will conceive but not carry to term > hybrids are born malformed > hybrids are healthy but sterile > hybrids are fertile but have lower fitness) nor transitive (see ring species, where A is interfertile with B and B with C, but C is not interfertile with A). Besides, most species are named on morphological or genetical grounds, because checking interfertility with their relatives would be impractical. And of course many species are exclusively asexual and do not mate at all -- just look at the mess that is bacterial taxonomy, where populations of a single "species" can be more genetically diverse than mammals and fish.
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