animatedamerican:

So @your-biology-is-wrong wrote this excellent post, which attracted some wrongheaded comments and a lengthy, well-documented, frankly stunning rebuttal by @millenniumvulcan.  I recommend you go read them.

But the whole conversation got me thinking.

I’ve been saying for some years now that we’re teaching science terribly wrong in schools, and quite possibly the wrongest thing we’re doing is making no distinction between “facts about the universe that we have observed” and “categories and models that we have constructed in order to organize the facts we have observed”.

Essentially, kids are being taught that “cats are mammals” is the same kind of scientific fact as “cats give birth to live young,” and it isn’t.  At all.

Which is why we get discussions like the one linked above.  Or like the ones about Pluto being declared a dwarf planet instead of a planet, where people assert that the change in nomenclature is because “we understand better now what a planet is” and not because we’ve chosen to narrow the definition to (disputably) better organize our constructed categories of Things In Space.  Or, for that matter, like the ones that call out “scientific error” in the Bible by citing references to calling a bat a “bird,” or calling a whale a “fish,” as though the classification system we use today is objective scientific fact instead of constructed model.

Because nobody is teaching kids how to tell the difference, or even that there is a difference.