Chickens are not Dinosaurs!

(Or “Cladists are Sadists!”)

Photo by Rachel Vine from Pexels

7 minutes

She didn’t mean to destroy the world, but she did. True, when she spoke her Deplorable Word, the sky did not come crashing down. The room did not disintegrate. The large crocodiles standing behind her didn’t even react. But if what she said were true — and it literally cannot be true — all things would have come unwoven, strand by insubstantial strand.

The place was Clyde Peeling’s Reptile Land in Allentown, PA. The time was…a few years ago. (It’s all starting to blend together for me. I turned twenty. Next thing you know I’m thirty. Next thing you know I’m…but back to the subject at hand.) The speaker was a young woman standing in a sort of sunken auditorium next to two large crocodiles, to which her back was turned. Wait. No. Now that I think of it, the live crocodile expo was earlier, and the deplorable word came later, in a presentation room. And maybe they were alligators, not crocodiles. Oh well, let’s just go with crocodiles. It’s more dramatic.

Okay, so like I was saying: The young woman stood only inches away from two enormous and very hungry African crocodiles when she spoke the words that might have undone the world, had she only been Jadis and not Jasmine (or whatever her name was.) Do you want to know what she said? If there are children around, you might want to plug their ears!

“Chickens are dinosaurs.”

That’s what she said. Yes. I know. Believe me, I know. Hate speech is not even the term. But I’m not endorsing it; just reporting the facts.

What followed was the currently standard view of the Jack Horner crowd that birds have evolved from dinosaurs. Now, aside from the fact that another group of evolutionary biologists claims — or at least did within recent memory — that birds evolved from another line of reptiles, and that the similarities in the gait and feet of birds and bird-hipped dinosaurs represents convergent evolution, not descent, there are others reasons why chickens are not dinosaurs. Actually there’s just one reason. That reason is known as “REASON.”

I’m not a scientist, and I accept the overwhelming plausibility of common descent as a virtual fact. But I do sort of like reality. And words. Apparently not everybody does.

The thing is, to say that a chicken is a dinosaur is either false, or meaningless. A chicken is a domesticated fowl. It has all of the obvious features of any bird: wings, feathers, a bill, a lightweight skeleton, and the production of hard-shelled eggs. No creature classified as a dinosaur has all of these features. Now there are lots of good reasons for saying birds developed from a line of dinosaurs. Some of their number may have been warm-blooded, and some bore feathers, or feather-like structures. There are creatures intermediate between reptile and bird in the fossil record, and there are feathered dinosaurians. Some of the more birdy dinosaurs may have left descendants that were gradually succeeded by increasingly bird-like organisms, until the appearance of the first true birds. I mean legit bird birds; not some half-assed feathered velociraptor wannabe bird.

Now, I actually don’t have a dog in the dinosaurs-were-really-warm-blooded-and-became-birds-and-I’m-Jack-Horner-and-they-consulted-me-for-Jurassic-Park-so-you-have-to-listen-to-me-plus-I’m-super-popular-and-give-Ted-Talks fight. Like I said, this about REASON, not science. Science is only a sub-species of a sub-species of Reason, and evolutionary biology, in particular — being heavily dependent on historical inference and just-so stories — is a sub-species of that. But if I want to know what a chicken is, I will ask somebody who knows what the hell a chicken is. A farmer, for example, or a four-year old. (Case in point: my wife makes a mean roasted chicken, but she refuses to make me alligator steaks. Thinks it’s gross or something. Can you believe that? She also refuses to make me dinosaur, and that woman knows her food.)

If I want to know what a dinosaur is, I will have to go to a museum, consult a paleontologist (or two) and then do my best, as a layman, to differentiate fact from reasonable hypothesis. We are relying on interpretations of reconstructions here. One thing is clear: the creatures that we call birds are not just the same thing as the creatures we call dinosaurs, whatever their natures. Words have meanings, and equivocation is the most serpentine form of sophistry.

I am being a little flippant, but there’s a serious issue here. The error that my otherwise highly-competent, and insanely courageous GIANT MAN-EATING CYBERNETIC AFRICAN CROCODILE handler made was a form of equivocation. Really, it’s mental equivocation, (which is worse than the other kind.) She was not the first. She was only repeating a trend that is all the rage among a certain school of taxonomists (i.e. animal classifiers.) This view of systematics is called cladistics. Cladistics defines organisms by their origin (i.e. their ancestry,) rather than by their essences. And that is a huge problem. Origin and essence are not the same thing.

If I wanted to be pedantic, I could criticize evolutionary taxonomy in general for the circular habit of first treating taxonomy as the problem to be solved, then proposing common descent as the solution, only to turn around and use taxonomy as “evidence” for the very phenomena being explained. But I won’t do that. That would be rude. And evolutionary apologists hate “logic-chopping” (and logic, and irritating little questions about just how many mutations and of what kind were needed in order to turn X into Y, and exactly how many generations it took, and the experiments that show how all of this is done, and specific predictions of the sort available in virtually every other science…but we won’t go there.)

No, I am not interested in attacking common descent in general, which, in my opinion, has since been well-established on non-circular grounds. I am only interested in addressing this ontological error of classifying a thing by its origins, rather than by its essence. Systematics is the science of classification. Classification just means putting things into categories, with the assumption that those categories actually correspond to reality. Linnaean-style systematics, for all its limitations, is about just that. Cladistic systematics tries to cut out the middle-man of metaphysics by simply classifying things by their shared ancestry. Now it’s certainly true there’s more than one way to classify organisms. A nature program about animal flight would feature birds, bats, and insects, and there’s nothing wrong with a having a ready-made category like that for the purposes of comparison. But systematics, if it is anything, is the science of grouping like things, and that requires some prior notion of what makes a thing what it is, and not something else.

But considerations of kind or type take us beyond mere physical science and into meta-physics, that is, the philosophy of being. Even a non-scientist has the right to step in here, and call BS when he sees it. The BS in question, as so well-articulated by my swashbuckling crocodile-hunter lady, is the assertion that things just are what they came from. So let’s look at that.

The essence or nature of a being is that principle of unity which makes it itself, and not something else. Essence is usually expressed by genus and species. For example, a triangle is a polygon (genus) with three sides, and three interior angles (species). Or, we can drill down to more specific incarnations of the species; a right triangle for example, the latter being a kind of species of triangle, treating “triangle” now as the general category, or genus. From there we could get into varieties of right triangle, such as special right triangles that correspond to the Pythagorean Theorem. Eventually we end up with the two lowest categories of classification for some entity — genus and species — so that the only differences between this individual and that individual are non-essential, or accidental features.

Let me explain. Besides the properties that are essential to being a triangle, and which also necessitate that it be some specific example of that group, there are other characteristics which are inherently variable. These are things like position, relation, size, color, etc. Such features are called accidents. They differ from essential criteria because they can be found in lots of totally unrelated beings, and, especially, because they cannot exist at all unless they are possessed by something else. You can have a red triangle, but you cannot have a “red.” You can have an equilateral triangle beside a right triangle on the same plane, but you cannot have a “beside,” or an “on.” Things can be beside other things. That makes things rather important. It also makes talking about things themselves (logic, ontology, metaphysics) completely unavoidable. Either you do it consciously, or you end up smuggling some other (and usually insane) metaphysics in through the back door.

Now things, whether living or non-living, physical or conceptual, reveal themselves by their actions, properties, and characteristics. Applying this to the physical world, hydrogen is one thing (or substance), oxygen another, and water still another. Hydrogen has certain properties that hold true for any aggregation of hydrogen in parallel circumstances. Likewise for oxygen. If this were not the case, one could not do science, since the world might behave with total randomness at any moment. Indeed, you couldn’t think at all, since to think is to grasp part of the essence of a subject, and, applying logic, discover what follows from it. You couldn’t even name anything, since all names would be rendered arbitrary. Is that a bird, a plane, or a spaghetti dinner? It’s everything and nothing, if things don’t have essences.

Now when hydrogen and oxygen molecules are combined in a certain structure, behold, water appears. Water is neither hydrogen, nor oxygen. It has its own unique properties. If you doubt that, try the following fun experiment: Step 1) drop a match into a bucket of water. Step 2) Light a match in a room flooded with pure oxygen. Did the same thing happen, or was it different? Well, then, if you’re still with us…

Water is also not simply a mixture or solution of the two. Its properties, which are marvelous, are also quite unique to it, though some were guessable from the qualities specific to hydrogen and oxygen, respectively. And the latter two elements, in a slightly different structural combination, yield hydrogen peroxide. Try drinking a nice cold glass of that, (preferably after fleeing at full speed away from a carnivorous rooster!) Another fun experiment: next time you sit down to dinner, ditch the salt, and just pour some sodium and chlorine on your brazed alligator steak. If things are just the same as what they came from, then this should be a very tasty and cost effective way to season your food!

In all seriousness, it’s a matter of good reasoning that origin and essence are distinct. Even in the case of mere artifacts, it’s a serious error to conflate the two. A hammer comes from wood, steel, an idea in a designer’s mind, and the activity of bringing it all together. But even a hammer is not just wood, steel, concept, and skill. Physical substances, having (unlike the hammer) intrinsic natures, are also far from just the physical ingredients which effect their existence. And what’s true of mere water is infinitely more true of chickens and dinosaurs. Whether or not you fully buy into the Aristotelean notion of form — (and something like it has to be correct; or, again, Crazyville) — your common sense should revolt at the idea that some substance, A, is just the same thing as some other substances (B, C, D) that are temporally and casually antecedent to it, or which act to bring it about.

To say that a chicken is a dinosaur is just as mistaken as saying that a chicken is a fish, or a microbe, or a “warm little pond,” or a quark. I take it as fact that there are processes (still quite mysterious) in nature which somehow bring about new living forms from existing ones by descent with modification. It’s also a feature of the human mind that it struggles with demarcation, with drawing the line between one thing and another. However, this difficulty is no excuse for conflating two clearly distinct beings, just to make a point. It may be more fun to say, “Chickens are dinosaurs!” than to say, “Chickens are a form of omnivorous domesticated fowl, small in size, with wings unfit for flight and a sizable portion of tasty flesh,” but the latter is at least accurate, while the former is a direct attack on human thought. It amounts to saying that everything is everything, because everything is just a gradation of everything else.

And if that were the case, the world would come apart at the seams. And then everything would taste like chicken.

© 2021 Joseph Breslin All Rights Reserved