Humpback_Whit Welles _CCA_SA_30_Unported Mirounga_angustirostris_Frank Schulenburg_CCA_SA_30_Unported Charles_Darwin_Julius Jääskeläinen_CCA_20_generic California_sea_lions_Rhododendrites_CCA_SA_40_Intl Rainbow_trout_USFWS_PD Jean-Baptiste_de_Lamarck_CCA_PD_100 Walrus_AWeith_CCA_SA_40_Intl Fiona the hippo2_CincinnatiZooTwitter_CCA_SA_30 Carl_von_Linné_Alexander Roslin_CCA_PD_100 Leucothoe eltoni_Copyright_JamesDarwinThomas Previous Next "Discussion is an exchange of knowledge; an argument an exchange of ignorance."
Robert Quillenan American journalist and humorist who for more than a quarter century was "one of the leading purveyors of village nostalgia "They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance."
Terry PratchettEnglish humorist, satirist, and author of fantasy novels, especially comical works. "Is it ignorance or apathy? Hey, I don't know and I don't care."
Jimmy BuffetAmerican singer-songwriter, musician, author, actor, and businessman. He is best known for his music, which often portrays an "island escapism" lifestyle. "The problem with people who live in a world of speeches and books and theories is they don't know how to fix things in the real world when they go wrong. They feign ignorance, blame others, and make another eloquent speech."
Kathleen Troia McFarland;American political candidate, former government official, and political commentator "Through shallow intellect, the mind becomes shallow, and one eats the fly, along with the sweets."
Guru Nanak Gurpurabalso referred to as Bābā Nānak, was the founder of Sikhism and is the first of the ten Sikh Gurus. "I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living."
Anais Nin;French-Cuban-American diarist, essayist, novelist and writer of short stories and erotica. "When this unusual crustacean with a greatly enlarged appendage appeared under my microscope after a day of collecting, an image of the shoes Elton John wore as the Pinball Wizard came to mind.”
Dr. James Darwin ThomasProfessor at Halmos College of Natural Sciences and Oceanography; Hollywood, Florida. "You don't know Jack... yet! But once you do he's impossible to forget!"
Michelle HughesAlabama author who's self-published 20 books "Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing."
Warren Edward Buffett is an American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. He is currently the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. "I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there."
Richard Phillips Feynman American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics and particle physics. "I do like not knowing where I'm going, wandering in strange woods, whistling and following bread crumbs."
Katherine Matilda Swinton is a British actress. "There's no excuse for the young people not knowing who the heroes and heroines are or were."
Eunice Kathleen Waymonprofessionally as Nina Simone, was an American singer, songwriter, musician, arranger, and civil rights activist. "Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance."
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell OM FRS British polymath. As an academic, he worked in philosophy, mathematics, and logic. "I'm scared of the water, and I hate the sea. I'd be all right if it was clear and I could see what was underneath. But it's the not knowing what's there that freaks me out."
Hannah Mills, MBEBritish competitive sailor and two-time world champion in the Women's 470 class, having won in 2012 and 2019 "When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up."
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald American novelist, essayist, short story writer and screenwriter. "Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance."
George Bernard ShawIrish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist "The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff."
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce American short story writer, journalist, poet, and American Civil War veteran. His book The Devil's Dictionary was named as one of "The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature" by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration. Previous Next
CUSTODI IN MEMORIA John Booker Previous Next John Thomas Booker Jr., Director of Science Education for Seacamp Association Inc. on Big Pine Key, FL , passed away on November 7, 2010 after losing his battle with cancer. A member of NMEA (National Marine Educator's Association) since 1977, John joined FMSEA (Florida Marine Science Educators Association) in 1982 and served as President of FMSEA in 1988-89, hosting the "Back to the Keys" FMSEA Conference in April 1989.
John was a Marine Aquatic Species Collecting Workshop Facilitator since the beginning of the program in 1996. At Seacamp since 1982, John was instrumental in the recruitment and training of marine science staff. John worked to develop new programs, secure and manage grants, recruit and teach college groups, conduct teacher workshops, assist with training SCUBA staff, teach CPR/First Aid to all staff, train boat captains, develop a computer lab and training program, assist with computer management…and so much more. He was also a licensed boat captain and a NAUI SCUBA Instructor.
Most of all, John was a good friend to all. He provided logistical support and technical expertise to many visiting researchers, especially to Coupon Bight and Looe Key, as well as spending many hours around many campfires sharing seafaring tales and listening to John playing his guitar and singing songs of a southern soul and the Sea.
"As my knowledge increased, I soon became aware that the transfer of knowledge from the research community t o the general public is essential. I then became a marine educator."
contributing Tale-Teller
Dr James Darwin Thomas is the former Chair of the Crustacean Collection at The Smithsonian Institution and Professor at Halmos College of Natural Sciences and Oceanography; Hollywood, Florida.
He studied Amphipods his entire career, and is an SME (subject matter expert) in Coral Reef Ecology, Marine Science, and Systematic Biology.
Now retired from Florida International University, he continues to lead field education trips all over the world, most recently on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and the barrier reef in Belize, Central America.
transcript 14. Then You Don't Know Jack
A Marine Biologist friend of mine ran the training program for Marine Science Instructors and Interns at a sub-tropical Marine Station for years. One of his mantras was "If all you know is the scientific name…you don't know jack!"
I heard him say it once during a seasonal visit and, after waiting until we were alone, offered up a bit of a presumptuous advice, actually a correction, from my own days leading expeditions in field-biology.
He's passed on now, and I can't help but feel a bit remorseful for talking about him in the past tense. Because his memory is alive and well in all the people he taught about the ocean, all of whom are better off for having known him.
Systematics is "the branch of biology that deals with classification and nomenclature; taxonomy", and much thoughtful insight has gone into the formal naming of new species since the days of Lamarck. He's the scientist credited as the first to propose a viable theory of "inheritance of acquired characteristics", more recently referred to as "soft inheritance".
Incorporating the classical era theory of soft inheritance into his theory of evolution as a supplement to his concept of orthogenesis, a drive towards complexity. His legacy informed and inspired the research of Charles Darwin, and is credited with the seeds of insight that are the current understanding of the evolutionary process.
According to Wikipedia;
"Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck (who lived from 1744 to 1829), often known simply as Lamarck, was a French naturalist. He was a soldier, biologist, and academic, and an early proponent of the idea that biological evolution occurred and proceeded in accordance with natural laws."
Predating Charles Darwin, who was 20 years old when Lamarck died, the two of them formalized what began with Aristotle, who first formalized describing the "living world" in his own, classically ancient-Greek way;
Around the middle of the 4th century BCE, ancient Greek science had reached a climax…Aristotle was the first to attempt a system of animal classification, in which he contrasted animals containing blood with those that were bloodless.
The animals with blood included those now grouped as mammals (except the whales, which he placed in a separate group), birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fishes.
The bloodless animals were divided into the cephalopods, the higher crustaceans, the insects, and the testaceans, the last group being a collection of all the lower animals.
When discussing our shared world, resorting to classification is critical, meaning we categorize things in a shorthand way that makes our conversations more manageable, if not briefer.
Biologically speaking, taxonomy is the result, despite being rife with disagreements, as is true of all science. The naming of new species has undergone a series of changes and suggested new methods over the years. Yet systematics still suffer from a single unifying, mutually-acceptable way to do so. As we'll see in the rest of this treatise.
Taxonomies are trees, and as such are a particularly good metaphor for human inference. Time, symbolized within a branching hierarchical system of ranks, still dominates most systems of human design or description. We name the things that make up our world because failing to do so means we end up treating them as if they were all the same. While we know they aren't.
Similarity and distance can be thought of as oppositional synonyms. But they're really just labels anchoring opposite ends of a relational-continuum we use to describe aspects of our similar yet different lives and experience.
You might have heard this refrain before; "Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species" is the ranking system that has been recalled by most young students with the mnemonic "Dear King Philip Came Over For Good Spaghetti".
There are others, a few rather needlessly off-color. Biologists, professionally preoccupied with the study of life as they are, of which sex and digestion figure prominently, are prone to those baser aspects of life. But these three are poplar as well;
So the biologists study and find ways to name the things that comprise life in ways that both describe and enlighten. Sometimes they are even amusing.
A great first example is the hippopotamus, first described and named by Linnaeus, in "Systema Naturae" in 1758 as "Hippopotamus amphibius". Carl von Linné was a Swedish botanist, zoologist, taxonomist, and physician who formalized binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming organisms. He's known as the "father of modern taxonomy".
Combing two Greek words, hippos from for "horse" and potamos from "river or rushing water". Formerly labeled "Choeropsis" from the Greek for "having the appearance of a "young pig". What a great example this is of "knowing jack".
Imagine the clarity of the water his "apostles" beheld to note the graceful nature of the hippo as it ran along the river bottoms in search of good grazing areas. More than that, think of the work it took for an 18th Century field biologist to make the trek through the jungle marshes of Africa to finally witness this lumbering land-animal display such grace underwater. The danger, alone, is an incredible thing to consider. Not just from the host of dangerous predators they had to avoid as they travelled, but from the hippos themselves, still the humber one killer of human-beings in Africa today.
"Apostles" is how Linnaeus referred to his many world-traveling colleagues who collected specimens and descriptions for him from the field. Sweden, at the time, was beset by economic depression, limiting his own scientific expeditions to Scandinavia.
It's clear from just this first example how knowing the scientific name of an organism means you do know something. More than "jack", at any rate. Other great examples of "the scientific name telling us more than jack"?
Humpback Whale; Megaptera novaeangliae
“Their scientific name is derived from the Greek words “mega” meaning large and “pteron” meaning wing (referring to their long pectoral flippers which are one third of their total body length) and “novaeanglia” meaning New Englander because they were described from New England, USA in 1781.”
Pinnipedia; seals, sea-lions, walrus;
it's from the modern Latin (plural), from Latin pinna ‘wing, fin’ + pes, ped- which means foot. They're referred to now as "the fin or feather-footed animals". Feather because there's been some disagreement among linguists about the word-root pes and ped, apparently used interchangeably to refer to feet and wings depending on the context of land animals or birds.
Seals; genus Phoca (Latin; sea-calf)
Sea Lions; genus Otarridae; New Latin Otaria + -idae, from Ancient Greek, “little ear”). These are the "eared seals", often featured as the performing seals in zoos and aquaria, who sport a prominent external ear, or pina, that the true seals lack, who can hear quite well but have ears that are wholly internal
Walrus; genus Odobendae; Odobenus comes from the Greek: "tooth walker", and refers to the walruses' method of pulling themselves up onto the ice with their long tusks
The there's the...
Northern Elephant Seal, Mirounga angustirostris; this is the largest of the pinnipeds, a true seal, or phoca, but so large many thought them to be a distinct genus. Weighing up to 5,000 pounds the males are famous for their long drawn-out battles for territory on the mating beaches of California and western Mexico and Southern hemisphere locales of southern New Zealand, Australia, South America, and South Africa, where its cousin the larger southern elephant seal lives, males topping out at nearly 6,000 pounds.
“The generic name Mirounga is a Latinization of miouroung, which is said to have been a term for the seal in Australian Aboriginal language. However, it is not known which language this represents.” Angustirostris; New Latin; from angustus meaning (“narrow”) + rōstrum meaning (“beak”), which is an accurate description of its strange looking head and large elephantine "trunk"l angustorostris, "narrow beak".
Another descriptive example is the...
Rainbow Trout; Oncorhynchus mykiss
Originally named by German naturalist and taxonomist Johann Julius Walbaum in 1792, it's based on specimens from the Kamchatka Peninsula in Siberia. Walbaum's original species name, mykiss, was derived from the local Kamchatkan name used for the fish, mykizha. The name of the genus is from the Greek onkos ("hook") and rynchos ("nose"), referring to the hooked jaws of males in the mating season.
But my favorite of all was named by a friend, Dr. James Darwin Thomas, a Systematic Biology expert who once held the Chair of the Crustacean Collection at the Smithsonian Institution. Amphipods, a tiny crustacean, are his specialty.
Leucothoe eltoni is an amphipod he recently identified, characterized, and named. Here he is explaining why he named it in honor of Elton John;
"I named the species in honor of Sir Elton John because I have listened to his music in my lab during my entire scientific career. So, when this unusual crustacean with a greatly enlarged appendage appeared under my microscope after a day of collecting, an image of the shoes Elton John wore as the Pinball Wizard came to mind.”
Descriptive? And how!
Is it useful biologically? Well, the genus Leucothoe, certainly is. But the species, eltoni? You be the judge.
When you spend half your life underwater collecting tiny crustaceans that live inside sponges and tunicates on coral reefs and the other half in your lab peering into microscopes counting and measuring in what is known as "cladistics", a mathematical technique of classification also known as numerical taxonomy, you get to name them whatever you want. And you have to admit, thinking of Elton John's penchant for outlandish costumes, this amphipod's iridescent claws are described rather neatly, and creatively, in memory of his sparkling shoes.
When all was said and done, it turns out that my Science Directing and Intern-training friend adjusted his original mantra. After this, he admonished his charges with slightly more experience and acquired insight of a thoroughly dedicated interpreter of nature;
"If all you know is the scientific name…then you don't know much!"
Which is far more accurate, since all of these names contain a smattering of mostly descriptive information, but hardly scratch the surface of their complex uniqueness. And so it goes with #Science.
As Confucius taught; "training is endless". And despite chipping away at him with relentless exploration, research, and deep study…so is "Jack"!