Let me be clear on this point. No one will ever find a perfect classification system. Life will always defeat your classification process because life doesn't care about classifications systems. Life just -- is. Life is biologically diverse -- infinitely diverse -- because with every step of evolution, there is a new mutation, or conversely put, with every new mutation, every new combination -- by design or by accident -- evolution proceeds in a new and different way. Classification processes and systems can and will never keep up because life will always be one, or a hundred, or a thousand steps ahead. You think that bacteria and viruses are not 'smart'. Then why do we now have 'drug-resistant bacteria and viruses'. Because they mutated, they they compensated, they evolved -- they 'outsmarted' the drugs -- and man. And man is left scratching his head, saying: 'Bacteria and viruses are not supposed to be this way. They are not supposed to be able to defeat our wonderful, all powerful anti-biotics?' But they do. And for man -- and science -- it is back to the drawing room, back to the continual game of adjustment and re-adjustment, compensation, and further compensation...
Man's number one evolutionary tool rmaains his 'brain', and to maintain this evolutinary advantage, man has to continually stay on top of life's changes -- as well as its consistencies and its similarities until these consistencies and similarities break off and become something 'nwe' -- then again, man has to stay on top of these changes, and follow with 'life's new program'. Where life goes, science and philosophy need to follow right behind, like a 'stotm tracker' or a 'tornado chaser' follows a storm/tornado with all its twists and turns, and changes in directon. If a storm tracker or a tornado chaser, misses a tornado's sudden turn -- somebody could die (including the tornado chaser him or hsrself). Science's functionality/usefulness/value to mankind depends on it catching all of life's new twists and turns. The job of philosophy is mainly to keep science on the right track, and to keep it ethically honest, so that, for example, science doesn't start chasing money rather than what it is supposed to be chasing -- i.e., the 'truth' about life with all its different twists and turns.
-- dgb, July 18th, 2008.
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