Walter Lang Quotes

[In science any model depends on a pre-chosen taxonomy] a set of classifications into which we divide the enormous complexity of the real world... Land, labor, and capital are extremely heterogeneous aggregates, not much better than earth, air, fire, and water.

One thing scientists do is to find order among a large number of facts, and one way to do that across fields as diverse as biology, geology, physics and astronomy is through classification.

Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.

If man had not been his own classifier, he would never have thought of founding a separate order for his own reception.

Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really it’s a battleground.

A classification is a definition comprising a system of definitions.

It is the genus that gives the characters, and not the characters that make the genus.

The need to create a new taxonomy that isn't just applying to our own solar system will become so evident and apparent that something will come out of it. I'm sure of it, even if it's not tomorrow.

The best opinion now is, that there are multitudinous forms which are not sufficiently differentiated to be distinctively either plant or animal, while, as respects ordinary plants and animals, the difficulty of laying down a definition has become far greater than ever before.

Miscellaneous is always the largest category.

I don't know where to put whales. I'm sticking them here, but I don't have any reason for it.

It is once again the vexing problem of identity within variety; without a solution to this disturbing problem there can be no system, no classification.

The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists.

We would have been happy if we could have assigned just three categories, large, medium, and small; the point is, we wanted to avoid personal judgments. It actually turned out to be quite a finely tuned scale.

I kind of have a Victorian sensibility - I don't understand stuff until I can classify it and name it.

There's a lot of essay writing that could pass for journalism and journalism that could pass for essay. Some of it is just taxonomy.

We are a categorically obsessed culture, where we have to compartmentalize everything in reference to another thing, like, 'What does it sound like? Does it sound like this?'

A creationist can embarrass an evolutionist by asking for a definition of species.

I have worked really hard to defy categorization, to break down a taxonomy whenever it comes my way.

I love taxonomies, categories, ways of dividing people into groups.

It was always understood that plants and animals, though completely contrasted in their higher representatives, approached each other very closely in their lower and simpler forms. But they were believed not to blend.

A race is what zoologists term a variety or subdivision of a species.

It's fair to say that Wikipedia has spent far more time considering the philosophical ramifications of categorization than Aristotle and Kant ever did.

The former conviction that these two kingdoms were wholly different in structure, in function, and in kind of life, was not seriously disturbed by the difficulties which the naturalist encountered when he undertook to define them.

Species can be recognized by their morphological characteristics and songs.