Useless science "fact" of the day

junkshop said:
oceanconservancy.org

Is There a Difference Between Arms and Tentacles?

Arms and tentacles are different, and each has their own unique characteristics and functions. Discover the differences here!
oceanconservancy.org oceanconservancy.org
Click to expand...
Yes, I've seen this and similar articles.

If you read past the headline, you soon discover that this is a taxonomic affectation of teuthologists. It's not a scientific fact. It's not, "actually, they're arms." It's not even "technically, they're arms." It's just, "akshully we like to call this kind of tentacle an 'arm', much the same way cosmologists like to call any element heavier than hydrogen a 'metal'."
 
theprestige said:
Yes, I've seen this and similar articles.

If you read past the headline, you soon discover that this is a taxonomic affectation of teuthologists. It's not a scientific fact. It's not, "actually, they're arms." It's not even "technically, they're arms." It's just, "akshully we like to call this kind of tentacle an 'arm', much the same way cosmologists like to call any element heavier than hydrogen a 'metal'."
Click to expand...
I read past the headline. That is how I learned why these two different appendages that have different capabilities, morphology, purposes, and uses are referred to by different names. It is the same reason why we have different names for hands and feet. It is not a "taxonomic affectation", it is a taxonomic distinction, which is the fundamental point of taxonomy, after all.
 
Last edited:
junkshop said:
I read past the headline. That is how I learned why these two different appendages that have different capabilities, morphology, purposes, and uses are referred to by different names.
Click to expand...
Yes, and that's just an arbitrary preference of the teuthologists. They could just as easily have taxonomized the limbs as "brachial" and "non-brachial" tentacles. Or "hyper-ganglial" and "hypo-ganglial" tentacles.

One thing this taxonomy makes clear is that it is not based on a more general taxonomy of limbs. There's no general defnition of "arm", which these limbs conform to.
 
theprestige said:
Yes, and that's just an arbitrary preference of the teuthologists. They could just as easily have taxonomized the limbs as "brachial" and "non-brachial" tentacles. Or "hyper-ganglial" and "hypo-ganglial" tentacles.
Click to expand...
They could have, but they didn't. Feel free to gain the appropriate qualifications to make your hot take relevant to this area of biology.
theprestige said:
There's no general defnition of "arm", which these limbs conform to.
Click to expand...
This appears to be wrong:
...a flexible limb of an invertebrate animal, e.g. an octopus...
Click to expand...
source

As I mentioned before, this is no different than hands and feet in humans. They started the same, but evolved to have different morphology and uses, so we gave them different names.
 
Last edited:
What's the percentage of factually "useless" science (the right wing loved talking about a treadmill for shrimps, never bothering to understand the point), and science that is advancing science in general?
The extreme overrepresentation of reporting on science that looks poorly down and a waste of money compared to reporting on good science ( and the lack of critical reporting on bunk science used to justify anti-vax etc.) definitely cause more harm than they prevent waste.
One key result is the pathological aversion to publishing Negative Results, even though that could save billions in helping to better direct research.
 
Well, I don't know if there's any practical use in my daily life to knowing that the universe is about 13.7 billion years old plus/minus a couple hundred million years. But I'm still glad that somebody is trying to figure things like this out.

As far as the fact in question, whether to call them arms or tentacles, it seems to be a more important distinction for squids and cuttlefish, because they actually are different things there. I didn't really know the difference before, and now I do. I'm also glad that there are people who study octopuses and other cephalopods, and I don't think that scientific knowledge is entirely useless. Does it matter to my daily life? No. But it's still cool to know about just because these are pretty amazing creatures.

Here's another useless fact: The Japanese use the same word for fingers and toes: yubi. It's sort of an arbitrary choice of English to have two (or three if you count thumb. Is the thumb a finger?) for the digits. I guess that's four words. Yubi is more like digit in English because it means all 20 fingers and toes.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom