The other day, my friend was bemoaning the fact that Pluto is no longer a planet. (Yeah, my friend needs to get out more. He knows that.)

Over the past few months I read a bit of the nonsensical debate over whether “Pluto is a planet” with amusement. In fact, the debate has nothing whatsoever to do with Pluto. Neither the final decision nor any of the arguments put forth have the slightest effect on Pluto which will keep orbiting the sun as it has done for billions of years. Pluto doesn’t even know the debate exists. The debate was not about whether Pluto is a planet. It was about whether we should all call Pluto a planet. It’s an arbitrary label that people take far too seriously.

It reminds me of the duck-billed platypus. The platypus is a favorite of high-school biology teachers who explain that it is a freakish animal since it lays eggs, but nurses its young and does all kinds of things that make it difficult to classify. The platypus, of course, is blissfully unaware of this “problem” and continutes to eat, sleep, mate and make lots of baby platypuses just as it always has.

To say that the platypus is a mammal is not a statement about the platypus. It is a statement about our system of labels. Most people cannot separate the labels we apply to something from what that something actually is, and therefore think there is something odd about the platypus, because it does not fit cleanly into our labels.

Personally, I blame Aristotle for all of this, but I’ll save that for another post.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 6th, 2006 at 2:45 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.