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Comment by ftxbro | Hacker News Reader

By the way, 'lower animals' isn't the preferred nomenclature in biology anymore. They have had a comparable amount of evolutionary time to specialize in their own things (maybe even effectively more if they have larger populations or smaller generation times), and they are more refined at some stuff while humans are more refined at other stuff (like advanced sweat pores and big brain).

Humans: lose our ancestral abilities of limb regeneration

Also humans: call our distant cousins who didn't lose those abilities as 'lower'

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Out of curiosity, what is the preferred nomenclature nowadays?

If you want to differentiate between mammals and other vertebrates you could simply say "other vertebrates".

Non-mammalian vertebrates also

Follicly challenged species or Animals of Scales (AoS)

Regenerative limb enjoyers.

Higher

Former limb-regenerator.

Now we're language-revising biology to make sure animals aren't being disrespected? Wew.

It's mostly for precision, especially in terms of avoiding confusion about the nature of evolution.

If you ever take courses for a degree in a science like biology, chemistry, or physics, you will often run into stuff like this. We are insanely pedantic about precise terminology because we have to be. If you don't speak carefully you can say something entirely different from what you mean.

To a lay-person it seems like we are just being know-it-all jerks. But it's actually really important to use proper terminology when communicating science information. Scientists spend a lot of their time just learning proper terminology and how to communicate properly. Stuff like the difference between precision and accuracy, centrifugal and centripetal forces, etc...

A good example of this is, that niacin used to be called nicotinic acid. As a result, many people tried to supplement niacin by smoking nicotine. When we communicate scientific concepts to lay-persons we have to be EXTRA careful. We had to language revise and rename the vitamin as niacin to prevent misunderstanding.

> When we communicate scientific concepts to lay-persons we have to be EXTRA careful. We had to language revise and rename the vitamin as niacin to prevent misunderstanding.

If you're cultivating a herd of uneducated emotion-driven stressed-out people by destroying education, getting everyone hooked on addictive social media and killing the economy every couple years, then yeah, you got to be careful. Better put that "do not eat" sticker on a box of moth balls.

But I think we'd be better off teaching people how to think properly, than trying to dumb down everything to a level of a toddler.

You can't be an expert on everything. Everyone is a lay-person in something. I used to scoff at warning labels myself until I realized that some people grow up without the benefit of parents or education. Those things that we think are obvious are, very often, not. We learned them from someone who cared about us.

Sure, but our effort should be put into making an education and learning accessible to those people, instead of normalizing stupidity by restricting everyone else's language.

Language by necessity must be restricted for it to have meaning. If a word can mean anything, it has exactly no meaning. By creating your own definition of the word you now must define it clearly otherwise you will spend all day arguing about "No True Scotsman".

What biologists have done in this case is removed the definition of "Lower Animals" from their context because there was no agreed upon definition of "Lower Animal." The term was too vague and could not be defined properly and was useless for scientific communication. There was no way to taxonomically define a "Lower Animal" except in a biblical sense. Even then, few can agree what it actually means.

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