Yes, you are a fish

I get this question all the time, and I just got asked it again: “Did you really say that humans are fish in that Ray Comfort video?” Yes, I did, and I guess I have to explain it again.

There are multiple meanings of “fish”. We can use it to refer to specific species or an extant category of animals: salmon are fish, halibut are fish, herring are fish. No one objects to that, and they all understand that if I said “humans are still salmon”, that would be wrong.

But another way the term is used is as a descriptor for a clade. A taxonomic clade is a “grouping that includes a common ancestor and all the descendants (living and extinct) of that ancestor”.

clade

So, for instance, humans belong to the mammalian clade, which includes mice and cats and cows. If we have transhuman, part-cyborg descendants, they will still be mammals, because, note, by definition a clade must include all the descendants of an ancestor. We’re trapped! There’s no way our progeny can exit the clade!

We’re also members of multiple clades. For example, the tetrapod clade is the group that descended from a 4-limbed ancestor, an early amphibian, so it includes frogs and salamanders, and also reptiles, mammals, and birds, and the fact that we’re weird bipeds that have specialized our two pairs of limbs in odd ways, or that birds have turned a forelimb into a wing, doesn’t get us out of the club labeled “four footed”.

The thing about the clades of mammals and tetrapods, though, is that we have convenient generic labels for the groups: we can say “humans are mammals”, and we don’t get hordes of clueless people gawping and saying, “Did he just call me a mouse? That’s absurd!” But we belong to another clade, all the organisms descended from an ancient fish, and “fish” is the common label there. People generally have such a dim comprehension of the diversity of the fishes, though, that they hear a biologist pointing out that we belong, and will always belong, to the fish clade, and they think, “Did he just call me a sturgeon? That’s absurd!”

One way to get around the problem is to get technical. I could say we’re all gnathostomes, and nobody would freak out because most of them wouldn’t have the slightest idea what I was talking about. So I could hide in technical obfuscation. But the point is that you are descended from an ancestor that was a torpedo-shaped aquatic vertebrate with gills, a fish. You can never escape your ancestry. Embrace Your Inner Fish.

innerfish

By the way, another way “fish” is defined taxonomically is as a craniate that is not a tetrapod, and if you use that definition, we are not fish. But that requires explicitly creating a paraphyletic group (that’s what you call it when you take a clade and willfully exclude a smaller clade), and that’s just annoying.

My one true talent at #cvg2016 is being annoying

I was on this panel at the con yesterday, and while we were all civil and polite, I think my fellow panelists, and a few members of the audience, were left feeling a bit peevish. It was the “What Does God Need With a Starship?” panel, and here’s the description.

From the Christ-like figure of Superman to the metaphysical adventures of the Enterprise, fantasy and science fiction have long explored religious and philosophical questions. What is it about SFF that touches our spirituality?

It was fun. I was the odd person out of the group, I think, because I disagree with everything.

The first question came from the moderator, and it played right into my hands, because it was the first thing I would have asked: what the heck is this “spirituality” thing? We got a couple of answers from the other panelists: one was that spirituality is a container for their “love of all people”, which is a wonderful thing to feel, but I had to point out that that’s humanism. God and the supernatural are redundant there. Another answer was that it was a feeling of “connectedness to all things” — well, great. Except that this universe is the domain of science, not religion.

I also pointed out that religion has a tendency to steal credit: there is a lot of good science fiction that explores philosophy and ethics, and that religious people like to turn around and claim that that is “religion”: nope. It’s philosophy and ethics. That you assume all discussion of morality is grounded in god-belief doesn’t make it so.

The other panelists had their revenge, though, and there was a long bit where they were cooing over those wonderful Narnia books by C.S. Lewis, an author I thoroughly detest, and because I’m obnoxious but not that obnoxious I had to chew on my tongue for a while. I did at least state that the open allusions to Christian mythology were not a feature, they were a bug, and they interfered with my ability to trust anything in the books. Crappy fictional plot holes are not rescued by coupling them to crappy religious plot holes.

One discussion that was unresolved but was interesting was the role of science fiction in demythologizing religion — how it could act as a gateway for people with a religious upbringing to explore new ideas and possibly adopt a less restrictive faith. I then learned that there is a whole genre of Christian science fiction which is supposed to go the other way: it draws in secular people and plants the seeds of faith. I’d never even heard of the latter category — I guess CS Lewis did some of that, but he’s the only one I know of — so I don’t think it was very successful, in my case.

I am not done being annoying, though. My next panel today is “Our Place in Space” at 2:00.

What are the dreams and practicalities of colonizing space? How might humanity reach beyond our planet? We’ll discuss the science of human spaceflight in reality and fiction.

My position is that we humans will not be colonizing space, ever. We might build robots that will, though.