Posted by Kermit on September 24, 2002 at 11:59:28:
In Reply to: revisiting the frog thing posted by john on September 23, 2002 at 13:58:26:
On behalf of my non-english speaking frog type cousins, "Whew!"
: Okay, so here's another big curve to the whole issue.
: I finally caught one of the "cubans" to bring to work. Once there it was the source of much discussion becasue apperantly no one could identify it. The one thing we were sure of, was that it was NOT a cuban tree frog. So it turns out that it was a barking treefrog with one of the multiplicitious variations in color.
: So several things can be learned here.
: 1. If I had taken the mechanistic route and killed them without worrying about it, I would have actually slaughtered more native frogs than non-native. (I do have some cubans, but not many)
: 2. Nature doesn't so easily fit into our classification scheme. We think we know so much, but we always have to be careful not to impose our systems on things that don't necessarily abide by them. What I'm getting at, is that just because we think we have found a natural law doesn't mean that nature agrees. What we have really done is place a human construct on a living system because in most observable cases, it fits. So in short, a natural law is only a natural law because it hasn't been known to occur any other way yet. But our knowledge is extremely limited. (not that we have discovered some new thing in my yard, but it is a microcosmic illustration of my point. A true frog expert would have known about the unreliable variations in marking right away.)
: 3. Book knowledge and pictures are a very poor substitute for true experience.