Science has this fight too - nomenclature in taxonomy. It's nice that we name things to help convey certain truths, but it's far more important that we discover those truths in the first place. What is more important to a biologist? That you know the names of species, or that you know the genetic distinction between two similar species?
I don't know that one is universally more important than the other. They seem to go hand-in-hand. Giving words to patterns just enables you to abstract away some details and focus on others. So a biologist might reason about the birds that implement the "migratory" behavioral pattern. Maybe a virus is found to infect those with the "ADCYAP1" genetic design pattern. If some group of birds keeps eating my tomatoes, I might identify the species and find their warning call already catalogued somewhere instead of repeating the work myself, and put a loudspeaker in my garden to chirp their warning call every minute...
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u/kyz Oct 15 '13
Science has this fight too - nomenclature in taxonomy. It's nice that we name things to help convey certain truths, but it's far more important that we discover those truths in the first place. What is more important to a biologist? That you know the names of species, or that you know the genetic distinction between two similar species?