What's the difference between a Coral Glow and a Banana?

[Badgemash]

not semantics, its all about ontology.

for me, on the specific issue, the thread is pointless anyway: banana and coral glow are identical until PROVEN otherwise. that they are identical CANNOT be proven. (well, with genetic sequencing actually its now possible, but to do that beyond reasonable doubt would require us to sequence the genome of quite a lot of ball pythons). but that they ever turn out to be dissimilar is extremely unlikely. i delivered the tools that are required to understand why that is the case. but the tools i delivered have other uses as well, you can apply them to questions like: did aliens visit earth? does god exist? does homeopathy work? should i or should i not vaccinate my children against diseases that could kill them? is Uri Geller for real? what really happened on 9/11? is global warming / climate change for real?

what i did is nothing more or less than a decent reality check. if you want to argue, and we all like that, better be properly prepared.

basically, tools for correct thought, that were missing in this thread and were necessary to settle the issue on hand.

No, I meant semantics - the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning. We are not discussing the existence of god, vaccines, or aliens, nor are we discussing philosophy. We are discussing whether there are any known differences between two groups of snakes called coral glows and bananas, no one has to date shown any evidence that there are. The generally accepted definition of the term "morph" within the bp community is a set of visual characteristics that are passed from parent to offspring, therefore coral glow and banana are the same morph until the time the definition of the term "morph" is either more tightly constrained or changed.

unfortunately the scientific method is a part of philosophy, so, if you cut it out, you can no longer explain why Karl Poppers concept of falsifiability is so damn important, or why Occams Razor makes sense. thats the one thing science cannot explain: why the scientific method works and is useful in the first place. deprive students of that, and your university will have a hard time when it comes to producing top research scientists. if you want students to be able to differentiate between good scientific theories and weak theories, science cannot do it. without philosophy, you can teach students all you want to teach about science, but you cannot explain why homeopaths or 9/11 truthers are wrong and why their theories are less valid than general relativity or the standard model of particle physics.

and OWAL was wrong when he said that it is proven that CG and banana are the same morph - it cannot be proven. (at least not without genetic sequencing of BPs, bananas, and coral glows, and careful analysis of the resulting data). explaining why that is the case is not possible with science alone.

take away philosophy, and in the worst case you get "scientists" that waste their time trying to prove or disprove hypotheses that cannot be proven or disproven.

I get that you like natural history and are a self proclaimed science geek, but I am an actual scientist at a tier 1 research university, so I'm going to go ahead and clear up some of your apparent confusion. The scientific method is NOT a part of philosophy, it a set of procedures and methods which ensure that experimental results are measurable and repeatable. The scientific review process actually does a very nice job of differentiating between quality work and shoddy work, that is why journals are peer reviewed. No one in my department, or any other department that I'm aware of encourages our students to take philosophy, we do however stongly encourage developing writing skills. If you want an education or job at a top research institution you'd better be able to write grant proposals, because getting consistant funding and getting published are the keys to success.

Science is based on empirical, measurable evidence, philosophy and religion are the diciplines that involve the impossible to prove or disprove theories.