How is This Possible?

[Nullifidian]

Originally Posted by Clutch Munny

!!!

My first day of grade school EVER in my life, my grade one teacher asked the Grade Wunners to list some animals, so he could write the words on the board. This being farm country everybody said cow and horse and such.

I said, "A seagull is an animal."

He smiled gently and said, encouragingly, "No, L'il Clutch, a seagull is a bird."

Both of these errors might be combined in Robin Lane Fox's The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible.

To set it up, Fox is talking about the dietary restrictions found in Leviticus. He proposes the plausible explanation that the priests who were making decisions about what constituted clean and unclean animals were deciding based on whether they shared the class characteristics of animals deemed appropriate for sacrifice (chewing cud and having split hooves). So sheep and cows were okay, but horses weren't because of their single-toed hooves. Rabbits were banned because their nibbling and teeth-scraping was taken for cud-chewing but they didn't have hooves to divide.

Now, after having addressed only mammals, Fox then goes on to say:

So much for the animals: what about the birds?

As Robin Lane Fox is a Classicist, this lends credence to the picture of scientific ignorance of Classics majors portrayed in the brilliant comedy Yes, Minister.

[Angakuk]

Originally Posted by lisarea

You can't effectively 'learn math|science|history|literature,' especially as a kid, without some expert guidance to help you understand and put that information into context.

Cue Seymour Lessans.

[But]

Yes?