Tall pencils, short pencils

Some events, ideas, occasions stick in your mind, because of the sheer magnitude of change they cause in your mind, yet being so simple. Like a magician saying "now you don't see it, and now you do" they force us to see things in different light. The world changes ever so slightly. Or sometimes something you knew to be true, is confirmed with such clarity that it is wonderful to just to be there. It is like a poem for the intellect. I have experienced many a moments like this. One of them was this.

On a PBS show about the difficulty of classifying species a scientist gave a neat demonstration. It lasted only 30 seconds, but the effect is etched into my memory forever. He took about 20 pencils, all various sizes, and said we want to separate these into groups. So he picked one at random, and started putting them into three piles of short, medium and tall. He did a very good job. But the reality struck like lightening when he put them all together again, this time in the order of increasing height. Lo and behold, they were simply increasing continuously. Each pencil was taller than the next one by about quarter inch.

The reality is rarely black and white. Pencils usually come in all sizes depending on how much they have been used. Yet we are lured into grouping them into different size buckets? Why?

Part of the reason is the process of discovery. We discover objects or phenomena one at a time. Just like the professor who picked pencils one by one. We look at the first one and say - this is a long one. The second might be short one. These two form seeds of the group. The next one needs to associated with either of them. And there the grouping starts. The pencils that formed a continuous spectrum of lengths going from short to long, become polerized into three groups of short, medium and long.

The other answer could be the language we use to capture this discovery and communicate it. Words are digital in nature. Yet they try to describe an analog world. This adds to the efficiency of the language. We have words like tall, short, long. To acoomodate the shades in between, we say things like midsize, longish, smallish. This increases the categories, but still does not change the digital nature of the meaning. It is like going from very low resolution to higher resolution, or smaller pixel images. Infinite resolution is never possible. For most part the short, shortish, longish, long kind of division is good enough. After all, pencils are not very important things. The important things in human psyche are things that cause danger. There too we divide the analog to digital gap by simply talking more about the event or object.

In most cases, the efficiency advantage that we get far outweigh the inaccuracies it produces. However there are some very charged words that force the categorization on the concepts themselves. Living and Nonliving are two such categories. We discovered that most things are either living or nonliving. Humans, tigers, dogs are living and rocks, water, soil are nonliving. These are very useful categories, because they posed different sorts of dangers, and advantages.

However, people start discovering objects in between, they need to belong either here or there. If living things are the ones that move, what about trees? And is river alive? Trees were firmly put on the living side and river on the nonliving side.

But onces these words are entrenched, and most known objects are classified in two groups, that's when the concepts start getting clobbered too. Everyone holds on to this polarization, because it is so useful. Then the question arises - how did life originate? Another such question is that of the missing link. The posing of the very question smacks of grouping. If you put humans and monkies into two poles, then you start asking where is the middle animal? It is like putting the pile of pencils into two groups of long and short and asking where are the midsize ones?

This is not a trivial, pedantic discussion. Humans have spent huge resources because of the problems created by this type of polarization. Just the question of how life originated has given birth to large number of religions, philosophies, cosmologies. The concept of evolution was simply ruled out of contention by this polerization. If it remained simply theoretical difference, it wouldn't matter too much. But millions of people have died in wars and persecutions that started with these differences.