Just past my house, near the Sawmill River, I passed about a dozen dinosaurs, lying in

the sun, relaxing, as they often do on a fall day.

Of course, they weren't the kind of dinosaur you just pictured.

They were birds.

Konnichiwa.

It's Nick in Fukuoka, Japan, and this is a special archived episode of Akimbo.

Yes, of course, birds are dinosaurs.

If we carve up all the animals on the face of the earth, and all the animals that there

used to be, the way Linnaeus did, we discover that the lineage of birds goes straight back

to the dinosaurs, but we don't call them dinosaurs anymore.

The reason is simple, because if I say I saw a dinosaur lying by the side of the road,

you're going to visualize an allosaurus, a prontosaurus, a trotosaurus rex.

Because in our minds, that's what a dinosaur looks like.

So the question for today is, why do we even bother dividing things into categories?

Well, Linnaeus did it for a reason, and the reason was this, if we could accurately

divide the world into categories, taxonomy, as it's called, and the categories are taxons,

maybe we could understand how the universe worked, maybe we would get some insight into

how we got here.

From that early beginning, we've developed a mania for sorting things.

We sort them for a whole bunch of reasons.

Go to the library, and there is the Dewey Decimal System, until you get to fiction, and then

it's alphabetical.

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