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Comment by giraffe_lady | Hacker News Reader

Moby Dick itself contains a ton of factual errors (even accounting for the state of knowledge contemporary to its writing) about whales and whaling. I think in this case it still points you in the right direction but that's mostly just luck.

And it is mostly focused on the habits of one particular whale fishery. Others are discussed but not in depth and the bias of the narrator in regard to them is itself an important part of the story. I don't know either way but it's plausible to me that other fisheries, positioned closer to their whaling grounds, would have dragged them back for processing.

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Many of the factual errors are there on purpose. The lengthy discussion of whether or not whales are fish for example is not intended to be scientific.

Melville himself served on a whaler and AFAIK the descriptions of actual whaling and processing of whales at sea are basically accurate with some embellishment. Open to being wrong about that though as I am by no means an 1800s whaling expert.

The whale is a fish thing isn't what I had in mind, iirc that's a solid argument that still mostly holds up.

It's been a long time, I read it right after reading the Eric Dolin book about american whaling and coming out of that some of the details about nantucket and its fleet & practices at that time were off but I'm not going to be able to come up with citations on anything.

He also messes with some of the shipboard social dynamics for the sake of the story, uses names for some of the positions that were not used in the american whaling fleet, shifts responsibility for certain things around so they'll land on named characters, standard literary moves like that.

It's probable that all of these were intentional to serve the story. And I'm not an expert either which makes simple embellishment hard to spot. I'm mostly just pointing out that asserting what anyone "knows" about whales from reading moby dick is tricky.

> The whale is a fish thing isn't what I had in mind, iirc that's a solid argument that still mostly holds up.

You're also of the opinion that whales are fish?

It's more that, as I understand it, "fish" isn't a coherent phylogenetic category so much as a convention-based descriptive grouping of certain characteristics. I don't think of whales as fish, no. But an exclusion based on eg tail fin orientation or lack of gills is based on convention rather than strict taxonomic practices. So if someone wants to weigh the characteristics differently and include whales in the term fish I would at least hear them out.

Different category but well explained here https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...

I know it’s not the point, but how does a flounder get categorised in this system? Are they vertical or horizontal? When they swim it usually has their tail horizontal.

As the saying goes, there’s no such thing as a fish - that is, there is no reasonable definition that both strongly selects for fish was, while rejecting non-fish.

It's utterly nonsensical to think that millennia of "fish swim" should be thrown out in favor of a century of "fish share DNA".

Hmm, my wife likes to swim, I better start calling her my fish.

Whales need to take breaths on the surface, unlike fish, which can stay underwater basically indefinitely. Without that difference, whaling would be a lot more complicated, if not outright impossible, especially in the 19th century - you just can't catch a huge solitary animal in an ocean on purpose if it doesn't have to surface from time to time. Or only with sheer luck.

Even the ancient whalers were aware of the fact that whales need to breathe, and thus, at the very least, could say "well, these are some rather special fish, you know".

There are fish that can breathe normal air such as the gar.

I think he's probably talking about something like this https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...

What kind of errors are there? I don't remember anything standing out.

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