A Tyrrany of Botanists

Scientists are well known for liking you to do things their way. This doesn't just extend to reasonable things like believing in evolutionism, or recognizing that dolphins are mammals. Scientists want you to classify everything according to their criteria, and their criteria are always the most obscurantist possible. This was brought to most people's attention with the Pluto crisis, which I have still not calmed down over (QUESTION: What happens to Plutonium? They named it with the understanding that Pluto was and would remain a planet), but the biggest fraud is in botany.

Here are some classifications, perfectly useful for the everyday man, that scientists say you Must not use:

Nuts include:

• Peanuts
• Cashews
• Almonds
• Brazil nuts
• Pistachios
• Macadamia nuts
  
• Pine nuts
  

No! say the scientists. None of these tasty things are nuts. Nuts, they say, are instead a collection of barely edible fibrous hulks. According to science, nuts include:

• Hazelnuts
• Pecans
• Walnuts
• Chestnuts
• Acorns
• Birch, beech, alder and hornbeam seeds

Now you will notice that only the first four items on this list are at all edible -- and they all taste worse than any item on the first list. If we were thinking clearly, as a society, we would say science has gotten the definition of nut exactly backwards. Here's another example

Berries include:

• Strawberry
• Blackberry
• Raspberry
• Mulberry
• Salmonberry

Whereas science tells us that berries actually include:

• Cranberries, currants, gooseberries
• Grapes
• Tomatoes
• Eggplants
• Chili peppers (!)
• Avocadoes
• Lots more dumb stuff

This is even worse. Botanists can't just push us around like that. If they want to classify fruit like this that's fine, but I don't want them to use the word "berry". That's our word. We use it to refer to specific kinds of fruits. Tomorrow scientists will probably classify goldfish as furniture (because they live in your house and don't move) and computers as not (because they think).