Yes? You aren't agreeing with me nor I with you. Your first word should have been no.
I don't know what your point or purpose is here.
As we wander up and down the taxa in the mind's eye, living things separate out as we go down toward the species taxon and unite as we go up. Kingdom Animalia contains tuna, eels and whales. As we drop down to phylum and subphylum, we get chordates them vertebrates. These taxa also contain all three. They part ways at the lower taxon of class. Eels and tuna are classed together under order Osteichthyes, and whales are counted among the mammals because tuna and eels are more like one another than either is like a whale. Tuna and eels remain yoked at the class level, both being Actinopterygii, but they diverge when we go to lower taxa. Eels are Anguilliformes (eel-shaped) and tuna Scombriformes (mackerel shaped).
This is how nested hierarchies work. We use them not only to classify animal taxa, but also things like languages and religions. They can all be diagrammed as "trees" with trunks, larger branches, smaller branches, and twigs. We do this according to similarities and differences. Here are Indo-European languages. Their "last universal common ancestor" was proto-Indo-European. This level can be compared to a phylum and everything deriving from it a clade. The first branches each represent one of several large families of languages more like one another than languages in other branches
You would likely call this type of organizing or classifying arbitrary, and there is some wiggle room and uncertainty in fashioning these diagrams, but there is also merit to this way of organizing evolving items with a common origin. Italian, French, and Spanish really are more alike than say Yiddish or Manx.
Perhaps in the mind of uneducated lay people. People use biological term anomalously all of the time. They don't acknowledge that the people looking at animals in the zoo are also animals in the zoo on that day, and they call the chimps monkeys.
From your link: "Let me begin by considering briefly what is a whale and what is a fish. We may, I think, be quite confident that these are terms of ordinary language. My four-year-old son is a quite competent user of both."
It would not be surprising if the boy considered orcas at a marine park fish, yet his son's understanding of the matter is offered there as a legitimate standard for usage of these words - not that of biologists. You seem to have been adversely influenced by this article.
I didn't specify variety of creationist.
You seem to have difficulty with the idea of nested hierarchies of categories. Creationist is a higher-order category (hypernym) relative to YEC or OEC. YEC and OEC creationists (an example of RAS syndrome) have more in common with one another than with naturalists, but all three have more in common with one another than say a Swiftie, which fits in another group of ideas unrelated to the origin of reality.
There are also other creationists. YEC and OEC refer to OT scripture. Every culture with a creation myth was creationist, including the Mesopotamians and Vikings.
You probably do this kind of grouping yourself naturally. Places you like to go has a subcategory of restaurants you like to patronize which divides by cuisine (Mexican, Italian, Chinese), and each of these latter categories divides into individual restaurants.
Leroy: I'm not interested in going down this hole with you any further. You've made your point that biological taxonomic classification is arbitrary and meaningless, and I've rejected it. You have a habit of verbally wrestling a point like a pit bull with a pork chop, and it's generally over some point that only seems relevant to you and is usually a point that I can't see why you want to make at all.
Generally, when creationists argue evolutionary science with the scientifically literate, they are promoting their god even if they don't say so explicitly. I'm not convinced that that is your purpose, but if not, do you have one? Do you have a reason for doing this kind of thing? What would be the benefit to you if we all relented and conceded your point? What do you imagine would be the benefit to us?
If the answer to both is nothing, then why do this?
Incidentally, that's my answer and why I consider this kind of discussion a time waster and want to nip it in the bud. I indulged you this much out of courtesy and respect, but I don't think I've helped you. You may have helped me by giving me incentive to write this post. I enjoyed creating it and was glad to have an opportunity to elaborate on classification systems and nested hierarchies. There's nothing more I'd care to add to that discussion, so whatever benefit this discussion might provide my side of it has likely already been realized.
I'd be happy to discuss any of this with you, but please no more "fish are whales are fish." We disagree there irreconcilably.
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Or maybe they didn't. Maybe they only hurt others' brains when they thought about what they might have thought.
