> See that bird? It’s a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany, it’s called a halzenfugel, and in Chinese, they call it a Chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird. You only know something about people; what they call the bird.
Unless there's more to that quote that has to be one of the dumbest things Feynman is on record as saying. The name of the bird (in whatever language) can be used as a key to retrieve information about the biology of the bird (as presumably you already understand!).
Oh absolutely! Naming things is important, it's how we communicate. But there are a TON of people whose knowledge acquisition STOPS at naming things. Oddly this is exceptionally prevalent in things like birdwatching and stargazing. "That's a yellow-rumpled warbler!" "Nice, what do you know about it?" "What do you mean? I know it's a yellow-rumpled warbler!" "So, what's interesting about it?" "???"
Ok well I was (rightly) suggesting that birdwatching is a good break from technology, and you have responded by making a criticism of birdwatching, so I'm going to take you up on that.
(I've been a birdwatcher since I was about 6, did a PhD partially on birds and have done lots of scientific field work on birds in addition to "birding")
What you said (and Feynman's specious know-it-all comment) is actually not true. Let's take your example of someone seeing a Yellow-rumped Warbler. Being a birdwatcher, this person is probably interested in seeing other Yellow-rumper Warblers in the future, or more likely, in seeing other Warbler species they've never seen before. Because they are interested in seeing birds, they'll notice Yellow-rumpeds microhabitat choice -- leafy branches in mid to high canopy. And when they see Black-and-white Warblers, they're obviously going to learn that Black-and-White has a habit of foraging along the trunk itself in a manner more like a treecreeper, and quite unusual for a warbler. So their birdwatching is already teaching them something about habitat and foraging behavior.
They'll be learning how to tell something is a warbler on sight, rather than say a Chickadee or a Thrush, and hence learning how morphology and plumage features vary across avian taxonomy. And they may even start wondering whether that bird-book taxonomy accurately reflect the true evolutionary relationships.
They'll hear the Yellow-rumped warblers thin, high-pitched calls and song, and they'll hear songs of other warblers and other birds, and eventually they'll realize that they can tell that a call is a warbler, even if they don't know what species. So they'll have learned that vocalisations are correlated with phylogeny. Perhaps they'll wonder whether birds vocalisations are arbitrary or not: they might end up learning about the notion of sexual selection, and also the fact that birds living near fast-flowing water (Kingfisher, Dippers, Wagtails) have strikingly loud and sharp high-pitched calls which can be heard over water (so not arbitrary sexual selection) and maybe they'll learn that in some species, studies have shown that females prefer males with more complex songs.
The bird-book / app they use to carry out their hobby shows them geographic ranges, and which species are migratory. They'll learn not to look for warblers in the winter, and hence they'll learn which birds are migratory and which not, and how that varies over avian taxonomy, and it will lead to many questions about what can be learned from these phylogenetic and geographic patterns versus what is just random.
Of course, what you said is true of some people, but the general statistical characterization of birdwatching is the opposite: identifying species is the starting point for virtually all field studies of biological organisms, and of course there is a huge statistical tendency for people who know what species they are looking at to end up learning more natural history and biology than those who are oblivious to it all.
- Feynman