The “Bats aren’t birds” myth – Debunked

I've seen this crop up a lot on the internet of late, roughly paraphrased: "The Bible says bats are birds, hurr durr, religious people are stupid lol." I found it sufficiently irritating to devote a short video to the topic.

Here we will discuss exactly why the Bible categorises bats as birds, and why it makes sense given the taxonomical system in use at the time.

Sources not referenced in the video itself:

[1] A. J. Cain, “Taxonomy,” Encyclopedia Britannica, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/science/taxonomy (accessed Aug. 20, 2020).

[2] C. R. Woese, O. Kandler, and M. L. Wheelis, “Towards a natural system of organisms: Proposal for the domains Archaea, Bacteria, and Eucarya,” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A., vol. 87, no. 12, pp. 4576–4579, 1990, doi: 10.1073/pnas.87.12.4576.

[3] R. Bailey, “Guide to the Six Kingdoms of Life.” https://www.thoughtco.com/six-kingdoms-of-life-373414 (accessed Aug. 20, 2020).

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CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)