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While this is an older reference than I've seen before, the more common variation dates back at least as far as the German work Reinhart Fuchs in the 1100s, with no apparent connection to the Arabic variation. As scriver states, the traditional blood brotherhood and similar rites were "make us family where we were not before", indicating that family ties were never ranked below other ties as the modern "water of the womb" quote implies.

I'm aware of the Reinhart Fuchs quote, but I have trouble crediting that as the origin when it's not saying or meaning the same thing. The translation of the quote is "I also hear it said, kin-blood is not spoiled by water," where the water in question is literal seawater. There's no comparison of either viscosity or the relative strength of friendships and blood relationships implied, so if that's the origin, we've got to somehow get from "we still care about family even when we're oceans apart" to "family matter more than friends" while also changing the literal text of the proverb.

The Arabic origin, on the other hand, is referring to Raḍāʿ as opposed to blood covenants and explicitly contrasting the two -- which makes sense. Raḍāʿ is the term for an idea predating Islam that breastfeeding produces a form of consanguinity, and under Islamic jurisprudence it prevents marriages in the same way. It also had some of the same political implications we might recognize from arranged marriage, and in much the same way, the relationship is established before the participants have any say in it. "Blood is thicker than milk," then, would seem to be saying that people care more about the people with whom they choose to associate than those with whom they are bound under this sort of arranged consanguinity -- and that makes sense as a description of human behavior if not as a prescriptive ranking of the importance of different relationships. I'd probably care more about my friends than my arranged milk siblings too, if I had any. Moreover, it's closer to the modern saying both literally and in meaning.

EDIT: I also can't find any reference to the "friends vs family" meaning earlier than the 1600s, and the "Qamus" my souce upthread refers to as the source of the Arabic version is probably the Al-Qāmūs al-Muḥīṭ, an Arabic dictionary compiled from even older works by al-Fayrūzābādī (1329–1414.)

Quote from: pikachu17 on September 17, 2019, 12:33:14 pm

"Blood is thicker than water" comes from the phrase "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb" which means the exact opposite.
It actually means that blood shed in battle bonds soldiers more strongly than simple genetics.

This is a modern myth. The phrase "Blood is thicker than water" predates modern English, while the "water of the womb" variation dates back to the 1970s at the earliest.

That specific phrasing is modern, yes, but the "blood means blood brothers" interpretation is referenced in The Blood Covenant - A Primitive Rite And Its Bearings On Scripture from 1893, in reference to the Arabic variation that holds that blood is thicker than (maternal) milk.

It's certainly not about bloodshed in any event, but the idea of deliberate blood covenants as a stronger bond than family (specifically siblinghood) considerably predates the 1970s -- and blood oaths themselves are old as all get out.

Ah. I understand now. thank you. The papers still give interesting info about virus polyphyly and possibly independent acquisition of capsid proteins.

If you would like to learn about more things that have been used as examples of the definition of life being fuzzy, you could look at prions. They're like viruses without genetic material.

EDIT: Oh, or the origin of organelles.

It's pretty obvious that arithmetic classes progress into actual math classes, but I'm not sure what advanced English courses would be.

If you want a focus on communication, maybe the equivalent of advanced English classes would be some combination of formal and material logic and rhetoric?

It's simply that cutting all federal funds for such education that isn't deemed essential then leads to those fields suffering losses that then hurt our society - I agree not everyone needs to take English class, I disagree that we should stop funding English class.

Okay. How, though? I'm asking earnestly, because a lot of the justifications I hear for teaching the humanities on societal grounds (critical thinking, organization, etc) don't actually require teaching the humanities. What do students get out of English class that they can't get out of science class?

So yeah, I think educating people about why they need to be educated is pretty key. That's really hard to do though, especially as our society hasn't figured out why and how we value education. I'm still waiting for someone to give me a good answer to say to the boy I was mentoring. I'm not sure there is one, myself.

Well, there's the answer people will pretend justifies the entire educational system: that learning for the sake of learning is an inherently good thing and we should encourage people to learn whatever they're interested in because society somehow indirectly benefits from people knowing more things. They will describe how pupils learn all sorts of ancillary skills like critical thinking that, while totally unconnected from the subject matter, somehow justify the inclusion of all sorts of things that even the kids know are useless.

One trouble with that line of thinking is the same one we've seen historically in the problems with Chinese and later British examinations for government service: there's no test that can't be gamed. The examinations theoretically selected for the skills to competently execute technically challenging tasks, but in practice, they selected for highly skilled essay writers first and competent people second, and so the top-scoring brackets were enriched in specialists at writing good essays rather than anything general enough to actually be useful to mandarins. It also insists on ranking students on a single spectrum to suit to desirability of jobs rather than a multidimensional spectrum that could start matching people to the jobs' requirements, but that is solvable independently.

The other trouble, and the one we tend not to talk about, is that education doesn't necessarily improve people. People will tout their "lifelong love of learning" as yet another way to pride themselves on their preferences rather than their accomplishments, but if all they're doing is absorbing knowledge because they want to, they can do that on their own. I've interviewed so many people like this whose "love of learning" has made them dilettantes who have learned the most fun and interesting tenth of what it would take to be useful in ten different jobs and dismissed the rest as an irrelevant detail beneath their notice,but I've never hired any of them -- and, indeed, the ones I know socially have had a similar experience, having failed their way out of any job involving any degree of skill until they end up cooking burgers or pushing a broom, their "love of learning" finding expression primarily in a truly indelible strain of ultracrepidarianism. There's nothing wrong with that, but we can get them there far more efficiently if we just hand them a spatula and a library card the first time they try to pretend their hobbies are impressive. As for highly skilled jobs, I'll take someone with a fear of failing over someone with a love of learning any day, because I know the first person actually paid attention to the boring bits. Nor is it worth pretending that generically better-educated citizens are somehow vaguely better for society, because there's nothing actually obligating them to remember their education beyond the bits that support whatever stupid position they've already decided to take.

So, if you want to fix education, start by taking out the liberal arts, less certain subsets of rhetoric. Start by revoking 501(c)3 status from any institution teaching humanities, and forbid all federal funding from the same. Make the cost of the arts department NIH and NSF funding and the tax deductibility of charitable donations to the institute at large, and higher education will rapidly reevaluate whether it really belongs. In the public schools, of course, teaching these subjects can simply be stopped by governmental fiat, and the resultant savings used to fund STEM to a more acceptable level; the requisite teaching of higher-level literacy can be formally folded into science classes, where it frankly belongs anyway. Kids need to know how to communicate technical data accurately, not how everyone and their hamster is Jesus in purgatory. If they want foreign languages, have a committee pare all the humanist frippery out of the vocabulary of Lojban and teach them that. All other efficiencies aside, it makes the inevitable question of "when will we ever use this" self-answering: they're either learning it to make use of it or learning how to deal with the arbitrary and meaningless bullshit that will define the entirety of their career, and they get to choose which.

This is a problem religion and science denial can cause

It's also a problem child abuse can cause, which I think is more at fault here. The "behaviors" some of these people describe are totally normal for neurotypical kids, too, but there's a tendency among certain horrible parents to pathologize anything a kid does that's annoying as some sort of neural disorder. There's no way to cure kids asking lots of questions, getting up early on weekends, liking cake more than vegetables, not wanting to do their homework, crying when they're upset and so forth because that's not a disorder, and part of parenting is helping them learn how to deal with it. But that's not what really awful parents want to hear. They were raised to believe parenting is wonderful and defines their worth as people and all this other be-fruitful-and-multiply rot, so when it's not, they want a drug they can insert into their child to make it so. Thus the plague of kids being "cured of ADHD" until they behaved, and now we have a similar thing with autism.

Of course, if you teach a kid that "behaviors" lead to having a gallon of bleach forced into them, they will do what they can to avoid that, so in that sense the torture treatment appears to work so long as you don't actually pay any attention to the child. The parents know that. Child abuse is just easier than parenting, and they care more about ease than their children.

I suspect that years from now, one of these kids is going to announce that the new miracle cure for dementia (defined by them as "being dependent on your children and old") is hourly bleach enemas, just to complete the cycle.