There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
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There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
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Re: There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
#2When you think about it, it would actually be crazier if our common words matched exactly with biological evolution.
Re: There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
#3Perhaps not, yet I have never seen anything so lovely.
Re: There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
#4Perhaps not, yet I have never seen anything so lovely.
Trees sure are a beautiful strategy.
Re: There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
#5When you think about it, it would actually be crazier if our common words matched exactly with biological evolution.
This is one of the cool things about math, there are a lot of aspects of math which stem from thinking, "well what if I took a square root of negative one?" or "what if geometry worked this way?" and then someone does the thought exercise and fleshes it out into something interesting. And then there just happen to be aspects of reality that end up being very nicely described by these what if questions
Re: There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
#6I’ve become increasingly interested in what I think would be called “computational botany” if it were to be fleshed out. In looking at this and articles like it, and speaking with both trained and amateur botanists, a common thread is that the appearance of a plant has become increasingly detached from its scientific classification. A frequent refrain in nature hikes I’ve been a part of goes along the lines of: “this plant used to be family X, but then dna testing showed it was actually family Z” - “what? You’re kidding, that’s family Z? It has all the characteristics of an X!” - “Yep, Z. I don’t much understand it myself but apparently that’s what the dna says.”
I think this is a bit silly. It’s akin to categorizing programs by the libraries they use or the programming language they’re written in rather than the problems they solve. What’s more useful to the layperson: “VSCode, IntelliJ, and Vim are Text Editor family; Slack, Talk2Me, and mIrc are Chat family” or “VSCode and Slack are Electron family; IntelliJ and Talk2Me are Java family; and Vim and mIrc are C family”?
The idea with my proposed “Computational Botany” is that the only information used to classify a plant is that same information that would be used to generate a computer model of the plant. So if a specimen has all the markers of an X appearance wise, such that implementing its clone would take the least changes when starting from an existing X, it’s an X.
Of course, the actual implementation of these models may end up requiring an unattainable God-level intelligence, but I leave that as an exercise to future me (or you!)
Re: There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
#7This just means that our notion of a tree does not map cleanly to a genetic lineage. That does not mean the concept is useless, even in scientific fields.
Re: There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
#8This is why I don't respect rationalism as a philosophy.
Re: There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
#9I don't get the premise of the article. A tree is just a growth shape of a plant (plants are quite flexible regarding growth shapes, and often adapt to the environment), and a category that our minds place a plant species into. And its clearly an ancient ability common to all vascular plants to develop woody tissues. So why would we expect the tendency of a plant to become a tree to depend on its position in the phylogenetic tree? (the authors had me there for a moment. I thought they wanted to show that the phylogenetic tree is not really a tree!)
Re: There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
#10I don't get the premise of the article. A tree is just a growth shape of a plant (plants are quite flexible regarding growth shapes, and often adapt to the environment), and a category that our minds place a plant species into. And its clearly an ancient ability common to all vascular plants to develop woody tissues. So why would we expect the tendency of a plant to become a tree to depend on its position in the phyl…
I was under the impression that what made a tree was its woodenness so I was probably more of the target audience, and was impressed by the article.