" Tree is not a distinct clade" is the version of the title that isn't clickbait horseshit.
How many people know what clade means, though? I had a pretty rigorous and extensive course of biology in high school, we spent a lot of time poring over various details, but the word clade never even fell. (Granted, that was 1992-1996, so things might have changed.) I only met the expression cladistics and clade much later in some popsci literature.
I think the first time I encountered /clade/ was in Bruce Sterling's Shaper/Mechanist stories. "Cicada Queen" was written in 1983, but I expect that I thought he made the word up for several more years.
Precisely. I think this has been on HN before, or if not then another “Wow you’re gonna be surprised by this — trees aren’t monophyletic!” article. Given all the surprising examples of convergent evolution, and given human tendencies to give vernacular names to paraphyletic groups, and given that it’s obviously easy for plant lineages to increase or decrease the woodiness of their stems, it is baffling that anyone wo…
'Anyone'? Really? I think you massively overestimate how much general knowledge about biology people have. For a lot (I would reckon most, but obviously I have no evidence of that) of people, terms like 'paraphyletic' are literally not in their vocabulary.
Yeah, no, fair enough. I didn't mean that people would express it in that terminology, or appreciate the distinction between paraphyly and polyphyly! What I'm trying to say is: anyone who has ever poked around in some wild vegetation (even as a kid) knows that "normal plants" vary quite a bit in their woodiness. There are little ones, and sort of stiff little ones, and then there are "shrubs". I think most people here have the nous to think at this point "wtf's a shrub?" and 'I am doubting that "shrub" is actually a real thing'. Hence, by extension, tree? They are just sort of big stiff things aren't they?
> The phylogenetic tree of life is organized not on the characteristics, but on the evolutionary origin of species. My mother's old university biology textbook presents this as one of a few "equally valid" visions for how taxonomy should be organized. I agree with the modern view that it's the only valid vision, but it's interesting to see it presented in a "teach the controversy" way, and we can see from the comment…
Think of evolution as an optimization algorithm that finds organisms for ecological niches. The monophyletic grouping approach tells you something about the path through solution space taken by the algorithm. The paraphyletic approach instead focuses on properties of the solutions. I think it's fine to think of those as equally valid.
Not for the same purposes: you are comparing the biological equivalents of history and engineering.
> Imagine if actually there were amphibian birds and mammal birds and insect birds flying all around Bats (mammal) Mosquitoes (amphibian) Any number of flying insects. My least favourite is a two inch long flying cockroach that I encountered on a visit to Tāmaki Makaurau
The paragraph continues > ...and they all looked pretty much the same – feathers, beaks, little claw feet, the lot. You had to be a real bird expert to be able to tell an insect bird from a mammal bird
I've seen this insect in person and I was persuaded it was a hummingbird that somehow got to Poland. It's huge for an insect, feeds of flowers hovering in place just like a hummingbird does, nothing like an usual flying insect. It has texture that look like feathers and when it feeds it often looks like he has a long straight beak.
Only on photos or very up-close you can recognize some things don't match.
We argued for a few hours what it was until we found it's actually an insect.
This is also a thing with mushrooms. The Common Earthball [1] f.x. is more related to a Porcino [2] than to a Meadow Puffball [3] which itself is related to the Field Mushroom [4]. Seems like genes are more like a toolbox where evolution takes from what it needs. After all we share a significant amount of common genes with totally different animals like flies. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scleroderma_citrinum 2:…
Interesting. I couldn't understand for a moment why this should be surprising. Then I remembered English has 2 words for "grzyby" - fungi and mushrooms. Is that it?
Fascinating article, but I think it could benefit from some more examples. Since it mentions "a tree evolving into a dandelion (or vice-versa)" and then a paper about wood evolving independently at least 38 times in the Canary Islands, the perfect example is Sonchus Canariensis ( https://www.smgrowers.com/products/plants/plantdisplay.asp?p... , better picture: https://garden.org/pics/2014-03-30/Kelli/5ef4db.jpg ). I…
I wasn't really surprised by the claim of the article but also hadnt thought about it explicitly much.
Bunchberries, for example, are really common where I am, and they're a type of dogwood (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornus_canadensis). It's really obvious they're a dogwood too, once you get past the fact they're not woody.
Also, "tree" can get really fuzzy really fast with different shrubs in between.
I 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…
In addition to the sibling comments, I'd point out that the article is sort of an extended riff on the phrase, "There is no such thing as a fish," which was a sloppy QI paraphrase [0][1] of a principle elucidated by the 20th century paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, and later became the title of QI's well-known podcast [2]. And of course, fish do exist, just not in the simplistic way that many of us were taught as ch…
In a similar way, there's no such thing as a reptile. An alligator is more closely related to a sparrow than it is to a monitor lizard.
Well, I thought this was a fascinating and well-written article. p.s. I learnt not long ago that there's no such 'thing' as an antelope: "The term antelope is used to refer to many species of even-toed ruminant that are indigenous to various regions in Africa and Eurasia. Antelope comprise a wastebasket taxon (miscellaneous group) within the family Bovidae, encompassing all Old World ruminants that are not bovines, c…
Also, you're a fish. When people talk about fish, they mean "fish that aren't tetrapods", because cladistically speaking, tetrapods (birds, reptiles, mammals) are fish too.
... except when people talk about fish, they mean "gnathostomata that aren't tetrapodomorpha".
It's still cladistically meaningful to a very informative extent.
When I started my studies, we had a tour of the hortus of our university. A retired taxonomist gave us the tour, and was lamenting how genetic research had changed quite a bit of the taxonomy of his gardens, and that the old art of careful observation and encyclopedic knowledge of the appearance of plants was lost on his successors.
I’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…
If your primary concern is that of the physical characteristics of the plant, then you don't need to use the classification system based on the phylogenetic tree. You can choose different classification systems based on need!
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