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…
The term for these sorts of categories is called "Wastebin Taxon"
There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
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Re: There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
#102In many parts of the US, there's poison ivy, a noxious weed that can cause severe itching, rashes, ect on contact with skin. It's common where I live, so I've become very good at identifying it.
Sometimes it's just groundcover. Sometimes it's a shrub. Sometimes it's a vine. It's surprising how its stem can take many different forms.
Re: There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
#103This is one of my favourite articles! But as someone who has recently become interested in botany, what I find really crazy about this is that there are so many different ways for plants to become trees. A listing (surely incomplete): • Normal trees, like what you see every day, with bark and wood and so on • Monocots like yucca and aloe and Draecena , which have no bark and become woody through ‘abnormal secondary g…
I bet this is crazy common, where vastly different species have similar characteristics.
What animal characteristics exhibit convergent evolution?
* Wings in bats / birds, for one.
* Tails and fins in swimming mammals vs fish.
* Eyes? Cephalopods?
Re: There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
#104No post body was provided.
Re: There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
#105This is one of my favourite articles! But as someone who has recently become interested in botany, what I find really crazy about this is that there are so many different ways for plants to become trees. A listing (surely incomplete): • Normal trees, like what you see every day, with bark and wood and so on • Monocots like yucca and aloe and Draecena , which have no bark and become woody through ‘abnormal secondary g…
I bet this is crazy common, where vastly different species have similar characteristics. What animal characteristics exhibit convergent evolution? * Wings in bats / birds, for one. * Tails and fins in swimming mammals vs fish. * Eyes? Cephalopods?
iirc crabs have evolved independently half a dozen times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation
Re: There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
#106I'm surprised he describes the pineapple as a tree?
Same for the banana. I would put those under "definitely not a tree".
Re: There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
#107Following a link in that article lead me to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welwitschia, where I found what will be probably be the best sentence that I've read today:
Plants in Angola are better protected than those in Namibia, because of the relatively high concentration of land mines in Angola, which keep collectors away.
Re: There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You’re right that is what makes a tree. But don’t you feel that it’s obvious that different lineages of plants could acquire, and lose, woodenness independently of each other? And therefore 100% unsurprising that “tree” is not a monophyletic group.
It is obvious that it can happen, but it is not obvious how common it seems to be.
Re: There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
#109Well, 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…
Biology is what happens when you try to decompile code written in assembler into OO language.
This comment is underrated
Re: There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think it's fine to think of those as equally valid. Only for extremely limited purposes. Both approaches are about properties of the organism as it currently exists. The paraphyletic approach will let you know about similarity in maybe three dimensions of a ten-thousand-dimensional space. The monophyletic approach captures the other 9,997.
> Both approaches are about properties of the organism as it currently exists. Not really, no. The monophyletic approach does that only indirectly. Think of marsupial/mammal convergence. Is it really wrong to think of marsupial mice and mammalian mice as a somehow similar kind of thing? Or consider secondary unicellularity. Losing multicellularity is as drastic a change as can be, and it makes no sense to try to unde…
> Think of marsupial/mammal convergence. Is it really wrong to think of marsupial mice and mammalian mice as a somehow similar kind of thing?
It seems to me that most of the similarity can be explained by their shared phylogenetic history. Before the K-T extinction, that ecological niche was probably occupied by a very different small animal, and its occupation of that niche may have even been quite stable. So, occupation of a particular niche by an organism doesn't really imply optimization over the space of possible organisms, but rather over the space of relatively cheap modifications to existing body plans.
Think of it this way - say Australia had never been connected to the rest of the continents, so no organism with a common ancestor with mammals could exist there. How similar would the organisms filling the niche of marsupial mice be then? Probably some strategic similarities like burrowing etc, but probably enough to pass as a pseudo-mammal.