121–130 of 137 posts
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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!
Any suggestions?
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'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 her…
So - yes, if you'd asked me whether all trees had a single woody ancestor, I would probably have said yes. I'd come across the idea of convergent evolution in animals before, but at least convergently evolved animals were really obviously different. Trees were obviously all the same thing: big trunk, some branches, green bits on the end. Some of them were coniferous and some deciduous, but I would have guessed that was a far-back ancestral split.
I had no idea that tree ferns even existed!
Anyway, the conclusion of this very rambling story is that I started dating an horticulturist and rapidly learned an enormous number of mind-melting facts about plant biology. But I still remember knowing absolutely nothing.
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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 her…
Perhaps I'm just on the low end of botanical curiosity, but I wouldn't ever have made that leap myself. If you'd asked my younger self 'what is a shrub?' I would have said 'uh, like a small bush?'. It would never have occurred to me to pursue the thought any further: my mind interfaced well with mechanical and electrical and computational things, and not at all with living things! I'd just about struggled through int…
Would your younger self have felt that one could always decide whether something was a bush or a tree?
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Perhaps I'm just on the low end of botanical curiosity, but I wouldn't ever have made that leap myself. If you'd asked my younger self 'what is a shrub?' I would have said 'uh, like a small bush?'. It would never have occurred to me to pursue the thought any further: my mind interfaced well with mechanical and electrical and computational things, and not at all with living things! I'd just about struggled through int…
> If you'd asked my younger self 'what is a shrub?' I would have said 'uh, like a small bush?' Would your younger self have felt that one could always decide whether something was a bush or a tree?
Younger me was very confidently wrong sometimes ;)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonchus_fruticosus
PS. Ok, it's technically a shrub.
This 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?
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No. I would guess you are thinking of "toadstool" versus "mushroom". Fungi is a technical term for a type of organism, not the fruiting body.
toadstool is colloquial for poisonous mushroom.
But while all toadstools are mushrooms, not all mushrooms are toadstools...
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> 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…
You are aware that marsupials are mammals?
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…
Biology is what happens when you try to decompile code written in assembler into OO language.