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I am confused - what does "ur-" prefix mean?
I am confused - what does "ur-" prefix mean?
I’m assuming it is something like a Cradle of Civilization (the city of Ur is recognized as one of a handful). They are civilizations of which all other civilizations are derived…they have no predecessor civilizations.
> All taxonomies are broken, full stop. Your categories are gonna be completely wrong and everybody’s going to argue over every single thing. There is no such thing as a tree. Is this a serious statement? If so, wouldn't it be incompatible with the theory of evolution? Would an alien taxonomy of human binary numbers not be a legitimate tree?
> All taxonomies are broken, full stop. Your categories are gonna be completely wrong and everybody’s going to argue over every single thing. There is no such thing as a tree. Is this a serious statement? If so, wouldn't it be incompatible with the theory of evolution? Would an alien taxonomy of human binary numbers not be a legitimate tree?
What is a cat? It's a small furry quadruped in family Felidae.
- Exception: cats may be quite large (lions, tigers).
- Exception: cats may have no fur (sphinx cats).
- Exception: cats may have fewer than four legs (e.g. due to injury).
Even questions that seem like they should be quite easy to settle, like "are these two gulls of the same or different species?", might be impossible to define formally due to things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species>.
With the specific example of "no such thing as a tree", the category of plants that humans call "trees" isn't a genetically coherent group. Lots of different types of plants have woody stems and bark and leaves, and you can't group together all the things humans call trees without also including things that we definitely don't.
> All taxonomies are broken, full stop. Your categories are gonna be completely wrong and everybody’s going to argue over every single thing. There is no such thing as a tree. Is this a serious statement? If so, wouldn't it be incompatible with the theory of evolution? Would an alien taxonomy of human binary numbers not be a legitimate tree?
> All taxonomies are broken, full stop. Your categories are gonna be completely wrong and everybody’s going to argue over every single thing. There is no such thing as a tree. Is this a serious statement? If so, wouldn't it be incompatible with the theory of evolution? Would an alien taxonomy of human binary numbers not be a legitimate tree?
> All taxonomies are broken, full stop. Your categories are gonna be completely wrong and everybody’s going to argue over every single thing. There is no such thing as a tree. Is this a serious statement? If so, wouldn't it be incompatible with the theory of evolution? Would an alien taxonomy of human binary numbers not be a legitimate tree?
Are you sure evolution is tree like? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution That said, some categories are real, precise, and useful, like integers vs reals vs complex numbers.
> All taxonomies are broken, full stop. Your categories are gonna be completely wrong and everybody’s going to argue over every single thing. There is no such thing as a tree. Is this a serious statement? If so, wouldn't it be incompatible with the theory of evolution? Would an alien taxonomy of human binary numbers not be a legitimate tree?
Are you sure evolution is tree like? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution That said, some categories are real, precise, and useful, like integers vs reals vs complex numbers.
Carcinization is a good example: it makes lots of things crab-like, so from a surface taxonomic point of view a flattop crab, a coconut crab, and marbled crab are all pretty crabby. But they're completely different evolutionary lineages, and only one of them is a "true crab".
Where evolution gets less tree-like is MGEs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_genetic_elements) as some of them can move between branches.
> All taxonomies are broken, full stop. Your categories are gonna be completely wrong and everybody’s going to argue over every single thing. There is no such thing as a tree. Is this a serious statement? If so, wouldn't it be incompatible with the theory of evolution? Would an alien taxonomy of human binary numbers not be a legitimate tree?
Voodoo categorisation and dynamic ontologies in the world of OER: https://web.archive.org/web/20190505064655/https://blog.mood...
Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags: https://web.archive.org/web/20070119210402/http://www.shirky...
> All taxonomies are broken, full stop. Your categories are gonna be completely wrong and everybody’s going to argue over every single thing. There is no such thing as a tree. Is this a serious statement? If so, wouldn't it be incompatible with the theory of evolution? Would an alien taxonomy of human binary numbers not be a legitimate tree?
Well, this clearly references this wonderful article: https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th... The idea is that our taxonomy selects a group named "trees", but there's little internal coherence in that group, which probably results in more online hilly wars in the plant-loving communities than we the laypeople can think of. See also: is Pluto a planet?
1. There is a coherent parent-child relationship
2. Children have only one parent
3. Children have no lateral relationships with other children
4. Relationships are mediated through parents, not e.g. grandparent-child directly.
5. We can coherently differentiate between different children
etc.
All of these are assumptions that greatly simplify analysis and therefore useful in any situations, but almost always fail in some way on closer inspection.
More generally we go to the saying "all models are wrong, some are useful."