There's no such thing as a fish, there's no such thing as a tree, there's no such thing as a vegetable, there's no such thing as a man, there's no such thing as a woman. Biology is weird and blurry and doesn't fit into well-defined groups
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There's no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically) (2021)
11–20 of 67 posts
Re: There's no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically) (2021)
#12What is this "there no fish" thing? The blog link takes to a British show.
All fish are not phylogenetically correlated:
Things became fish multiple times independently.
There is no "first fish from which all fish derived".
Phylogenetic existence refers to the evolutionary history and relationships of a species as represented in a phylogenetic tree. This tree is a diagram that depicts the lines of evolutionary descent of different species, organisms, or genes from a common ancestor.
So monkeys are phylogenetically related, because all monkeys that we know have common ancestors.
Fish came to be multiple times independently. Being a fish, a tree, or a crab is a strategy, not a species.
Which is ironic because we call it the "tree of life", but it should be "forest of life" (but since life originated in the sea, it should be the "sea of life"), since trees don't have a single phylogenetic root: There wasn't a "first tree that all trees descend from": Things became trees independent of one another, because being treelike is beneficial early on, much like being fishlike and crablike.
Re: There's no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically) (2021)
#13It’s occurred to me before (and I’m sure to someone thinking more seriously about it) that our way of categorizing organisms seems to be ultimately based on their origin, and not on something…more beneficial to the human experience, or more in-line with aesthetics and colors, or in some other way. In other words, it is a deliberate choice to “taxonomize” organisms by their origins, and not by some other thing. This s…
Since an organism characteristics depend a lot on its evolutionary history, classifying organisms like that helps us make predictions and assumptions based on our knowledge of related organisms, so it's quite beneficial to humans. Also, the other classifications like tree, shrub, fruit, whatever, are also valid and used in biology, just not the main classification system. The other feature of phylogenetically classifying organisms is that it's valid for all life, which is a nice property.
Re: There's no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically) (2021)
#14I initially thought this was a criticism of phylogenetic trees (the mathematical object) rather than whether trees (the kind of plant) exist phylogenetically! Much less radical than I was expecting.
Re: There's no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically) (2021)
#15There's no such thing as a fish, there's no such thing as a tree, there's no such thing as a vegetable, there's no such thing as a man, there's no such thing as a woman. Biology is weird and blurry and doesn't fit into well-defined groups
Or perhaps phylogenetics does not determine what categories are relevant.
Re: There's no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically) (2021)
#16It’s occurred to me before (and I’m sure to someone thinking more seriously about it) that our way of categorizing organisms seems to be ultimately based on their origin, and not on something…more beneficial to the human experience, or more in-line with aesthetics and colors, or in some other way. In other words, it is a deliberate choice to “taxonomize” organisms by their origins, and not by some other thing. This s…
Ehhhh I strongly disagree with your statement.
The biological system of taxonomy is really for the biology of the organism. We have other categories we use (as humans who are not biologists), even though we borrow organizational structure from biologists! For example, the conceptual category of "vegetable" is a culinary term, not a biological one, and is a good example of a category not used by biologists.
There's a common saying, "Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it into a fruit salad". I believe that biologists should be categorizing organisms based on their origin, but people who are not biologists should not be bound by categories created by biologists.
For example, palm trees and bamboos are not trees biologically, but actually tall grass. The biological category of "tree" may not apply, but when you hire a landscraper, you aren't using the biological category of "tree", but rather the gardening category of "tree" (when you need a palm tree cut down). That's not a failure of biology, that's just because we use 1 word "tree" to describe 2 categories used by different fields.
Re: There's no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically) (2021)
#17There's no such thing as a fish, there's no such thing as a tree, there's no such thing as a vegetable, there's no such thing as a man, there's no such thing as a woman. Biology is weird and blurry and doesn't fit into well-defined groups
There is such thing as a men and women. Gender has nothing to do with biology!
Re: There's no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically) (2021)
#18It’s occurred to me before (and I’m sure to someone thinking more seriously about it) that our way of categorizing organisms seems to be ultimately based on their origin, and not on something…more beneficial to the human experience, or more in-line with aesthetics and colors, or in some other way. In other words, it is a deliberate choice to “taxonomize” organisms by their origins, and not by some other thing. This s…
You've got that exactly backwards. Humans say "fish" and "tree". That's the entire point of the article.
Re: There's no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically) (2021)
#19There's no such thing as a fish, there's no such thing as a tree, there's no such thing as a vegetable, there's no such thing as a man, there's no such thing as a woman. Biology is weird and blurry and doesn't fit into well-defined groups
You lost it a bit at the end with women and men. Those aren't phylogenic groups, so not even closely related to the concept. It's a bit like saying "there's no such thing as granite" because not all granite is the product of two other pieces of granite having sex.
Re: There's no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically) (2021)
#20There's no such thing as a fish, there's no such thing as a tree, there's no such thing as a vegetable, there's no such thing as a man, there's no such thing as a woman. Biology is weird and blurry and doesn't fit into well-defined groups
But "there's no such thing as a fish" is a different statement than "there's no such thing as a man". First off, "man" is not a biological category, but a human social category. Biologically, "boy" and "man" are both "male". And there is such a thing as male in biology.
There is such thing as a fish, just not phylogenetically: all the different organisms that we think of as fish don’t form a group that includes all the descendents of all fish and all fish. Why is that? Some things we consider fish today have common ancestors that have legs, i.e. not fish.
https://evolution.berkeley.edu/fisheye-view-tree-of-life/wha...
Fish only exist in a duck-typing sense, not in an unambiguous ancestry tree sense.
Being a fish is better seen as an interface rather than an inheritance.
Which is how cyborg feminism sees those human categories, too.