Hacker News Reader

Comment by quantumhobbit | Hacker News Reader

"one of the top regional functionaries stated that "Lenin could not have been a mushroom" because "a mammal can not be a plant.""

I love the the logic here. As though "Lenin was a bottle nose dolphin" would have been more plausible. Also did the Soviets have the same taxonomy as the west, meaning mushrooms would be fungi and not plants?

View on HN

I guess the Soviet government was known for such "logic". A dissident once gave a speech at my university and told us this joke:

After the Americans landed on the Moon, the Soviet Politburo went to the cosmonauts saying, "Russia can do better than the Americans, so we are going to send you to the Sun."

"Don't send us to the Sun," they said, "We'll burn up and die!"

The politicians replied, "You think we are stupid in the Politburo? We will send you at night."

I thought you were going to say something like "Russia must do an even better job of being the first to the moon!"

Fungi were plants in the west too until the early 80s. Anyone old enough to be making a speech on TV in 1991 would have probably thought of them as plants regardless of their country.

Russian Wikipedia has this quote from the author of hoax: "I wrote a rebuttal to this statement [that a mammal can not be a plant] in 'Smena' newspaper. In fact, we spent the whole hour proving that fungi was a separate kingdom from plants and animals."

> Fungi were plants in the west too until the early 80s.

What brought about the change? Was some difference between them discovered or was it a matter of deciding that it would be more convenient to give them separate names?

Iirc, its because of their genome.

I think it has to do with the evolution of our scientific taxonomic system. It was realized that although fungi seem like plants in many ways, they have certain differences which warrant their separation from plants, phylogenically and morphologically.

Fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opisthokont

Under "History" in that article:

>The close relationship between animals and fungi was suggested by Thomas Cavalier-Smith in 1987

>Early phylogenies placed fungi near the plants [...]

Taxonomy isn't an arbitrary classification for convenience akin to call numbers in a library, but a reflection of our best understanding of evolutionary history, and as such changes as we learn more. Already in the 19th century many biologists already doubted that fungi were plants based on the fact that they don't have chloroplasts or photosynthesize and thus need to feed off of other living things as do animals. However, with the development of sequencing methods, first for proteins in the 1950s and then for DNA in the 1970s, more quantitive support for the similarity of fungi to animals were obtained. And in the 1990s when whole genome sequencing became possible yet more information supporting the grouping was obtained.

Non-biologists maybe. In the same sense that laypeople might not realize that neither starfish nor whales are fish.

What are starfish?

echinoderms. Related to sea urchins, sea cucumbers etc. Fish are an entirely different kettle of Osteichthyes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish

An echinoderm

And here I was trying to imagine space guppies.

Stars

Spawn of the Old Ones.

> Non-biologists maybe

Think of it like old astronomers who still refer to Pluto as a planet. They know it's not officially a planet anymore, but they still call it one because that's what they like calling it and they don't give a shit.

Most older mycologists still use the scientific names from before DNA sequencing in casual conversation. It's not that they don't know the new ones, they do, but that's just what they like calling them and they're fine with the younger generation waiting for them to die or whatever.

And let's be honest...."official" in that case just means, "what other people think."

Some day I hope someone explains to me why people care so much about the classification of Pluto.

I think it's just change of habits. For example, in russian "coffee" was masculine gender for long time, until significant amount of people started to erroneously call it in neutral gender. Now rules is "okay" with both.

I don't know, in the U.S. people get really emotional about Pluto's status.

I have to confess, this song rather gets to me: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6lZdqonobwk

I like to play with those sort of people by saying that the planets of the solar system are: "Mercury, Venus, Mondas, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Rupert".

While one of those entries is strictly fictional, if Pluto belongs on the list there's no reason to exclude Ceres or Eris (though in the true spirit of Discordianism, I have to stick with the initial, fictional name for the final known planet).

My guess: It is also a cute character from Disney. In French they are not homophones, and people seem to care a lot less.

That's what I can't figure out. It is what it is. What a few men decide to call it, doesn't change what it is. It's mass, radius and composition are not in debate. Those are the things that matter (no pun intended).

There is nothing wrong with the logic here. It doesn't mean that "Lenin was a bottle nose dolphin" would have been more plausible - it simply means that a different argument would be used to refute it (such as: "a human can't be a dolphin").

The logic is correct, but directs the attention of the audience to an irrelevant point. (Similar to a magician performing a trick)

E.g., imagine there actually existed some little-known mammal/plant hybrids. The "historian" could have presented one and dramatically refuted the argument. Of course that wouldn't actually help in proving Lenin was a mushroom, but it would let that proposition appear more credible.

Well yes, if there were actual mammal-mushrooms then it would make the proposition more credible, and rightly so. The whole reason why "a mammal can not be a plant" argument works is because it assumes we know that there is no such thing as a plant-mammal.

If you see a helicopter in the sky, but somehow believe it is an airplane, saying "it can't be an airplane because it has no wings" is perfectly valid. It doesn't somehow make the claim "a bird is an airplane because they both have wings" more plausible - it just means that a different argument is needed to refute it.

Well yes, if there were actual mammal-mushrooms then it would make the proposition more credible, and rightly so.

Well, I think, even if that were the case, it would still be a logical fallacy, because the fact that a mammal could be a plant/fungus/whatever doesn't tell anything about whether that particular mammal is. All it does is to increase the "refuted counter arguments" score which gives it the illusion of credibility. So the whole "can a mammal be..." debate would be a red herring.

You could pull the same trick with the airplane example: "What do you mean, this thing can't be a plane because a plane needs wings? The rocket plane XYZ-34 doesn't have wings either." (while ignoring the fact that the helicopter you're watching doesn't look anything like that rocket plane)

Why not make some argument about 1. Symbosis between fungi and other life forms, and 2. The fact the some parasites are known to alter the behavior of many creatures (specifically the one that influences a flea to climb grass to be eaten by cows for reproduction).

There was a deliberate suppression of entire fields of research & education from the 1930's onwards. Biology being one

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressed_research_in_the_Sov...

Wikipedia does not note the real reason for the Soviet rejection of genetics. Darwin's theory of evolution, being based on random mutation and natural selection was seen as contradicting the theory of dialectical materialism which assumed a deterministic ontogeny culminating in a fixed and inevitable end point.

The rejection was nothing to do with Nazis and priests.

I feel like he's more pointing out the fundamental absurdity of the whole thing than trying to make an ironclad logical assertion.

Go out on the street and ask 3-4 regular passers-by what "taxonomy" means :)

I think the question is about the cultural taxonomy, not the scientific one. For instance, culturally, tomatoes are often a vegetable in the United States, but botanically they're a berry and therefore a fruit. A culture could either treat fungus as in the "plant" category or not in the "plant" category and both would be culturally reasonable.

(It's also an error to claim that it's "wrong" to call a tomato a vegetable. Words have different meanings, and you're in for a lifetime of frustration if you go around insisting that cultures are only permitted to use all words in exactly the way that scientists use them.)

Fruit/berry are biological distinctions, I think, whereas vegetable-ness is mostly culinary.

I recall reading an argument refuting this, but it didn't alter my way of differentiating.

Hm no. Ask your waitress for a bowl of oatmeal with berries and they bring tomatoes, you will be upset.

The issue is domain-specific definitions. It causes a lot of misunderstandings. A common issue is the meaning of the word theory.

Yes. Oatmeal is culinary. What's your point?

Read it again. Fruit/berry was proposed as not being culinary.

In context, it was clearly saying that a tomato is a fruit/berry in a biological context, but a vegetable in a culinary one. That doesn't mean that those words don't also have different meanings in other contexts.

> Ask your waitress for a bowl of oatmeal with berries and they bring tomatoes, you will be upset.

Right, because if you ask your waitress, you expect culinary rather than biological definitions to be used.

Then again, you'd usually ask for something more specific than "berries".

You'd probably be upset if they brought raw cranberries or poisonous juniper berries too.

Many years ago I worked as a cashier in a supermarket. There tomatoes had their own classification as "salad".

Just as coffee "beans" are actually seeds. This information is of no use to the vast majority of people unless one finds it enjoyable to be pedantic, but it is a neat bit of trivia all the same.

> Just as coffee "beans" are actually seeds.

All beans are seeds. Except "sea beans", which aren't beans, either.

And NetBeans.

How is the claim that "Lenin was a bottle nose dolphin" more plausible, comrade? If a mammal cannot be something simple like a plant, then surely it is even less likely that a mammal can be a fish!

This would have been an excellent opportunity for a dad joke about Lenin and the Vodka bottle had he not prohibited alcohol in 1917.

It's great but it's not a proof, because a mushroom isn't a plant.

Functionaries were as clueless about taxonomy as about anything else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com