There is such thing as a tree. There is such thing as a fish. Maybe even conceding that dolphins and whales aren’t fish was already too much. After all, cladistics isn’t everything.
She has a hard time believing me — tomatoes was ok, but for peanut she said “no daddy, there’s nut in the name”
And so now we call it pealegume and jelly sandwiches
With my younger kids, I settled on just introducing the ideas of multiple overlapping systems, but not pushing on it too hard until they're older. They're only now getting to that age and I've been folding it in to some conversations lately more strongly. I think having some fun with it early as you are is a very strong approach to the topic.
I sort of dislike the framing of this sort of article, as well as the "actually nothing's really a berry" and similar culinary silliness, because this is a really important cognitive skill for higher-level thinking and introducing it with an approach virtually guaranteed to produce resistance and associating it with trickery rather than clear thinking is a real disservice, in my opinion.
This article, once it gets going, is good; I'm only complaining about the framing, not the content.
I will complain about the culinary version of this, where the trickery I'm referring to is "You think that a strawberry is a berry (often heavily implied, 'dumbass'), but really it's an aggregate accessory fruit (often heavily implied, 'as I am smarter for knowing than you')." The whole frame is wrong; it isn't really one thing or the other, it is both, and several other things besides. The multiple classifications all exist at once and they aren't better or worse than each other, they are better or worse for certain uses, and there certainly isn't one classification that is the "real" one and all the rest are fake. For people pushing this, it's like, yeah, you almost get the idea that multiple classifications can exist at once, but you've still completely missed the point.
Tomatoes and peanuts are primarily known to be useful as food, and in the context of food, they fill the niche of vegetables and peanuts, respectively. Palm trees are useful pretty much only decoratively and to provide shade (unless you harvest them, which most people don't) so they have exactly the same utility as trees, making them trees.
It's interesting to think about how these things are biologically different from the other things in their practical category, but we strip away the utility of placing things into categories if we try to apply them outside of the context in which the category is... useful. So unless you're in a biology lesson (or you are a botanist, or just having fun with facts), tomatoes are vegetables.
Human languages are great, aint they?
What's interesting about peanuts is that it seems to have the same allergenicity profile as nuts that cause allergies. Kind of odd for a legume, if you ask me.
Huh? Peanut allergy is distinct from nut allergy; people with peanut allergies can generally eat nuts fine, and vice versa.
There’s also pea in the same. It’s kinda like a pea and kinda like a nut.
Strawberries aren't berries but bananas are.
- "Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me."
- "To be short, then, a whale is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail."
He even notes right there that he knows about Linnaeus' work (a century old at this point) that concludes that whales are not fish. He simply decides not to care. Looks like Walrus is where he draws his line.
[1]: Moby Dick, Chapter 32: Cetology
In the sense that they share an ancestor with all fish.
It just also happens to be one of your ancestors too.
I think the best alternative is to use different names depending on what we're highlighting (cladistics versus functionalism, for instance).
The -id/-ine suffix (e.g. ursid / ursine) seems to do this.
It would be clarifying to distinguish hodgepodge groupings such as "fish", and groupings such as "ducks" that are basically monophyletic with some exceptions removed from the group. Ducks are just small Anatidae.
There are billions of dollars of peanuts, fish, etc., being traded across the world every week.
Unless, that is, you intended for your comment to be a very bland summary of the piece, and not some kind of insightful counter-argument.
You may also find this referenced blog post interesting: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...