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Comment by BobaFloutist | Hacker News Reader

There was a huge revolution in understanding taxonomy when we started actually genetically testing various organisms. Before then, we had to categorize things based on the fossil record and based on similar structures, but it turns out a lot of very similar looking things aren't actually more related to each other than they are to very dissimilar looking things.

I do think there's an argument to be made that there should be a paradigm that describe organisms that are functionally the same within an ecosystem but genetically quite different other than "convergent evolution."

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For an animal example with pretty specific niches, various kinds of tenrec look and behave very similarly to various types of hedgehogs and shrews, to the point that they can be mistaken for each other at a glance, but are in a completely different order of species.

I think the paradigm you're looking for is Plato's Theory of the Forms.

Half-joking.

I just think that while it's scientifically fascinating, and great as a fun fact to say "There's no such thing as trees actually, they're just related to various other plants" and "There's no such thing as fish, actually, they're all related to different other species" it's also useful to have a word that refers to all tall, woody plants or all gilled-vertebrates.

Either way, better Plato than Pliny.

The word "fish" historically meant more or less any animal in the sea, which to my understanding included whales, seals, sea turtles, shrimp, shellfish, starfish, jellyfish, etc.

Phylogenetically, there is also a relevant group, but we call them "chordates" instead.

>"There's no such thing as fish"

fun fact, your average bony fish is more closely related to us than it is to a shark

And then there’s https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation

That would be interesting, a taxonomy of niches.

We already have the concept of "tree", "grass", etc. it would just need to be formalized

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