There's no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically) (2021)
eukaryotewritesblog.com
eukaryotewritesblog.com
Lots of different and only loosely related types of plant have evolved to be tall with thick strong stems to get above other plants and capture the light.
That is a way of growing, and we call it a tree, but the point here is not "trees do not exist" but "lots of totally different unrelated types of plant came up with being tree-shaped independently."
We seem to cling too tightly to definition, as the expense of paying attention to the things as they are.
My point is resonant with the piece because it illustrates that conventional naming doesn't match taxonometric systematisation. I am happy to be wrong though, if it makes you feel better.
I mean, I like your attitude to the debate, but I don't really get it.
"A is not B." "No, A is a B, but B is not the same as A."
"Ah, but, there is no such thing as an alphabet, really, it's all just vibrations in the air or marks on paper."
You can dismiss almost any argument in science by deconstructing it to symbols and then saying that symbols are not real, but I don't see this as a valid contribution to the debate, myself. Your mileage clearly varies.
There absolutely is such a thing as "a tree". Trees are a real thing. They are an identifiable type of land plant.
But "tree" is a growth habit. It's not a family of plants. This is an important distinction and it's not a hard one to grasp. I still find it odd that it surprises people.
Similarly, I have zero time for this "no such thing as a fish" bollocks. Yes there is such a thing as a fish. It's an obligately aquatic, legless, gilled vertebrate.
It is quite easy to define what "fish" means in unambiguous terms that exclude tadpoles, axolotls, terrestrial vertebrates such as humans and so on.
The argument seems to rest on their being (at least) two families of fish. Big deal. Fish are real, trees are real. They aren't families, but they are identifiable groups.
My point was more to do with the construction of meaning and the general trend of clinging to knowledge at the expense of learning, hence the Taoist addage, since this is a phenomenon that is driven primarily by Western scientific thought.
To put it more verbosely - taxonomies, especially those driven by classification based on gene presence and regulation, will end up with lots of loose ends and contradictions, because this is not the fundamental mechanism by which new forms emerge. The metric is distorted and, by extension, so is our understanding of the morphogenetic space that it is attempting to describe. Calling it phylogeny is somewhat circular because it insists on genes being the regulating mechanism, whereas the article specifically draws attention to the limitation of this category-system, instead looking at the direct experience of a tree, which would more aptly be described as its morphology: "a big long-lived self-supporting plant with leaves and wood."
I do not see nature (of which we are a part) as entirely gene-regulated, though obviously they are involved. But what else is there? Following Michael Levin, I say 'agential material', meaning that life solves problems with full acknowledgement of an unpredictable context. In this interpretation, it is no surprise that a dandelion can become a tree, or vice versa; what matters is the needs that the plant expresses and the responses given by the environment it is exploring. This is cell-level cognition; heretical and beautiful.
A cladogram tries to show common descent and relatedness.
There are other meaningful analyses which are also true. Physical resemblance is valid: the concepts of legs, and wings, and lungs, and eyes, get re-invented over and over. "Animals that fly with wings" is a valid group but doesn't fit on the cladogram.
Cladograms are essentially 2D. Just going to 3D might not be enough, but while I can just about barely hold a simple 4D shape such as a tesseract in my head, computers make this easy. I never needed Excel's pivot tables, but thousands use them as a daily tool.
Maybe a 4D or even n-dimensional chart can usefully allow all these different categorisations to coexist, and for feeble human brains like mine to see different cross-sections of them?
And maybe if we can construct those, then they will expose interesting new conceptual relationships we didn't know about before?
Genetics has changed massively since my 1989 degree, with methylation and epigenetics and horizontal gene transfer, and shotgun DNA analysis. Who knows what non-cladistic relationships may be in there to be traced?
I mean, the genetics of lignin are not well known AFAIK, but the invention of lignin and hence woody plants was, what, very roughly 400MY ago.
The evolution of basidiomycota able to digest and eat wood was very roughly 300MY ago.
That 100MY interval formed coal. Coal and oil aren't dinosaurs. Coal is trees, oil is plankton, extremely roughly.
Fossil fuels caused the industrial revolution ~250Y ago and the emissions will very probably end technological civilisation by 2050 at the accelerating rate we are going.
So, 2 superficially minor bits of the evolutionary development of biochemistry 300-400 million years ago began and ended the reign of some slightly smart bald apes over the last 300 years. That's interesting. It would be interested to nail down how and why.
We came down out of the trees but the trees will have the last laugh: we will chop them all down or burn them, but their ancient Carboinferous era ancestors will burn us in revenge.
https://www.reddit.com/r/evolution/comments/o6yja1/serious_a...
If you ever meet an evolutionary biologist at a party, ask them if apes are monkeys. I think the closest thing for a Web developer like myself would be casually dropping into conversation the comment that "an Englishman invented the Internet".
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.
In areas of cultural analysis, terms are often read rhetorically, meaning as merely social actions with a persuasive or claim-making intent. E.g., to say "I know that ball will go in the net!!" isn't a claim involving actual knowledge, but something like a rhetorical act which appeals to the literal meaning of "know" in, say, something like an ironic/exaggerated/fabricated/social way. If one analysed the term "know" as-if this rhetorical context were its primary meaning, then one would conclude that all knowledge is merely a social presentation, knowing itself is no real thing in the world, only a game of making claims.
This is a deeply implausible primary meaning of "know", because it makes inexplicable why anyone would claim to know (ie., why would playing this game have any persuasive force?). It only makes sense if a literal meaning is available in which it is possible, and indeed quite common, to actually know things in an ordinary way. Then claiming to know, and being ironic/etc., makes sense.
It's no coincidence then that from this fields of analysis, in which any term whatsoever can take this merely rhetorical meaning, are terms like "man" given such a reading. However, the claim that this constitutes the only or even primary meaning of "man" is quite implausible. Since in the vast majority of cases, e.g., in biology, law, science, medicine etc. the authors are not taking "man" to be a kind of social rhetorical assertion. For example, pension ages differ in law across men/women -- its implausible to suppose that this law concerns itself with merely rhetorical actions of individuals insofar as they make claims to be men/women.
Indeed, as above, unless there is a literal meaning of "man" the social act of claiming to be one in a variety of non-literal contexts becomes meaningless. Consider eg., "I'm not really a man, I'm just playing one on stage with a lot of makeup". Here I'd suppose "man" has to have a literal meaning of having the characteristics of (human, adult) males in order for social claims of the sort, "I am a man!" to make any sense.
The very contemporary move to re-read these terms as primarily rhetorical claims might make some sense from a political/cultural perspective; but its quite important to remember that this cannot be their literal meaning -- or else a vast amount of derivative rhetorical meaning, and indeed existing law/textbooks/discourse/etc. becomes meaningless.
Two interpretations:
1) It has a literal meaning: the speaker has the characteristics of adult human males.
2) It is has a social-asserting meaning: the speaker wants to be perceived as "the kind of person who makes those assertions"
For asserting-meanings like (2) to make sense, literal meanings (1) have to be available.
Consider, "I'm not a crook!"
For it to make sense to claim not to be a crook, it has to be literally possible not to be one (ie., to be innocent of crimes) independent of claiming to be one.
Many today want (2) to be the "primary" meaning of terms like man/woman, ie., we are told that we should always read them as social assertions. But we have to keep in mind that literal meanings (1) have to exist in order for (2) to even make any sense -- not least that in almost all historical cases (most of the law, medicine, etc.), the literal meaning is the intended meaning.
To say "I am a man!" cannot always mean, "I wish to be seen as having the characteristics of adult males". Just as saying "i am not a crook" cannot always mean, "i wish to be seen as innocent".
A person saying, "I am not a crook" is hoping to persuade the audience that they are innocent. They are "borrowing" from the literal meaning, hoping to persuade the audience that are innocent -- even if they are not.
People saying "I am a man" who are not literally men are likewise borrowing from "what would make this claim literally true" when the say it. If they arent, it wouldnt make any sense to say. The audience has to already know what men literally are before a person claims to be one.
I would say that "a man" is someone who presents, or deeply wishes to present, in the way the society has generally dictated people who have been assigned male at birth have to. For example, I have a friend who is a trans man. I would class them as "a man", since they wish to present, and exist in society, in the same way that people who have been assigned male at birth would. As such, they have short hair, refer to themselves by a name that has more masculine connotations, wear clothes generally aimed as masculine people, etc
In the first case, take a law about pensions -- the law-writer wasnt giving masculine-presenting people fewer years of their pension than feminine-presenting people; they were applying it to adult males. This applies very generally across many uses of man/woman -- the speaker just doesn't mean masculine-people and feminine-people, even if that highly correlates with the people they did mean. (Taking masculine/feminie to mean those presenting-characteristics).
In the second case, consider the claim, "I am really a man!", if that's only a claim to masculine-presentation then 'really' doesnt make sense, right? How could an audience ever be mistaken about this? What is at issue when people claim this, or dispute this? No person who asks, "are you really X?" is disputing how something is already perceived as-being-X.
Compare with, "are you really a crook?", "are you really a police officer?", "are you really a witch?" In each case there is a literal, descriptive, perception-independent meaning.
One reply to me here is to bite the bullet and say, "I am really a man(, I am just perceived to be a woman)!" is meaningless. That claims, "I am really a man/woman!" are meaningless. That makes sense out of the view that it's all just social perception, but its kinda implausible -- because we've written so much using these terms that there's clearly a literal meaning.
Eg., consider going to the pension office to collect a pension at the age for which women are allowed it but men are not. You speak to the pension officer and say, "I'm a woman, so I'm allowed my pension now". It seems the pension officer can meaningfully dispute this, "Are you really a woman?"
If you asked, "what do you mean?" the pension officer could coherently say, "pension age for women is 66, meaning if you are female and an adult over 66 then you are entitled to.."
It would seem disqualifying to reply, "I am a woman because I am perceived to be the same as the people who qualify"
You can redefine the terms to eliminate any non-presentational meaning, but it seems quite implausible to say that the people who wrote that law mean to make it a choice as to whether you qualify for a pension.
When they said, "women qualify for a pension at age 66", they were not using the word "woman" which would have any sense of a choice associated with it, right?
Giving the terms "woman", "man" etc. only a presentational meaning renders a vast amount of our discourse using these terms absolute bizarre, at the very least. Law makers of 1940s setting pension ages were not handing the qualification criteria to individuals to decide, right? The law is not encouraging people to present-as-women, it's not saying: if you choose to present as adult females, we'll give you a few more years pension! Indeed, its hard to imagine any law-maker involved ever thought that qualification for a pension could turn on any choice an individual could make.
You can argue that people should not use "woman" to refer to "adult human females" in most contexts, or that it is better to take the rhetorical meaning of "woman" as the primary one (ie., the ones in which one claims to-be-like literal women) ---- but I cannot really see how you could claim the law makers of the 1940s were writing pension grants based on how people happened to present.
Likewise the same goes for medical textbooks, biology textbooks, etc. And a vast amount of social conversation. If bob says "I'm only interested in dating women", and eve replies, "I present in all the ways adult females do!", bob isnt mistaken to say, "no, i'm looking for someone to start a family with".
It's really really strange to say that when bob said, "i'm interested in dating women" he was confused when he thought being pregnant wasn't ordinarily entailed by the term "woman".
Again, you can try to change how these words are used. But the claim that lawmakers, doctors, biologists, ...people going on dates... that everyone is either confused or "always meant" making-choices-over-presentation.. is a very strange view that just seems patently at odds with what people mean.
It doesn't really make sense to me to say that "this is what people have always meant", nor much sense to say today, "most people mean this". We can change the terms, or adopt a kinda rhetorical practice where we don't use them literally, but its hard to imagine that's what most people have meant in most usages of these terms.
It rubs people up the wrong way when people try to tell others what their words mean in order to win an argument, so it comes across as bad-faith/manipulative to assert that this is what people mean. The reason i use pensions as an example is just because its neutral and specific, but people use man/woman in exactly those ways all the time.
It's straightforward to have an open argument about how to integrate people into society who present-as-women (, -as-men) etc. whether/when these class of people should be treated as-if a part of the relevant sexual class. But this requires giving arguments, being understanding of people who are sceptical, trying to persuade people, etc.
It comes across bad faith when people try to say, instead, "the very words you're using already mean i'm right" -- not only isnt this a very plausible account of the history of the terms, or of what people using them intend them to mean, it's alienating to people who would otherwise be quite tolerant. It turns a discussion of how to change society to be accepting into one about how everyone is profoundly mistaken about the words they use, and control over the meaning of these words "really" lies with others, who have happened to define them in ways that make most common thoughts about the issue incoherent.
Fyi, i dont think you are doing that -- ie., acting in bad faith. i'm just explaining why it rubs people the wrong way
In other words, it is a deliberate choice to “taxonomize” organisms by their origins, and not by some other thing. This seems like an assumption that no one really questions, and I wonder if it ultimately leads to some unforeseen problems, or at least a view of the world that’s less than true or optimal for human flourishing.
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.
This article is nice because it is both interesting in the purely rigorous sense (phylogenetically), and it highlights this divide between precise definitions and the words we find useful (most of all in that catchy title!).
We know of course that taxonomy is only one way to group organisms. People use plenty of others, including ones more beneficial to the human experience.
We group plants by the hardiness zones they can tolerate, for example. If you go to a plant shop they'll likely have plants which thrive best in sun outside, while others which need shade are inside or covered.
A zoo might group animals by where they are found, with zebras, ostriches, elephants, and giraffes together in the savanna section, rather than place all of the mammals together and the birds elsewhere.
As others already mentioned, "fruits" and "vegetables" are culinary definitions, not biological ones. Far more people use the culinary term "vegetable" to describe a tomato than the botanical term "fruit".
We also have religious classifications, like the Biblical prohibition: "“Nevertheless, these ye shall not eat of them that chew the cud, or of them that divide the cloven hoof: as the camel, and the hare, and the coney: for they chew the cud, but divide not the hoof; therefore they are unclean unto you.”
I would delete but I can't, because there's a reply now.
I only answered because nobody else had commented on this post at the time.
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.
Basically, another way for nerds to demonstrate their superior technical knowledge on a subject, and afterwards a way for cool internet kids to demonstrate their superior knowledge of current memes.
a) There are fish. Sharks are fish. Trout are fish. So therefore humans are fish as we are more related to trout than we are to sharks. This is basically saying that "fish" is roughly the same as "any vertebrate" or "any vertebrate with teeth" (depending on where you draw the line).
or
b) There is no such thing as a fish. There are THREE things: sharks/rays, ray finned fishes, and lobed finned fishes (which includes humans)
That's the joke in the name of the British show.
wait what
Hmm. This is a circular definition. You need to invoke tree to define leaves and wood.
Lots of plants have leaves. A few don't, some primitive because they hadn't evolved them yet (e.g. algae) and a few because they lost them (broom, cacti). If there were no trees and nobody had ever seen a tree you could still explain leaves.
Lots of plants have wood. Things that aren't trees have wood. They're called bushes. Wood is a thing separate from trees. Not all trees have wood: bananas grow on really big herbs that people call trees because they are tree-sized, but they're herbs. Palm trees aren't really made of wood.
I don't think so?
All non-tree plants have leaves (almost all maybe? edit: not cacti, so not all but most). Wood can be defined biologically ("cellulose fibers embedded in a lignin matrix" or something like that)
EDIT: you could also have totally separate definitions on what wood and leaves are without talking about trees or plants, don't you think?
People who have only seen non tree plants doesn't exist.
And nor does any non tree plant leaves help you generate a tree leaf.