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A lot of biology is dedicated to these taxonomic categorization debates that don't actually mean anything.
by guelo 11y ago
A lot of biology is dedicated to these taxonomic categorization debates that don't actually mean anything.
- danieltillett 11y agoI would not be so harsh on biologists, but I do agree that we waste far too much time arguing over garbage like this. As I used to tell my students taxonomy is just a tool to help humans make some sense of all the complexity in living systems, but it is not real.
- kpil 11y agoI think that if the taxonomy is based on evolutionary paths, it's somewhat more "real" compared to the "looks alike" sense. The evolutionary paths could potentially give some insights, while grouping similar but genetically unrelated species is just a confusion in that sense. On the other hand - classifying things based on their genome does not really help us understand the biomes.
- danieltillett 11y agoI was of course stretching things a bit to make the point that taxonomy is a human classification system that life ignores :) This is particularly the case with microbes where because of rampant horizontal gene transfer we don’t have clean evolutionary paths.