4 ms·

I looked up what makes an animal an animal. It turns that animals have to eat another living thing to survive. It's quite interesting that the thing that makes

I looked up what makes an animal an animal. It turns that animals have to eat another living thing to survive. It's quite interesting that the thing that makes us animals is not the brain, limbs, heart, lungs, liver, etc. It's having a stomach. Every animal has gotta do some sort of ingesting of another lifeform. The sea squirt seems to be the prime example, it's just a stomach. Everything else is replacable.

krick 6y ago
No idea where you "looked it up", becuase that's hardly a valid definition. Modern taxonomy is rather complicated and is not particularly concerned with kingdoms (like Animalia), which are used more because they are handy to use, not because there is a real strict boundary between what is an animal and what isn't. So they have rather loose definitions. Your statement lacks definition of what exactly is a "stomach", and I don't think you can provide such a definition for it to classify animals correctly. Sponges (which are animals), for instance, don't really have a "stomach", there is no cellular differentiation based on that function. Many carnivorous plants (which are not animals based on that they are plants, a different kingdom), on the other hand, do consume other living creatures and have something that can be considered "a stomach".
- akiselev 6y ago
  > Your statement lacks definition of what exactly is a "stomach", and I don't think you can provide such a definition for it to classify animals correctly. Sponges (which are animals), for instance, don't really have a "stomach", there is no cellular differentiation based on that function. To be fair to sponges, they are considered the first branch of the animal kingdom - direct descendants of the first digestive tract and the first organism with any sort of cellular specialization. They're what animals would look like if they were nothing but a stomach.
munificent 6y ago
> I looked up what makes an animal an animal. It turns that animals have to eat another living thing to survive. I'm not sure where you looked up the definition, but that is very much not what defines animals. There are plants like pitcher plants that eat living things, as well as many bacteria that eat other living bacteria. And there are animals like earthworms that only eat non-living organic material.
- lordnacho 6y ago
  > Animals (also called Metazoa) are multicellular eukaryotic organisms that form the biological kingdomAnimalia. With few exceptions, animals consume organic material... Assumes that meant living things? Other things doing it too doesn't make a different, definitions we use for words are gonna have grey zones, such is the reality of compression.
  - akiselev 6y ago
    "Organic material" as in organic chemistry as in compounds that form carbon-hydrogen bonds - stuff made up mostly of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and the halogens. The correct term is heterotrophic but even that is a fuzzy distinction because many (if not most) plants require symbiotic bacterial/fungi colonies due to nitrogen depletion and there are plenty of parasitic plants that can't produce their own nutrition. Clean classification of such abstract groups after billions of years of evolution is impossible.
wruza 6y ago
Yeah we are basically a thinking chunk of meat that grew around a ringed worm, for it to feed itself more easily than wallowing naked in the dirt. Welcome to the depersonalization disorder.

krick 6y ago

No idea where you "looked it up", becuase that's hardly a valid definition. Modern taxonomy is rather complicated and is not particularly concerned with kingdoms (like Animalia), which are used more because they are handy to use, not because there is a real strict boundary between what is an animal and what isn't. So they have rather loose definitions. Your statement lacks definition of what exactly is a "stomach", and I don't think you can provide such a definition for it to classify animals correctly. Sponges (which are animals), for instance, don't really have a "stomach", there is no cellular differentiation based on that function. Many carnivorous plants (which are not animals based on that they are plants, a different kingdom), on the other hand, do consume other living creatures and have something that can be considered "a stomach".

akiselev 6y ago
> Your statement lacks definition of what exactly is a "stomach", and I don't think you can provide such a definition for it to classify animals correctly. Sponges (which are animals), for instance, don't really have a "stomach", there is no cellular differentiation based on that function. To be fair to sponges, they are considered the first branch of the animal kingdom - direct descendants of the first digestive tract and the first organism with any sort of cellular specialization. They're what animals would look like if they were nothing but a stomach.

munificent 6y ago

> I looked up what makes an animal an animal. It turns that animals have to eat another living thing to survive. I'm not sure where you looked up the definition, but that is very much not what defines animals. There are plants like pitcher plants that eat living things, as well as many bacteria that eat other living bacteria. And there are animals like earthworms that only eat non-living organic material.

lordnacho 6y ago
> Animals (also called Metazoa) are multicellular eukaryotic organisms that form the biological kingdomAnimalia. With few exceptions, animals consume organic material... Assumes that meant living things? Other things doing it too doesn't make a different, definitions we use for words are gonna have grey zones, such is the reality of compression.
- akiselev 6y ago
  "Organic material" as in organic chemistry as in compounds that form carbon-hydrogen bonds - stuff made up mostly of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and the halogens. The correct term is heterotrophic but even that is a fuzzy distinction because many (if not most) plants require symbiotic bacterial/fungi colonies due to nitrogen depletion and there are plenty of parasitic plants that can't produce their own nutrition. Clean classification of such abstract groups after billions of years of evolution is impossible.

wruza 6y ago

Yeah we are basically a thinking chunk of meat that grew around a ringed worm, for it to feed itself more easily than wallowing naked in the dirt. Welcome to the depersonalization disorder.