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Why would you think it necessarily would? Imagine that we had grouped together all of the animals that were purple. Or all of the animals that were edible. Tha
by AndrewDucker 5y ago
Why would you think it necessarily would?
Imagine that we had grouped together all of the animals that were purple. Or all of the animals that were edible. That wouldn't mean that there was an evolutionary link between them that could distinguish them from all the things that weren't purple or edible.
- timeslip1523 5y agoI think the point is that relatedness is just one property, and not the one that actual matters in an immediate practical sense. Does it really matter that whales and dolphins are mammals, and technically aren't fish? Yeah, it's why they hold their breath instead of having gills- but whalers/fishermen work off of long lists of specifics, not biology textbook classifications. In terms of practicality, a duck-typed classiciation system that means that deals neatly with convergent evolution sounds great. Keep your phylogenetic tree system for looking at phylogenetic trees, give me the classification that groups together everything that's purple, everything that swims, etc.
- jameshart 5y agoWell it could matter if someone has, say, a ‘tree nut’ allergy, and we are trying to determine whether a ‘nut’ from a plant that doesn’t seem tree-like visually could potentially trigger that allergy...