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There is such thing as a tree. There is such thing as a fish. Maybe even conceding that dolphins and whales aren’t fish was already too much. After all, cladis

There is such thing as a tree. There is such thing as a fish. Maybe even conceding that dolphins and whales aren’t fish was already too much. After all, cladistics isn’t everything.

omginternets 4y ago
What alternative are you suggesting? Some kind of functional grouping?
- NegativeLatency 4y ago
  Probably something along the lines of “if it quacks like a duck then it’s a duck”
  - a3n 4y ago
    Those aren't trees either.
    - embedded_hiker 4y ago
      They are, if they are made out of wood.
      - bregma 4y ago
        A witch! Burn her! Burn her!
        embedded_hiker 4y ago
        Fortunately, we know much more about science than they did when the Monty Python movies were made.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    And who will arbitrate disagreements? There are billions of dollars of peanuts, fish, etc., being traded across the world every week.
- allturtles 4y ago
  The same thing we've always done: pattern matching based on characteristics with fuzzy boundaries. Cladistics is useful as a way of classifying things for biologists, but not very useful in day-to-day life. e.g. if someone says "let's go sit under those trees", or "let's chop down some trees for firewood", replying that there is no such thing is a tree is not a very useful response.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  We don't have these arguments about bipeds because we never assumed that all bipeds shared an exclusive bipedal common ancestor. I think the best alternative is to use different names depending on what we're highlighting (cladistics versus functionalism, for instance). The -id/-ine suffix (e.g. ursid / ursine) seems to do this. It would be clarifying to distinguish hodgepodge groupings such as "fish", and groupings such as "ducks" that are basically monophyletic with some exceptions removed from the group. Ducks are just small Anatidae.
matthewaveryusa 4y ago
I’ve been teaching my daughters about these “pirate terms” like tomatoes being fruit, peanuts being legumes, palm trees are not trees. She has a hard time believing me — tomatoes was ok, but for peanut she said “no daddy, there’s nut in the name” And so now we call it pealegume and jelly sandwiches
- tshaddox 4y ago
  > for peanut she said “no daddy, there’s nut in the name” There’s also pea in the same. It’s kinda like a pea and kinda like a nut.
- jerf 4y ago
  Child pyschological development is always a entertainingly fuzzy science, but I think there's at least some good reason to believe that the ability to apply multiple categorization systems to a set of objects at a time is something that will take until the teen years to really come in. Some people never really grok it. With my younger kids, I settled on just introducing the ideas of multiple overlapping systems, but not pushing on it too hard until they're older. They're only now getting to that age and I've been folding it in to some conversations lately more strongly. I think having some fun with it early as you are is a very strong approach to the topic. I sort of dislike the framing of this sort of article, as well as the "actually nothing's really a berry" and similar culinary silliness, because this is a really important cognitive skill for higher-level thinking and introducing it with an approach virtually guaranteed to produce resistance and associating it with trickery rather than clear thinking is a real disservice, in my opinion. This article, once it gets going, is good; I'm only complaining about the framing, not the content. I will complain about the culinary version of this, where the trickery I'm referring to is "You think that a strawberry is a berry (often heavily implied, 'dumbass'), but really it's an aggregate accessory fruit (often heavily implied, 'as I am smarter for knowing than you')." The whole frame is wrong; it isn't really one thing or the other, it is both, and several other things besides. The multiple classifications all exist at once and they aren't better or worse than each other, they are better or worse for certain uses, and there certainly isn't one classification that is the "real" one and all the rest are fake. For people pushing this, it's like, yeah, you almost get the idea that multiple classifications can exist at once, but you've still completely missed the point.
zamfi 4y ago
I think you completely missed the point of the piece. Unless, that is, you intended for your comment to be a very bland summary of the piece, and not some kind of insightful counter-argument. You may also find this referenced blog post interesting: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jameshart 4y ago
Cladistics agrees that dolphins and whales are fish. In the sense that they share an ancestor with all fish. It just also happens to be one of your ancestors too.
sopchi 4y ago
Melville's got your back: - "Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me." - "To be short, then, a whale is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail." He even notes right there that he knows about Linnaeus' work (a century old at this point) that concludes that whales are not fish. He simply decides not to care. Looks like Walrus is where he draws his line. [1]: Moby Dick, Chapter 32: Cetology

There is such thing as a tree. There is such thing as a fish. Maybe even conceding that dolphins and whales aren’t fish was already too much. After all, cladistics isn’t everything.

omginternets 4y ago

What alternative are you suggesting? Some kind of functional grouping?

NegativeLatency 4y ago
Probably something along the lines of “if it quacks like a duck then it’s a duck”
- a3n 4y ago
  Those aren't trees either.
  - embedded_hiker 4y ago
    They are, if they are made out of wood.
    - bregma 4y ago
      A witch! Burn her! Burn her!
      - embedded_hiker 4y ago
        Fortunately, we know much more about science than they did when the Monty Python movies were made.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  And who will arbitrate disagreements? There are billions of dollars of peanuts, fish, etc., being traded across the world every week.
allturtles 4y ago
The same thing we've always done: pattern matching based on characteristics with fuzzy boundaries. Cladistics is useful as a way of classifying things for biologists, but not very useful in day-to-day life. e.g. if someone says "let's go sit under those trees", or "let's chop down some trees for firewood", replying that there is no such thing is a tree is not a very useful response.
anonymouskimmer 4y ago
We don't have these arguments about bipeds because we never assumed that all bipeds shared an exclusive bipedal common ancestor. I think the best alternative is to use different names depending on what we're highlighting (cladistics versus functionalism, for instance). The -id/-ine suffix (e.g. ursid / ursine) seems to do this. It would be clarifying to distinguish hodgepodge groupings such as "fish", and groupings such as "ducks" that are basically monophyletic with some exceptions removed from the group. Ducks are just small Anatidae.

matthewaveryusa 4y ago

I’ve been teaching my daughters about these “pirate terms” like tomatoes being fruit, peanuts being legumes, palm trees are not trees. She has a hard time believing me — tomatoes was ok, but for peanut she said “no daddy, there’s nut in the name” And so now we call it pealegume and jelly sandwiches

tshaddox 4y ago
> for peanut she said “no daddy, there’s nut in the name” There’s also pea in the same. It’s kinda like a pea and kinda like a nut.
jerf 4y ago
Child pyschological development is always a entertainingly fuzzy science, but I think there's at least some good reason to believe that the ability to apply multiple categorization systems to a set of objects at a time is something that will take until the teen years to really come in. Some people never really grok it. With my younger kids, I settled on just introducing the ideas of multiple overlapping systems, but not pushing on it too hard until they're older. They're only now getting to that age and I've been folding it in to some conversations lately more strongly. I think having some fun with it early as you are is a very strong approach to the topic. I sort of dislike the framing of this sort of article, as well as the "actually nothing's really a berry" and similar culinary silliness, because this is a really important cognitive skill for higher-level thinking and introducing it with an approach virtually guaranteed to produce resistance and associating it with trickery rather than clear thinking is a real disservice, in my opinion. This article, once it gets going, is good; I'm only complaining about the framing, not the content. I will complain about the culinary version of this, where the trickery I'm referring to is "You think that a strawberry is a berry (often heavily implied, 'dumbass'), but really it's an aggregate accessory fruit (often heavily implied, 'as I am smarter for knowing than you')." The whole frame is wrong; it isn't really one thing or the other, it is both, and several other things besides. The multiple classifications all exist at once and they aren't better or worse than each other, they are better or worse for certain uses, and there certainly isn't one classification that is the "real" one and all the rest are fake. For people pushing this, it's like, yeah, you almost get the idea that multiple classifications can exist at once, but you've still completely missed the point.

zamfi 4y ago

I think you completely missed the point of the piece. Unless, that is, you intended for your comment to be a very bland summary of the piece, and not some kind of insightful counter-argument. You may also find this referenced blog post interesting: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jameshart 4y ago

Cladistics agrees that dolphins and whales are fish. In the sense that they share an ancestor with all fish. It just also happens to be one of your ancestors too.

sopchi 4y ago

Melville's got your back: - "Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me." - "To be short, then, a whale is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail." He even notes right there that he knows about Linnaeus' work (a century old at this point) that concludes that whales are not fish. He simply decides not to care. Looks like Walrus is where he draws his line. [1]: Moby Dick, Chapter 32: Cetology