3 ms·
What alternative are you suggesting? Some kind of functional grouping?
by omginternets 4y ago
What alternative are you suggesting? Some kind of functional grouping?
- NegativeLatency 4y agoProbably something along the lines of “if it quacks like a duck then it’s a duck”
- a3n 4y agoThose aren't trees either.
- embedded_hiker 4y agoThey are, if they are made out of wood.
- bregma 4y agoA witch! Burn her! Burn her!
- embedded_hiker 4y agoFortunately, we know much more about science than they did when the Monty Python movies were made.
- MichaelZuo 4y agoAnd who will arbitrate disagreements? There are billions of dollars of peanuts, fish, etc., being traded across the world every week.
- allturtles 4y agoThe 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 agoWe 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.