4 ms·
At least you could exclude jawless, cartilaginous, and lobe-finned fish. That would leave you with 99% of what people call fish. But as said it would exclude sh
by ralfd 1y ago
At least you could exclude jawless, cartilaginous, and lobe-finned fish. That would leave you with 99% of what people call fish. But as said it would exclude sharks, they would need to be their own group.
More bothering me is that there are no trees. There are just many plants which have independently evolved a trunk and branches as a way to tower above other plants to compete for sunlight.
- pavel_lishin 1y agoYeah. Terms like "fish" and "tree" are more like "quadruped" than they are like "rodent".
- IAmBroom 1y agoExcept that "quadruped" is (AFAIK) phylogenetic: Tetrapoda.
- pavel_lishin 1y ago> * tetrapod (/ˈtɛtrəˌpɒd/;[4] from Ancient Greek τετρα- (tetra-) 'four' and πούς (poús) 'foot') is any four-limbed vertebrate animal of the clade Tetrapoda (/tɛˈtræpədə/).* Huh. I always thought it was a more generic term for any four-limbed animal. TIL, I guess!
- IAmBroom 1y agoHonestly, I can't think of a non-tetrapod animal that is four-limbed. I mean, unless you cut one leg off a starfish.
- ndsipa_pomu 1y agoExcept that you can come up with a decent definition of "fish" and "quadruped", whereas there's no definition of "tree" that covers all the cases. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/how-do-you-define-a-tree/557135/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/how-do-y...
- Dylan16807 1y agoIt's much more valid for trees. They've evolved many times and there is no common ancestor that is itself a tree. Fish evolved once, and then a specific subgroup is excluded. That's fine.