• RandomStickman@fedia.io
    11·
    56 minutes ago

    My attempt at an explanation

    • Ducks are dinosaurs: Ducks, as with all birds, evolved from theropods and are considered living dinosaurs.

    • Horses walk on middle fingers: Ancestors of modern horses have 5 toes the size of a small dog. Eventually they evolved away the other toes and only the middle toe remain.

    • Bees are crustaceans: Crustacea is not a single branch in the tree of life but a collection of multiple branches (i.e. paraphyletic). If we pick a point and said everything after that is considered the same group, then by necessity we have to put bees (and all hexapoda) and what we traditionally call crustaceans into a single group. That group would be pancrustacea. Is that exactly the same as saying bees are crustaceans? Are jackdaws crows? I’ll let you decide.

    • Pterodactyls are fish: Fish is also not a single branch. By the same token, if we want to put what we traditionally counted as fish (such as sharks, carps, and lungfishes) together as a single group, we have to include all vertebrates (which includes pterodactyls, us, whales, etc.)

    • Redwood are algae: I’m not too sure about this one. The wikipedia page for algae say that it excludes the land plants (embryophytes) which redwoods are part of.

    • Humans are part virus: Viruses have the ability inject and splice their genetic material into our genome and have our cells do the cloning for them. Usually it is not passed on to the next generation. Apparently an ancient strain of virus from millions of years ago incorporated themselves into our genome and our germ cells (sperm and egg) and can be passed on to the next generation.

    • bluestem@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
      1·
      43 seconds ago

      “Redwood are algae” is a similar statement to “Pterodactyls are fish” or “bees are crustaceans”. Redwoods are land plants, thus are also members of Viridiplantae - the clade containing land plants and green algae. The sister taxa to Viridiplantae in clade Archaeplastida are Glaucophyta (unicellular algae), and Rhodaria (contains red algae among other things). Thus since land plants are more closely related to green algae than green algae is to red algae or glaucophytes, if we want to treat the term “algae” as a monophyletic clade, then we have to include land plants in that, which of course includes redwoods. Essentially, this framing would make the term “algae” equivalent to Archaeplastida.

    • phdepressed@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      5·
      54 minutes ago

      Ducks are avians, thus descended from dinosaurs.

      Anatomically, the hoof of a horse is equivalent to a human middle fingernail.

      There are “sea bees” tiny crustaceans that are pollinators of underwater plants. Both crustaceans and “bugs” are arthropods.

      Not sure about the pterodactyl fish reference.

      Redwoods and all plants really descend from photosynthetic algae.

      About 8% of the human genome is composed of ancient viral DNA from viruses that integrated into DNA…

    • iilwl@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      7·
      1 hour ago

      It’s cladistics.

      “Theoretically, a last common ancestor and all its descendants constitute a (minimal) clade. Importantly, all descendants stay in their overarching ancestral clade. For example, if the terms worms or fishes were used within a strict cladistic framework, these terms would include humans.”

      • arctanthrope@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        52 minutes ago

        so basically it’s a language problem, not a biology problem? people are incorrectly assuming that any group of species with a word to describe it must be monophyletic, and therefore include all unrelated species which would make it monophyletic?

        • iilwl@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          2·
          3 minutes ago

          I’m honestly surprised this isn’t better understood in this community, at least as an approach to the tree of life system of classification, with or without its merits. I didn’t go to college and went to public school that suppressed science education, but this was how I came to understand evolution and that all types of life had a universal common ancestor.

          I’m not speaking to the accuracy of the meme, and the science community at large has its criticisms of cladistics, but I’m not sure I would define this as a problem of biology or language, or a problem at all. It is the most common method of evolutionary classification at this time.

          Keep in mind I’m a blue collar worker on my lunch break and not a scientist nor college educated. I just like to learn in my free time about a bunch of stuff.

  • Jo Miran@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    14 minutes ago

    Human are an advanced bio mech suit for bacteria. Human cells - 37 trillion (majority red blood cells). Bacteria in the human body - 38 trillion.

    There is a non-zero chance that the human consciousness is the product of bacteria forming a mesh neural network that hijacks the human brain’s voluntary functions. It could explain why some people suffer emotional distress while under antibiotics (I get severe depression).

    Just playing with ideas.

    • we are all@crazypeople.onlineEnglish
      10·
      1 hour ago

      Yeahhh, I looked it up and I don’t know what OP meant. there are redwood lichen who live symbiotically with the trees but are separate life forms.

      Then there’s the “redwoods of the sea” huge kelp like algae structures that resemble tree growth patterns but… like aren’t the actual redwood trees.

      soooo yeah. I dunno.

          • we are all@crazypeople.onlineEnglish
            2·
            59 minutes ago

            ok well yeah I don’t disagree all terapods evolved from ancestors we call fish but then… they and we were also single cell life forms? OP is trying to say they ‘are fish’ and that’s just a random pull from history instead of direct lineage.

            sorta like

            pTeRodActYLs ArE StaRStUfF

            • KTJ_microbes@mander.xyzEnglish
              4·
              53 minutes ago

              I mean, all eukaryotes are Asgardarchaeota ¯\(ツ)/¯

              Single-celled is physiological description, though. But I like OPs point. We have a lot of “some group except” categories. Algae (photosynthesizers except land plants), fish (vertebrates except tetrapods), some definitions of protists (eukaryotes except animals, land plants, and fungi). Practically, we use dinosaurs for the long (>65mya) extinct lineages of the clade that also includes birds. But we don’t have another name for the clade, so the point is lost.

              • KTJ_microbes@mander.xyzEnglish
                1·
                51 minutes ago

                Okay, I don’t think people would call purple bacteria algae, it is a bit more complex, algae are basically cyanobacteria and eukaryotes with plastids except land plants.

        • Entropy_Pyre@lemmy.caEnglish
          3·
          51 minutes ago

          You’re forgetting our first land ancestor, the fish that decided to come up on land. By certain definitions, all land animals that descended from that ancestor are fish.

          It’s an obscure biology joke. Doesn’t play into day-to-day conversations. It is the same logic that causes biologists to say that birds are dinosaurs though—because they descended from dinosaurs. But by the same logic, birds also evolved from lizards, and before that amphibians, and from before that fish, etc. This definition is more like putting all of life into nested boxes. Or perhaps it’s more like the saying “all tigers are felines, but not all felines are tigers”.

          This definition is helpful for evolutionary biologists to talk about evolution at grand scale and how we might share certain genes with fish. But it’s admittedly not very helpful for day-to-day conversations that say humans are pretty distant from fish and don’t resemble them much at all now. (Though I admittedly love little biology facts like how our middle ear bones evolved from gills.)

          Anyway. I get silly excited about this stuff. Random nerdy rant done.

  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    1 hour ago

    “Pterodactyls are fish” seems disingenuous to insert when two of the previous ones are about pedantic taxonomy facts (which are true). “Fish” are paraphyletic and thus not an actual taxon, but as a practical group, it’s all non-tetrapod vertebrates – and order Pterosauria are decidedly tetrapods.

    It’s trying to be pedantic in a cheeky way but just ends up being wrong.

    • bisby@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      25 minutes ago

      I find pedants are often wrong or completely missing the point.

      Sometimes it triggers a fun discussion. and sometimes it’s just tedious.

      (ghoti could never be pronounced like “fish” because “gh” only sounds like an F near the end of a word after au or ou, but ghoti is at least an interesting way to bring up the topic of weird inconsistencies of the english language, even if it’s wrong)