If birds are dinosaurs doesn't that also mean that whales really are fish after all?

[Chronos]

"Nut" isn't quite as bad, because at least the botanical nuts are (almost) a subset of common-parlance nuts... but still, almost all of the common-parlance nuts aren't botanical nuts. Peanuts are legumes; almonds, walnuts, and pecans are drupes; cashews are... something weird; what common "nuts" even are true nuts? I think maybe pistachios and Macadamias?

[Eldan]

Botanical nuts: Chestnuts, hazelnuts. Acorns, weirdly enough (I think? Botany class has been a while.)

Neither pistacchios nor macadamias are botanically nut.

PRetty sure they used the hazelnut as the "type" nut. That still tends to be the basic nut around here, if something is nut flavoured, it's hazelnut and wild hazelnut bushes are fairly common.

[Lord Torath]

Similarly, bees are now classified as fish. Which I think is ridiculous in general, but a good thing in this specific case.

And I seem to recall that honey is considered raw meet for the purposes of a trade agreement with the UK (although I'm less certain of this one)

[LibraryOgre]

What I'm taking from this thread is that if you really think about it, we're all actually just single-celled organisms.

(Yes, I am aware that at certain levels of biology that's not so much wrong as it is imprecise.)

pffft. newcomer. i'm a long protein chain.

[Dame_Mechanus]

pffft. newcomer. i'm a long protein chain.

"you entitled single-celled organisms with your ability to eventually form avocados and wheat and yeast to become avocado toast"

[veti]

Does anyone else look forward to the day when some scientist declares "Hey, we've been reading DNA all wrong, everything we've ever said about clades is nonsense"?

... Just me, then? Oh well. But I do think it's an odds-on likelihood within the next 10-20 years.

[Radar]

"you entitled single-celled organisms with your ability to eventually form avocados and wheat and yeast to become avocado toast"

Somehow, I feel that quoting Carl Sagan would be appropriate here: The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.

[LibraryOgre]

"you entitled single-celled organisms with your ability to eventually form avocados and wheat and yeast to become avocado toast"

Don't talk to me about yeasts! Turnin' carbohydrates into energy! Newfangled stuff, anyway.

[Dame_Mechanus]

Don't talk to me about yeasts! Turnin' carbohydrates into energy! Newfangled stuff, anyway.

It's never going to catch on, I imagine. Most likely peter out any year now, hardly a sustainable way of building an ecosystem.

[hamishspence]

Does anyone else look forward to the day when some scientist declares "Hey, we've been reading DNA all wrong, everything we've ever said about clades is nonsense"?

... Just me, then? Oh well. But I do think it's an odds-on likelihood within the next 10-20 years.

You don't need DNA to do cladistics - plenty of cladistics is done with stone fossils that contain no DNA at all.

[Mechalich]

You don't need DNA to do cladistics - plenty of cladistics is done with stone fossils that contain no DNA at all.

Being fair, cladistic analyses have a tendency to work better when using genetic data (and in some ways it was the development of rapid and economical sequencing that cemented it as the dominant methodology), especially when dealing with taxa that are not closely related. Encoding character data sets to produce a data matrix viable for statistical analysis involves a lot of judgments and, when dealing with taxa that have relatively few characters in common - ex. doing an comparison of all phyla and trying to encode things like flatworms alongside vertebrates - can get a bit ridiculous. And in fact the last morphological data sets attempting to chart all metazoa were made in the mid-2000s. No one has really tried to make the attempt since even though considerable amounts of new morphological data have been discovered (for example, regarding sperm ultrastructure and arthropod visual structure).

Cladistics works well in fossils with regard to closely related groups with well-known and detailed morphological data available, ex. marine invertebrates, and less well with regard to groups that are further apart or for whom there is much more fragmentary data. Those tend to produce competing contradictory analyses - as can be seen on Wikipedia's Archosaur page.

Of course, it is also true that cladistic analyses are simply easier to do using genetic data, because the cumbersome process of creating a data matrix can be essentially passed on to software once the genetic samples are in hand. This has allowed for a proliferation of said analyses by scientists who don't fully understand either the genetic data or the statistical principles (the later are actually quite complex and require some serious computing power, another reason cladistics didn't really take off until the 90s) involved.

[Chronos]

In order to completely overturn cladistics, you'd need to either show that living things are not descended from other living things, or that all species are able to interbreed with each other. Neither is an "odds-on favorite within 10-20 years".

You might overturn some specific classifications, and discover that organism X is actually more closely related to organism Z, and not organism Y as previously believed. And that might do away with some of the current weirdnesses. But it'll create entirely new weirdnesses. Because that's inherent in cladistics: It's very useful for some purposes, but it also inherently creates weird situations. In particular, it's almost impossible to completely divide a clade into a manageable number of subclades.

Like, take the "fish" example that started this thread: Suppose you want to divide up vertebrates into a small number of subclades. Well, mammals are a clade and birds are a clade, that's a good start. What's next? One might think "reptiles", but if we put all of the reptiles in a clade, that clade must include birds and mammals. Well, OK, scrap the birds and mammals, and say that reptiles are our first subclade of vertebrates. Or, actually, better make that tetrapods, which includes amphibians, because any clade that includes all the amphibians will include all of the reptiles, too.

All right, now we've got the vertebrates divided into the tetrapods and the fish... but any clade that includes all the fish includes all the tetrapods, too, and we're right back to just "vertebrates". So let's instead find some other subclades to divide up the fish. Well, we've got the lobe-finned fishes, that include all of the tetrapods, and we have the ray-finned fishes, and the cartilaginous fishes, and the (now-extinct) armored fishes, and the jawless fishes... except that any clade that includes all the jawless fishes includes all of the others. So now we need further subclades of the jawless fishes, and who the heck even studies jawless fishes?

At some point, in any cladistic classification scheme, you stop bothering with cladistics, and leave one non-clade group for "everything else".

[hamishspence]

At some point, in any cladistic classification scheme, you stop bothering with cladistics, and leave one non-clade group for "everything else".

For a dinosaur example, you'd probably have 2 huge clades (Ornithischians and Saurisichians) and the non clade "Basal dinosaurs" (ones which predate the split).

Same tends to be true as you go forward in time - you'd get basal tyrannosauroids, and tyrannosaurids - you'd get basal ceratopsians and you'd get chasmosaurs.

And of course, you'd get basal avialans, and Aves, in the case of birds.

[Mechalich]

For a dinosaur example, you'd probably have 2 huge clades (Ornithischians and Saurisichians) and the non clade "Basal dinosaurs" (ones which predate the split).

Same tends to be true as you go forward in time - you'd get basal tyrannosauroids, and tyrannosaurids - you'd get basal ceratopsians and you'd get chasmosaurs.

And of course, you'd get basal avialans, and Aves, in the case of birds.

It is increasingly common, even in the literature, to refer to assemblages of basal or stem group organisms as Grades - paraphyletic groups often found representing the evolutionary path between two larger and more successful groups. This is particularly common in paleontology in which such groups, due to their often short-lived nature tend to be poorly known and essentially impossible to sort out. For example, Tiktaalik, Acanthostega, and Icthyostega are all part of a Grade group immediately basal to the Tetrapods called the Eplistostegalia.

[snowblizz]

Botanical nuts: Chestnuts, hazelnuts. Acorns, weirdly enough (I think? Botany class has been a while.)

You forget the most important one. The botanists themselves, nuts, all of them.

[Witty Username]

What I'm taking from this thread is that if you really think about it, we're all actually just single-celled organisms.

(Yes, I am aware that at certain levels of biology that's not so much wrong as it is imprecise.)

"We are all connected, to eachother biologically, to the Earth chemically, to the rest of the Universe atomicly"

[Eldan]

"We are all connected, to eachother biologically, to the Earth chemically, to the rest of the Universe atomicly"

Well, not to Dark Matter, maybe.

[truemane]

Metamagic Mod: Thread Necromancy.