Yes this! I hate when people say biology supports their trans/homo/ect. phobia when in reality it absolutely does not
Transphobic people must really hate frogs.
And many kinds of fish! Like clown fish : ]
I am trans and love toads
How do you feel about trans fish?
Edit el
Especially the gay ones.
I think those are called amfibiphobes
It’s 1st grade biology!
Yes, it is. Advertising the fact that you only know biology up to a 1st grade level is not the flex you think it is.
Taxonomy isn’t biology, though. It’s a man-made classification system. And at the species level it’s much closer to binary definitions than spectrums. So maybe not the best analogy to make.
As is gender:
A man-made classification system
So I’d say it fits perfectly
But taxonomy aims (even though it sometimes fails) to classify organisms into rigid categories, which is exactly the thing you want to avoid with gender, right?
Just like how we understand that species at a real level are actually a spectrum, we do the same thing with our (self-identified) genders. We feel a certain way about ourselves and find the closest available definition to provide to others. It may not be a 100% exact match to you and you will likely have nuance, but so do species.
It actually is helpful, too because it lets others know how you’d like to be treated in a word.
Until you start to use evolution. What a species is, begins to blur as soon as you try to establish evolutionary lines. When is a whale not a whale but just a water enthusiast mammal? somewhere between 50 and 35 million years ago. Exactly when, it’s anyone’s guess. Taxonomy is indeed part of biology, though.
What a species is, begins to blur as soon as you try to establish evolutionary lines.
It doesn’t because “species” is definied as an animal that can have fertile offspring with other members of it’s species. Looking at evolution doesn’t change that definition, it just shows that it’s not a very good definition on an evolutionary timescale. Our concept of species in taxonomy only makes sense within small timeframes.
When is a whale not a whale but just a water enthusiast mammal?
First we have to establish what you mean by “whale” and translate that to the proper order/clade. Then you look at what was the first described fossile in the group is. And that’s your answer. And yes, that answer will change with new fossil discoveries or reclassifications based on other information happen. But as long as you keep up to date with them, the current way we use taxonomy gives quite binary definitions of the majority of lifeforms.
Taxonomy is indeed part of biology, though.
It sure is. But it’s just an arbitrary classification system within the greater field. It is like an “index”, so you can look up what information belongs to the thing you’re looking at. But it doesn’t actually hold much information about biology of the thing itself.
Species actually don’t have a rigid definition that works across all organisms. The most common definition is the one you gave but sometimes it simply doesn’t work, for example any organism the doesn’t use sexual reproduction doesn’t fit this definition. Clarification of extinct populations would also be an issue. Even considering organisms this is usually used with, there are exceptions. For example; domesticated cattle and American bison, coyotes and wolves, and most cat breeds with various wild species.
Attention! Turn back. Going into these comments can bring you nothing of happiness. You can just look up the “tumblr reading comprehension” meme instead of needing to see the gory details of it in action.
But comments like that are exactly why I’m here!
Haha fair enough, in that case you will find exactly what you’re looking for.
This is not a place of honor. Nothing of value is here.
Unfortunately I could still read this, needs more jpeg.
Diogenes strips naked and does a cannonball into the pool
“Behold! A fish!”
I wonder if that guy did shrooms.
Source (Tumblr), alternate frontend
I try to tell folks all the time that biology is not as simplistic as they think. It’s basically an endeavor of humans trying to make simplistic categories out of a naturally complicated clusterfuck. Some things defy labels, not everything fits into a nice, easy little box. Life is complicated. Get over it.
The world is a wonderful place, and far too wide to need to conform to your pet theory.
Fish absolutely exist cladistically, OP just didn’t want to admit they’re a land dwelling fish. You believe the implications of cladistics or you don’t, cowards.
I’d also argue it’s relatively easy to separate fish-fish from land fish from land fish that became sea fish again to bully the fish fish.
Is fish just another name for vertebrates ?
Nah. You could have a fish that evolved out of having a spine (see: Chuck Schumer) but you can’t evolve out of a clade.
Seems so. Wikipedia tells there are seven classes of vertebrates:
- Agnatha (jawless fishes, paraphyletic)
- Chondrichthyes (cartilaginous fishes)
- Osteichthyes (bony fishes, paraphyletic)
- Amphibia (amphibians)
- Reptilia (reptiles, paraphyletic)
- Aves (birds)
- Mammalia (mammals)
So yes, fishes is the same thing as vertebrates.
Probably because if you were a vertebrate living in the sea, you needed some sort of gills and fins and such. And those are what makes people assume something is a “fish”.
You sound exactly like a specimen from the Dunning-Krueger clade
I’m not gonna lie man this one sounded better in your head
Considering that you misspelled the name of a common term and that’s not a biological classification I’m going to stand by what the doctorates who taught my zoology courses said.
Fish do not exist because of pedantic technicalities? Reality isn’t real
No no, it’s that humans are technically in the fish group of evolution, even though it happened a LONG time ago. That’s what they mean by “cladistically”, there is no “clade” of fish. Look up “humans are hagfish by Clint’s Reptiles”. He explains it wonderfully
Wow. This video was great. Thank you!!
Yeah I disagree with the idea that there is no such thing as a fish.
It’s like saying that there are no striped animals because both zebras and snakes can have stripes.
Sure, there is no common ancestor for hundreds of millions of years but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t a thing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Just because we lack a definition, doesn’t mean something doesn’t exist.
It’s not even that we lack a way to define fish, it’s more that we lack a definition that isn’t arbitrary. One can define them as something like “vertebrates, except for all these ones that we don’t want to include”, but then there’s not really a clear reason to exclude all the amphibians and reptiles and mammals and such, other than that they don’t traditionally get called fish. Some of them even live in water, and a handful of fish can leave the water to a limited extent, so it isn’t even that.
When it’s a grouping that we lack the definition for, then the group doesn’t really exist, even if it’s members do and we all gave a good idea of what are, for instance, fish. Basically the group ‘fish’ contains all the things you think are fish, which is problematic as someone else may have a different idea of which things belong in the group, and while that’s fine when talking coloquially, you can’t really use it when trying to discuss things in a rigerous fashion.
Scientists said the oceans would run out of fish by 2048. In fact, fish stopped existing today. Sick burn.
“Gender is absolutely the same way.” - from How to Start a Vicious Online Argument
I was going to say ‘how about bony fish?’, but then I checked and I am technically a bony fish (Osteichthyes).
Pizza is a vegetable
actually no such thing as fish
ELI22 undergrad degree?
Take “Spider” for example, that is a fairly well definied term for all animals in the order “Araneae”. But that doesn’t really work for the term “Fish”. There a many dozens of completely different orders with thousands of species that are refered to as “Fish”. It’s a bit like saying “thing that swims in the water”.
My 5 year old says “thing that swims in the ocean/lake with exception of mamals is good fish”
You’ll get a lot of squids, seeweed, and all kinds of stuff with that, but not a bad start for a 5 year old. She’s way on her way to being a taxonomist :D
When organizing the big family tree of everything that’s alive, you use clades, which means a group that all of the individuals in it have the same common ancestor. E.g. All vertebrates, wether mammals, reptiles, etc, have the same vertebrate ancestor. Mammals also share the same tetrapod ancestor, so they’re all tetrapods.
Fish doesn’t work like that, because we don’t count all the its ancestors as fish (tetrapods have a common bony fish ancestor, for example, but you wouldn’t call a parrot a fish). But you know what a fish is. We call this a paraphyletic group.
Regarding “fish” Old classification relied on “phenotype” characteristics. And yes lamprey, a shark or a cod has little in common genetically. But they still share some common traits that distinguishes them considerably from whales, sea lions and seals. I still think the term “fish” is useful, and modern classifications rely more on genetics so I would say that the argument is semi void.
They didn’t say that fish wasn’t a useful concept, they said that the more you delve into the facts, the less certain you can be that it has a definite meaning that can be pinned down scientifically.
People think the science agrees with them that the world can be divided into fish and not fish, but that’s absolutely not what the science is saying, and their understanding is superficial.
Similarly, the terms male and female are generally quite useful, but the people who think that there’s some kind of scientific and absolute binary distinction between them are just incorrect, and their understanding is superficial.
I mean there are lots of differences between male and female.
In the same way, there are lots of differences between fish and non fish.
Transphobes 🤯 after reading this
