Humans care about wood, so they made tree (thing which produces wood) a category, as it can be used to build bridges, ships and other structures. Wood being dense also made it a better feedstock for charcoal (one can use grass, however).
As far as why trees don't seem to evolve into grasses, (or grasses into trees), it might be all about C3 vs C4 carbon metabolism, the latter being a complex structural system that pre-concentrates atmospheric CO2 before feeding it into the photosynthetic biochemistry (which is the right way to do artificial photosynthesis as well). This is apparently difficult to do in trees?
> "Since C4 photosynthesis was first discovered >50 years ago, researchers have sought to understand how this complex trait evolved from the ancestral C3 photosynthetic machinery on >60 occasions. Despite its repeated emergence across the plant kingdom, C4 photosynthesis is notably rare in trees, with true C4 trees only existing in Euphorbia."
>As far as why trees don't seem to evolve into grasses
There is obviously no non-teleological answer for this, but it can be much much more straight forward than metabolism.
Think of plants as basically solar panels. We can think of the 'grass' phenotype as competing through r-type selection. Lots and lots of individuals, lots of surface area, short life cycles. Short bursty growth, convenient loss resilience, easy mobility.
'Trees' are the also optimizing for surface area (among other things), but are relying on k-type selection. Longer life-cycles, lower probability of successful reproduction, specialized pollinators, and very significantly, vertically stratified growth habit. Being an individual in a k-type species is like a very significant advantage for that individual, since its unlikely that the vast majority of k-type seeds will successfully reproduce.
Being k-type may not be more competitive for the species overall, but it may result for a selection bias at the individual member resolution, and so may be unlikely to be selected against.
There are many many advantages to lignification when your whole thing is basically being solar panels on a pole. It would seem extremely unlikely this has anything to do with metabolism other than 'doing more of it'. We already know why monocots don't make trees more significant than palms (read: vascular bundles and eusteles). My money goes to species level versus individual level selection in k versus r.
When I see the ground under an oak tree covered in acorns, most of which will be food, my first thought is definitely not that the tree is engaging in k-selection.
The big split between flowering plants is between monocots (grass, palm trees) and dicots (say a Rose bush and a Apple Tree.)
You can find non-trees and trees that are monocots and dicots and also non-flowering trees and non-trees for that matter. The main issue is that when plants get big they get woody and take on the characteristics of trees.
I like the irony of that title that a "tree" (in the computer science sense) is the basic unit of phylogeny with the caveat that it is broken at the top because the three operating systems for a cell are described here
they do show a tree on that page based on a particular set of genes but if you picked a different set of genes you would get a different tree because complex cells have a mixture of Archaea and Bacteria because they merged in some horizontal gene transfer event long ago.
All grasses are monocots (single part seeds) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocotyledon and its got things like corn, oats, lawn grasses, wheat, horsetail grass ... and sugar cane, bamboo, Joshua trees, and palm trees.
My wife and I disagree quite strongly on the crossover point fairly consistently. I also saw some research showing a supposed gender gap in that observation. Whether or not the gender part is true it seems very much that different people crossover some of these at different points.
Have you considered evolutionary selection as reason for c4 not being adapted by trees?
Grasses profit much more from growing quick than trees, where new opportunities (e.g. trees dying, fires etc) are rather rare & being able to grow extremely quickly wouldn't provide much of a benefit?
> ... being able to grow extremely quickly wouldn't provide much of a benefit?
After any substantial ground clearing event (eg bushfire, etc), wouldn't the subsequent "winners" be those who grew the fastest to capture the available sunlight + suppress their competitors?
Welcome to "A thousand plateaus" by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
ATP is a political book, albeit not a book about politics. But in the process of building their radical political theory, they build a radical general systems theory that's u-n-m-a-t-c-h-e-d. We have no choice but to study it.
I’m not yet persuaded this is relevant, at all. This isn’t a case where hierarchy fails us: we have a perfectly good and natural hierarchical model of speciation based on descent from common ancestors. That model doesn’t give us the common-sense notion of a tree, but that’s fine: so much the worse for common sense.
If instead we used a D&G rhizome that “connects any point to any other point” — we’d be dropping the notion of time (ie, ancestors precede descendants). Which when we’re talking about evolution, seems bad.
If horizontal gene transfer were a big part of the story here, that’d be different. Or if your ecology has time travel, or interstellar exchange ala Butler’s Xenogenesis, then sure, rhizome away.
your concept of time is one which puts ancestry front and center as the obvious most important factor, but is in no certain terms the only method of interpretation. there are many other factors, and in fact, that reinterpretation is the point of rhizomatic thinking.
and that's exactly what we see in the article, right? if a species took a path A-B-C-D to exhibit features of D, and another took A-F-G-D and so also exhibits features of D, then isn't there more to the history there than simply genetic change via ancestry over time? there's a reason why convergent evolution is so weird and surprising.
epigenetics, for example, is an interesting manifestation of what sorts of new domains you can explore as you broaden the horizon for asking questions beyond "linear ancestry" or "natural heirarchy" - arborescent vs rhizomatic thinking. blasting out of these constraints is the process of deterritorialization/reterritorialization D&G put forward as necessary and essential.
A rhizome, maybe. The article is about literal trees (e.g. dogwoods, oak) and not mathematical structures, but it has a decidedly philosophical bent, and I find the idea of rhizomes to be relevant to that, at least.
What do you mean their general systems theory is unmatched? Unmatched for what? I have read a bunch of D&G (as well as D on his own) and generally enjoy their writing, but I find it basically useless in my every day life and work (software engineering), my attempts to understand science and the world, etc. For example the "body without organs" is a cool idea that unites a lot of seemingly disparate phenomena, but other than that it kind of useless. It does not lend itself to making predictions, drawing causal connections between things. I don't think it's even a good intuition pump, in Dennett's sense. Most of the "use" of D&G's philosophy that I'm familiar with boils down to "oh hey this thing is kind of rhizomatic and look at how it antagonizes capitalist structures". Would love to be proven wrong, since I spent hundreds of hours and thousands dollars getting an education with a strong emphasis on this kind of stuff.
I think this is basically the point. Understand the world around you, and especially the connections and influences between different components of a system (broadly defined), to form and verify more holistic, nth-order models rather than disconnected, first-order-only analyses.
I think it goes beyond "cool idea" and really strikes at the same kinds of intuitions that many on HN appreciate as regards simple models that explain complex phenomena. In this sense, then, D&G's work is a sort of "meta-model" for guiding intuitions when building specific models about specific systems.
It is not a predictive framework. I guess I would call it an "ontological/architectural" framework.
> I spent hundreds of hours and thousands dollars getting an education with a strong emphasis on this kind of stuff.
(I laughed)
> I find it basically useless in my every day life and work
D&G is of utility in architecture, for one. You need to have some philosophical decoration for your doodle. The art is in mapping bs to doodle. In general, useless philosophy is a faithful companion in bullshit fields. Where in software we could use D&G then? I suggest crypto space.
In software engineering, monkey patching and use-after-free are some examples of lines of flight. Broadly though, an ossified and financialized academy is never going to embody a rhizome. Check out the interview with the IDF commander who "use"s deterritorialization. If you want predictions, Nick Land was full of them
When I read Wikipedia (or any treatment) on philosophy, I can't help but feel like laymen are trying to science without getting their hands dirty and while trying to sound fancy. I know that's the wrong take, but I can't get over it.
The linked article for this thread is about how "tree" biology keeps springing up and disappearing - the molecular biology, genetics, convergent evolution -- and how the human concept of "tree" doesn't really map cleanly. All of that, to me, is intuitive.
But philosophy is lost on me. Neither your linked Wikipedia article or the article on the book you suggest [1] make much sense to my non-philosophical science brain. My eyes just glaze over.
You might enjoy reading at least a summary of existentialism. It is somewhat anti-scientific at its root - but like economics - philosophy exists in a somewhat untestable area. One cannot make a laboratory of the mind or use human beings as it’s lab rats.
Physics and maths tend to poopoo any line of thinking which considers human experience - and there is amazing utility in that! No opinions are important for calculation of a trajectory. However, human experience does exist, and operating rationally on it, despite the lack of ability to experiment, leads one into a world that mathematicians might scoff at, but is still a completely valid field of inquiry.
People will say “philosophy is a soft science! No experiments!” Without understanding that experiments cannot be done in this realm.
I recommend Michael Segrue on YouTube - his lectures are fantastic as an intro to philosophy. Particularly his into to Kierkegaard touches on the birth of existentialism out of the furnace of pure scientific rationality.
> like laymen are trying to science without getting their hands dirty and while trying to sound fancy. I know that's the wrong take, but I can't get over it.
It's actually the reverse—multiple sciences started out as subfields of philosophy, that got useful enough on their own that they were peeled out into their own thing. It would be more useful to think of as philosophy as a soup of proto-sciences that are developing, that some might prove useful, and some might die out.
That's not really all philosophy is, but at least it's a more historically accurate way to look at it.
I think philosophy is somewhat like math in that there is an attempt to create a logically self consistent system. Except it's not rigorous like math because the logic often have gaps that gets filled with observations (anecdotes), and it tries to explain the observed world.
Philosophy is also not science, since there is no attempt to rigorously test the theories with experiments or data.
So I lump philosophy with art. It's strongly tied with a person's sense of aesthetics as well as the culture around them.
For me it is the other way around. Scientist sound like laymen in philosophy when they want to bring their data into a larger context. They stumble to explain why certain connection can/cannot be made and how they come up with the implications.
^This applies mostly to epistemology.
I like my philosophy in the format of what the youth calls 'schizo-posts'. Weird, out-there, grasping to find right words and closer to art than anything else.
I worked in phylogenetics for a while and it was a pretty confusing area. Originally, phylogenetic trees (not the biological trees that are the subject of the OP) were created by finding physical features (yes, just like ML) and using those to build a semi-supervised tree-structure of classifications. However, eventually we began to use DNA sequences to compare organisms, which restructured the tree in many ways, even close to the root. It was a controversial time as the the historical physical-feature classifier group was certain their way was right, and same for the DNA folks. I sort of assumed that the DNA would be a much higher quality source for clustering but it hasn't really always worked out that way.
I thought the article was going to be talking about phylogenetic trees aren't really trees (in the data structure sense) because the prevalence of horizontal gene transfer and hybridization helplessly muddies things.
I guess it depends on on why you are doing the clustering, right?
If you want to cluster animals that sort of fuzzily behave similarly together — if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it probably acts like a duck, haha.
The point of making trees is almost always to understand the fundamental sources of phenotypic diversity and making simple models that explain how the new (complex, organismal) phenotypes arise, how they are shared through various forms of reproduction and gene transfer, and how those relate to molecular phenotypes.
Nobody that I am aware of is clustering things based on similar functionality simply to say "look, these two things are similar", without having some sort of "explanation".
Except phylogeny generally was used to categorize how hereditarily related things were. Whether sequence alignment or physical taxonomy are better determinants is perhaps an open question in some cases, although I’m firmly on the side of sequence alignment, since DNA is an important component of inheritance
Please do elaborate for a non-biologist - how and when is DNA sequencing worse at phylogenetic grouping than physiology? I had assumed the latter was embarrassingly outdated and easily duped (by convergent evolution, etc)
It's been about 20 years since I last looked into this but I think there were a few cases where people had "golden classifications" (IE, some sort of external proof of the grouping) that were more consistent with character features.
To be honest I'm not the best person to ask because every time I dip my toes in the area I realize (a) how little I know and (b) just how ugly these debates get. and (c) how much scientists like to treat some side observation as golden data that is absolutely right when trying to build support for their theory
Reminds me a little of the fact that "vegetable" is not a botanical term.
People who say "tomatoes are fruits, not vegetables" are guilty of performing an incorrect hypercorrection. Tomatoes are vegetables just as cucumbers, green beans, asparagus, lettuce, fennel and carrots are. "Vegetables" is a culinary and dietary term, not a biological one.
So some fruits are also vegetables? That doesn't seem right. I would think they're mutually exclusive because fruit is more precisely defined. If tomato is a fruit, then necessarily it is not a vegetable. It's a simple distinction between the product of a plant (what it produces) and parts of the plant.
They are not mutually exclusive because they are defined in orthogonal ways.
"Vegetable" is defined by how a plant is cooked and eaten, and so has a lot of cultural and context specific influences. A vegetable can be a root (potato), a stalk (celery), a fruit (cucumber), seeds (beans), even non-plant fungi (mushroom).
A fruit has a very specific definition (especially in a biological or botanical usage). It's the "seed-bearing structure in flowering plants that is formed from the ovary after flowering" (Wikipedia).
The part of the cucumber we eat is the fruit (you can see its seeds). But the way we prepare and eat it means we classify it as a vegetable.
The common way to distinguish between the definitions is to say a tomato is a culinary vegetable and a botanical fruit, but not a culinary fruit.
> The question of whether the tomato is a fruit or a vegetable found its way into the United States Supreme Court in 1893. The court ruled unanimously in Nix v. Hedden that a tomato is correctly identified as, and thus taxed as, a vegetable, for the purposes of the Tariff of 1883 on imported produce. The court did acknowledge, however, that, botanically speaking, a tomato is a fruit.
Tangentially related, but grasses are, in fact, a very recent evolutionary turn. We live in a very grass heavy epoch to the extent that it is hard for me to imagine a world with out grasslands. In some sense grasses seem primitive and foundational to us compared to a flowering tree like the magnolia, but no - grasses are actually really complicated and impressive organisms that filled an unexpectedly large niche.
If all plant life evolved into grasses, that would create an opportunity to do something different - to grow taller than grasses are able, for example. Monocultures are not optimal.
There is such thing as a tree. There is such thing as a fish. Maybe even conceding that dolphins and whales aren’t fish was already too much. After all, cladistics isn’t everything.
Child pyschological development is always a entertainingly fuzzy science, but I think there's at least some good reason to believe that the ability to apply multiple categorization systems to a set of objects at a time is something that will take until the teen years to really come in. Some people never really grok it.
With my younger kids, I settled on just introducing the ideas of multiple overlapping systems, but not pushing on it too hard until they're older. They're only now getting to that age and I've been folding it in to some conversations lately more strongly. I think having some fun with it early as you are is a very strong approach to the topic.
I sort of dislike the framing of this sort of article, as well as the "actually nothing's really a berry" and similar culinary silliness, because this is a really important cognitive skill for higher-level thinking and introducing it with an approach virtually guaranteed to produce resistance and associating it with trickery rather than clear thinking is a real disservice, in my opinion.
This article, once it gets going, is good; I'm only complaining about the framing, not the content.
I will complain about the culinary version of this, where the trickery I'm referring to is "You think that a strawberry is a berry (often heavily implied, 'dumbass'), but really it's an aggregate accessory fruit (often heavily implied, 'as I am smarter for knowing than you')." The whole frame is wrong; it isn't really one thing or the other, it is both, and several other things besides. The multiple classifications all exist at once and they aren't better or worse than each other, they are better or worse for certain uses, and there certainly isn't one classification that is the "real" one and all the rest are fake. For people pushing this, it's like, yeah, you almost get the idea that multiple classifications can exist at once, but you've still completely missed the point.
For practical purposes, tomatoes are vegetables, peanuts are nuts, and palm trees are trees.
Tomatoes and peanuts are primarily known to be useful as food, and in the context of food, they fill the niche of vegetables and peanuts, respectively. Palm trees are useful pretty much only decoratively and to provide shade (unless you harvest them, which most people don't) so they have exactly the same utility as trees, making them trees.
It's interesting to think about how these things are biologically different from the other things in their practical category, but we strip away the utility of placing things into categories if we try to apply them outside of the context in which the category is... useful. So unless you're in a biology lesson (or you are a botanist, or just having fun with facts), tomatoes are vegetables.
- "Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me."
- "To be short, then, a whale is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail."
He even notes right there that he knows about Linnaeus' work (a century old at this point) that concludes that whales are not fish. He simply decides not to care. Looks like Walrus is where he draws his line.
The 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.
We 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.
I’ve been thinking it would be fun to build a simple game where you get three organisms and you’re supposed to identify which two are most closely related, for example, strawberry, apple, orange, or hippopotamus, horse, rhinoceros or for the big challenge, squid, earthworm, fish.
If you turn it into a mobile friendly site, and then reveal the common ancestor of the two closest, and the ancestor of all three, that would turn into basically my favorite educational addiction ever.
Bonus points if there are maps showing world geographical distributions.
Trying to track down common ancestors would be a challenge (not to mention that in most cases the common ancestor is unknown), I figure I’d be instead indicating how far up the kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus-species hierarchy you need to go.
Readit News
As far as why trees don't seem to evolve into grasses, (or grasses into trees), it might be all about C3 vs C4 carbon metabolism, the latter being a complex structural system that pre-concentrates atmospheric CO2 before feeding it into the photosynthetic biochemistry (which is the right way to do artificial photosynthesis as well). This is apparently difficult to do in trees?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32409834/
> "Since C4 photosynthesis was first discovered >50 years ago, researchers have sought to understand how this complex trait evolved from the ancestral C3 photosynthetic machinery on >60 occasions. Despite its repeated emergence across the plant kingdom, C4 photosynthesis is notably rare in trees, with true C4 trees only existing in Euphorbia."
And here we have the world's largest Euphorbia:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5851367
There is obviously no non-teleological answer for this, but it can be much much more straight forward than metabolism.
Think of plants as basically solar panels. We can think of the 'grass' phenotype as competing through r-type selection. Lots and lots of individuals, lots of surface area, short life cycles. Short bursty growth, convenient loss resilience, easy mobility.
'Trees' are the also optimizing for surface area (among other things), but are relying on k-type selection. Longer life-cycles, lower probability of successful reproduction, specialized pollinators, and very significantly, vertically stratified growth habit. Being an individual in a k-type species is like a very significant advantage for that individual, since its unlikely that the vast majority of k-type seeds will successfully reproduce.
Being k-type may not be more competitive for the species overall, but it may result for a selection bias at the individual member resolution, and so may be unlikely to be selected against.
There are many many advantages to lignification when your whole thing is basically being solar panels on a pole. It would seem extremely unlikely this has anything to do with metabolism other than 'doing more of it'. We already know why monocots don't make trees more significant than palms (read: vascular bundles and eusteles). My money goes to species level versus individual level selection in k versus r.
You can find non-trees and trees that are monocots and dicots and also non-flowering trees and non-trees for that matter. The main issue is that when plants get big they get woody and take on the characteristics of trees.
I like the irony of that title that a "tree" (in the computer science sense) is the basic unit of phylogeny with the caveat that it is broken at the top because the three operating systems for a cell are described here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_(biology)
they do show a tree on that page based on a particular set of genes but if you picked a different set of genes you would get a different tree because complex cells have a mixture of Archaea and Bacteria because they merged in some horizontal gene transfer event long ago.
They are different branches of the tree of life. Dicots (trees) vs monocots (grasses)
Grasses profit much more from growing quick than trees, where new opportunities (e.g. trees dying, fires etc) are rather rare & being able to grow extremely quickly wouldn't provide much of a benefit?
After any substantial ground clearing event (eg bushfire, etc), wouldn't the subsequent "winners" be those who grew the fastest to capture the available sunlight + suppress their competitors?
ATP is a political book, albeit not a book about politics. But in the process of building their radical political theory, they build a radical general systems theory that's u-n-m-a-t-c-h-e-d. We have no choice but to study it.
This doesn't do it justice, but it's a fair beginning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizome_(philosophy)
This is an illustrated audio reading of the first chapter of ATP (the one dedicated to rhizomes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XYc2scuJrI&t=64s
If instead we used a D&G rhizome that “connects any point to any other point” — we’d be dropping the notion of time (ie, ancestors precede descendants). Which when we’re talking about evolution, seems bad.
If horizontal gene transfer were a big part of the story here, that’d be different. Or if your ecology has time travel, or interstellar exchange ala Butler’s Xenogenesis, then sure, rhizome away.
and that's exactly what we see in the article, right? if a species took a path A-B-C-D to exhibit features of D, and another took A-F-G-D and so also exhibits features of D, then isn't there more to the history there than simply genetic change via ancestry over time? there's a reason why convergent evolution is so weird and surprising.
epigenetics, for example, is an interesting manifestation of what sorts of new domains you can explore as you broaden the horizon for asking questions beyond "linear ancestry" or "natural heirarchy" - arborescent vs rhizomatic thinking. blasting out of these constraints is the process of deterritorialization/reterritorialization D&G put forward as necessary and essential.
A rhizome, maybe. The article is about literal trees (e.g. dogwoods, oak) and not mathematical structures, but it has a decidedly philosophical bent, and I find the idea of rhizomes to be relevant to that, at least.
IDK, I barely understand what's going on here.
I think this is basically the point. Understand the world around you, and especially the connections and influences between different components of a system (broadly defined), to form and verify more holistic, nth-order models rather than disconnected, first-order-only analyses.
I think it goes beyond "cool idea" and really strikes at the same kinds of intuitions that many on HN appreciate as regards simple models that explain complex phenomena. In this sense, then, D&G's work is a sort of "meta-model" for guiding intuitions when building specific models about specific systems.
It is not a predictive framework. I guess I would call it an "ontological/architectural" framework.
(I laughed)
> I find it basically useless in my every day life and work
D&G is of utility in architecture, for one. You need to have some philosophical decoration for your doodle. The art is in mapping bs to doodle. In general, useless philosophy is a faithful companion in bullshit fields. Where in software we could use D&G then? I suggest crypto space.
The linked article for this thread is about how "tree" biology keeps springing up and disappearing - the molecular biology, genetics, convergent evolution -- and how the human concept of "tree" doesn't really map cleanly. All of that, to me, is intuitive.
But philosophy is lost on me. Neither your linked Wikipedia article or the article on the book you suggest [1] make much sense to my non-philosophical science brain. My eyes just glaze over.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thousand_Plateaus
Physics and maths tend to poopoo any line of thinking which considers human experience - and there is amazing utility in that! No opinions are important for calculation of a trajectory. However, human experience does exist, and operating rationally on it, despite the lack of ability to experiment, leads one into a world that mathematicians might scoff at, but is still a completely valid field of inquiry.
People will say “philosophy is a soft science! No experiments!” Without understanding that experiments cannot be done in this realm.
I recommend Michael Segrue on YouTube - his lectures are fantastic as an intro to philosophy. Particularly his into to Kierkegaard touches on the birth of existentialism out of the furnace of pure scientific rationality.
It's actually the reverse—multiple sciences started out as subfields of philosophy, that got useful enough on their own that they were peeled out into their own thing. It would be more useful to think of as philosophy as a soup of proto-sciences that are developing, that some might prove useful, and some might die out.
That's not really all philosophy is, but at least it's a more historically accurate way to look at it.
The problem here is postmodernism, which is absolutely a meaningless word salad designed solely to impress the gullible.
Philosophy is also not science, since there is no attempt to rigorously test the theories with experiments or data.
So I lump philosophy with art. It's strongly tied with a person's sense of aesthetics as well as the culture around them.
^This applies mostly to epistemology.
I like my philosophy in the format of what the youth calls 'schizo-posts'. Weird, out-there, grasping to find right words and closer to art than anything else.
Dead Comment
Deleted Comment
If you want to cluster animals that sort of fuzzily behave similarly together — if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it probably acts like a duck, haha.
Nobody that I am aware of is clustering things based on similar functionality simply to say "look, these two things are similar", without having some sort of "explanation".
To be honest I'm not the best person to ask because every time I dip my toes in the area I realize (a) how little I know and (b) just how ugly these debates get. and (c) how much scientists like to treat some side observation as golden data that is absolutely right when trying to build support for their theory
People who say "tomatoes are fruits, not vegetables" are guilty of performing an incorrect hypercorrection. Tomatoes are vegetables just as cucumbers, green beans, asparagus, lettuce, fennel and carrots are. "Vegetables" is a culinary and dietary term, not a biological one.
If you put it with ice cream it is a fruit, if you put with a roast it is a vegetable.
Deleted Comment
"Vegetable" is defined by how a plant is cooked and eaten, and so has a lot of cultural and context specific influences. A vegetable can be a root (potato), a stalk (celery), a fruit (cucumber), seeds (beans), even non-plant fungi (mushroom).
A fruit has a very specific definition (especially in a biological or botanical usage). It's the "seed-bearing structure in flowering plants that is formed from the ovary after flowering" (Wikipedia).
The part of the cucumber we eat is the fruit (you can see its seeds). But the way we prepare and eat it means we classify it as a vegetable.
> The question of whether the tomato is a fruit or a vegetable found its way into the United States Supreme Court in 1893. The court ruled unanimously in Nix v. Hedden that a tomato is correctly identified as, and thus taxed as, a vegetable, for the purposes of the Tariff of 1883 on imported produce. The court did acknowledge, however, that, botanically speaking, a tomato is a fruit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetable#Terminology
Would like to hear if anyone knows. If you look at onion or garlic growing, it basically looks like a very long piece of grass.
Perhaps they're doing exactly that. But grasses evolved far more recently than trees.
Previous discussions
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27094382
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29621646
Cool article either way.
There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29621646 - Dec 2021 (132 comments)
There’s no such thing as a tree, phylogenetically - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27094382 - May 2021 (207 comments)
There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27026812 - May 2021 (1 comment)
She has a hard time believing me — tomatoes was ok, but for peanut she said “no daddy, there’s nut in the name”
And so now we call it pealegume and jelly sandwiches
With my younger kids, I settled on just introducing the ideas of multiple overlapping systems, but not pushing on it too hard until they're older. They're only now getting to that age and I've been folding it in to some conversations lately more strongly. I think having some fun with it early as you are is a very strong approach to the topic.
I sort of dislike the framing of this sort of article, as well as the "actually nothing's really a berry" and similar culinary silliness, because this is a really important cognitive skill for higher-level thinking and introducing it with an approach virtually guaranteed to produce resistance and associating it with trickery rather than clear thinking is a real disservice, in my opinion.
This article, once it gets going, is good; I'm only complaining about the framing, not the content.
I will complain about the culinary version of this, where the trickery I'm referring to is "You think that a strawberry is a berry (often heavily implied, 'dumbass'), but really it's an aggregate accessory fruit (often heavily implied, 'as I am smarter for knowing than you')." The whole frame is wrong; it isn't really one thing or the other, it is both, and several other things besides. The multiple classifications all exist at once and they aren't better or worse than each other, they are better or worse for certain uses, and there certainly isn't one classification that is the "real" one and all the rest are fake. For people pushing this, it's like, yeah, you almost get the idea that multiple classifications can exist at once, but you've still completely missed the point.
Tomatoes and peanuts are primarily known to be useful as food, and in the context of food, they fill the niche of vegetables and peanuts, respectively. Palm trees are useful pretty much only decoratively and to provide shade (unless you harvest them, which most people don't) so they have exactly the same utility as trees, making them trees.
It's interesting to think about how these things are biologically different from the other things in their practical category, but we strip away the utility of placing things into categories if we try to apply them outside of the context in which the category is... useful. So unless you're in a biology lesson (or you are a botanist, or just having fun with facts), tomatoes are vegetables.
There’s also pea in the same. It’s kinda like a pea and kinda like a nut.
Strawberries aren't berries but bananas are.
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- "Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me."
- "To be short, then, a whale is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail."
He even notes right there that he knows about Linnaeus' work (a century old at this point) that concludes that whales are not fish. He simply decides not to care. Looks like Walrus is where he draws his line.
[1]: Moby Dick, Chapter 32: Cetology
In the sense that they share an ancestor with all fish.
It just also happens to be one of your ancestors too.
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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.
Unless, that is, you intended for your comment to be a very bland summary of the piece, and not some kind of insightful counter-argument.
You may also find this referenced blog post interesting: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...
If you turn it into a mobile friendly site, and then reveal the common ancestor of the two closest, and the ancestor of all three, that would turn into basically my favorite educational addiction ever.
Bonus points if there are maps showing world geographical distributions.
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