[HN Gopher] There's no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
___________________________________________________________________
There's no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
Author : dynm
Score : 227 points
Date : 2023-03-09 14:07 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (eukaryotewritesblog.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (eukaryotewritesblog.com)
| peter303 wrote:
| Poet Joyce Kilmer would be disappointed.
| salicideblock wrote:
| From 2021.
|
| Previous discussions
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27094382
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29621646
|
| Cool article either way.
| jmull wrote:
| I guess plants are awfully good at finding niches, but with the
| sun up there and ready lignin, they always come back to growing
| tall and strong.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| 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?
|
| 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
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| >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.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Lots of trees are wind pollinated. Pollen season can be
| unpleasant for people with hay fever.
| hammock wrote:
| >As far as why trees don't seem to evolve into grasses, (or
| grasses into trees)
|
| They are different branches of the tree of life. Dicots (trees)
| vs monocots (grasses)
| thriftwy wrote:
| Palm Tree is monocot, and it is a notable tree. A lot of
| grasses are dicot, any one with ornate leaves (monocots have
| blade-like leaves).
| hammock wrote:
| >Palm Tree is monocot, and it is a notable tree
|
| The least tree-like tree ever
|
| >A lot of grasses are dicot
|
| Such as?
| thriftwy wrote:
| Clover is a grass and dicot. Is clover a tree?
| hammock wrote:
| Clover is grown on lawns...not sure how many people would
| call it a grass
| justinclift wrote:
| Most people?
| samstave wrote:
| How tall are you?
| dboreham wrote:
| Palm tree is not very useful for structural wood.
| thriftwy wrote:
| Bamboo is monocot, not a tree, and is highly useful for
| structural wood. These are all orthogonal.
| [deleted]
| hammock wrote:
| Only with a lot of glue added or as entire culms
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| Tell the pacific islanders that.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Idk if you've dealt with palm wood but most of it is very
| very soft. You would not want to try to do anything you
| would recognize as structural framing with it.
| mcguire wrote:
| Being structurally a tree and producing useful wood are
| two distinct things.
| tremon wrote:
| But a palm "tree" is not structurally a tree -- it does
| not have branches.
| mcguire wrote:
| Is pine a tree? Cedar? Fir? Magnolias? How about cabbage?
| hammock wrote:
| Conifers (pine, cedar, fir) are trees but neither dicot or
| monocot, so outside the scope of this question.
|
| Magnolias are trees and dicots (so expected).
|
| Cabbage is a dicot but not a tree - not all dicots are
| trees. Maybe you misinterpreted my parent comment as me
| suggesting all dicots were trees? I more wanted to
| illustrate the key difference between grasses (which are
| monocots) and most trees
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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
|
| 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.
| go_elmo wrote:
| 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?
| justinclift wrote:
| > ... 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?
| jameshart wrote:
| Bamboo being the obvious exception of a grass that really wants
| to be a tree.
| mankyd wrote:
| And Palm "Trees".
| shagie wrote:
| 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.
| finiteparadox wrote:
| If tree is a category, does it have limits?
| behringer wrote:
| came here for the grassy tree, not entirely disappointed.
| eternalban wrote:
| > Axolotls
|
| The Axolotl tanks of Tleilaxu. I wonder if Frank Herbert got that
| from these creatures or is this some crazy coincidence that
| Axolotls are subjected to genetic 'shape shifting'.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Given what the fictitious axlotl tanks actually are I don't
| think it can be coincidental.
|
| Wikipedia on Axolotls
|
| > It is unusual among amphibians in that it reaches adulthood
| without undergoing metamorphosis.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| omginternets wrote:
| What alternative are you suggesting? Some kind of functional
| grouping?
| allturtles wrote:
| 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.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Probably something along the lines of "if it quacks like a
| duck then it's a duck"
| a3n wrote:
| Those aren't trees either.
| embedded_hiker wrote:
| They are, if they are made out of wood.
| bregma wrote:
| A witch! Burn her! Burn her!
| embedded_hiker wrote:
| Fortunately, we know much more about science than they
| did when the Monty Python movies were made.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| And who will arbitrate disagreements?
|
| There are billions of dollars of peanuts, fish, etc., being
| traded across the world every week.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| 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.
| sopchi wrote:
| Melville's got your back:
|
| - "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
| jameshart wrote:
| Cladistics agrees that dolphins and whales are fish.
|
| In the sense that they share an ancestor with all fish.
|
| It just also happens to be one of your ancestors too.
| zamfi wrote:
| I think you completely missed the point of the piece.
|
| 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...
| matthewaveryusa wrote:
| I've been teaching my daughters about these "pirate terms" like
| tomatoes being fruit, peanuts being legumes, palm trees are not
| trees.
|
| 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
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > tomatoes being fruit, peanuts being legumes, palm trees are
| not trees
|
| Strawberries aren't berries but bananas are.
| ghoogl wrote:
| [dead]
| tshaddox wrote:
| > for peanut she said "no daddy, there's nut in the name"
|
| There's also pea in the same. It's kinda like a pea and kinda
| like a nut.
| rags2riches wrote:
| "Pirate terms" because science hijacked perfectly good words
| and changed their meanings?
| jerf wrote:
| 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.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| 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.
| dekhn wrote:
| All fruits are vegetables; not all vegetables are fruit.
| Tomato is a fruit because it's the fleshy reproductive body
| of a plant containing seeds.
|
| What's interesting about peanuts is that it seems to have
| the same allergenicity profile as nuts that cause
| allergies. Kind of odd for a legume, if you ask me.
| michael1999 wrote:
| Nah. Legumes are famously hard to digest without
| fermentation or other processing.
| dekhn wrote:
| "hard to digest" and "causes an allergic reaction" are
| two different things.
| ranko wrote:
| Tomatoes are vegetables _and_ fruit. "Fruit" is a
| botanical category, including plenty of things that are
| inedible for various reasons. "Vegetable" is a culinary
| category, including many things that are fruit
| (aubergine/eggplant, cucumber, and many more).
| j16sdiz wrote:
| The word "Vegetable" also means plants in general,
| according to the english dictionary.
|
| Human languages are great, aint they?
| brabel wrote:
| Wouldn't that be "vegetation"? I agree with OP, it's not
| a vegetable if it's not edible!
| dekhn wrote:
| Why would tomato being a fruit be a pirate terms? It
| satisfies all the conditions of being a fruit.
| causi wrote:
| "Trees are not a clade" is a much more accurate description. Same
| as ravens, fish, and frankly most categories of _thing_.
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| Am I the only one drilling down in this thinking it might be
| about tree data structures? Not really having a clue what
| "phylogenetically" might mean, but kind of assuming it was about
| "those" other natural trees.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| There's also no such thing as a fish.
|
| https://chireviewofbooks.com/2020/04/15/why-fish-dont-exist-...
| mig39 wrote:
| Also a fact on one of the earliest QI episodes, and a popular
| podcast:
|
| https://www.nosuchthingasafish.com
| dhosek wrote:
| 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.
| jschveibinz wrote:
| Sounds like fun to me.
| [deleted]
| MiguelVieira wrote:
| I like David Allen Sibley's definition of a tree: "If you can
| walk under it, it's a tree; if you have to walk around it, it's a
| shrub".
| bagacrap wrote:
| Christmas Shrub then?
| euroderf wrote:
| Maybe Hanukkah Bush is a totally valid taxonomic
| classification.
| DeadMouseFive wrote:
| But what about plants that can be pruned to both shapes?
| agentwiggles wrote:
| Trubs, obviously
| jmull wrote:
| Shreebs.
| bee_rider wrote:
| But you still have to walk around trees, at least the trunk
| part. Maybe a tree is a subset of shrubs. Maybe shrubs are
| graphs.
| k_sze wrote:
| If a tree doesn't topple after a millennium, it's a...
| bee_rider wrote:
| Y2K compliant data structure
| hinkley wrote:
| force of nature.
| mcv wrote:
| I like that definition, but: is a tree with very low branches
| (like a fir) really a shrub? Does a fallen tree become a shrub?
| tshaddox wrote:
| And are walls, houses, rivers, people, etc. all shrubs?
| jameshart wrote:
| Christmas trees: actually Christmas shrubs.
| hinkley wrote:
| Christmas trees aren't just murdered trees, they're murdered
| _baby_ trees.
| dav_Oz wrote:
| Useful abstractions. Exploring their usefulness can be fun (the
| pedantic kind) and even sometimes illuminating.
|
| Obviously right from the start "taxonomy" itself is arbitrary. A
| more universal tool than naming, establishing branches, starting
| and end points is the concept of "most recent common ancestor"
| [0]. From that nameless unclassified vantage point I find it
| interesting to see (as OP pointed out) how "woodiness" or
| "treeness" evolutionary speaking is clearly a "strategy"
| (convergent evolution) and nearly impossible to chase down
| "phylogenetically" through MRCAs. Intuitively before reading this
| article I would have guessed this to be more straightforward.
|
| [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor
| jadbox wrote:
| Convergent evolutions are fascinating. It also gives me a hope
| that we'll find other non-earth life that will have some things
| axiomatically common with us (due to convergence).
| basch wrote:
| One question I've always had with the Drake equation is if it
| needs another line for scale. That we are roughly the same
| size, and experience time at roughly the same rate.
|
| Would we notice an alien civilization sending a signal with a
| small message over the course of hundreds of years, at a bit a
| century frequency? Would we recognize each other as life if one
| is the size of a galaxy or the size of an atom?
| thanatropism wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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
| feoren wrote:
| I'm confused. Does this word-vomit have anything at all to do
| with the article you're commenting on?
| Zetice wrote:
| If there's no tree, then what is there?
|
| 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.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| They both seem to be about evolution...
| lukeasrodgers wrote:
| 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.
| eternalban wrote:
| > 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.
| uoaei wrote:
| > unites a lot of seemingly disparate phenomena
|
| 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.
| lukeasrodgers wrote:
| For me, the sense in which it "unites a lot of seemingly
| disparate phenomena" is not that different than the sense
| in which "purple" unites a lot of purple things. It is true
| that they are all purple, but ultimately not very
| interesting or useful. Of course as a concept it is more
| complex and richer than "purple" hence why academics are
| able to write so many books and articles using it. I just
| don't recall ever having read anything that used these
| concepts to describe phenomena X and then felt like I
| better understood phenomena X, other than that I know
| realized it was sort of rhizomey.
| echelon wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thousand_Plateaus
| kosherhurricane wrote:
| 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.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Not quite.
|
| The philosophical sciences (I use this word in the
| classical sense, not the narrow modern/Anglo-American
| sense) can be said to couple the deductive rigor of math
| with general empirical observation. For example, consider
| metaphysics. Metaphysics often begins from very basic and
| general observations like "things change", observations
| that, btw, everyone generally presupposes, including the
| empirical scientist. From these observations, we can infer
| what must be true about reality in general and necessarily
| so. Metaphysics gives us the principles characteristic of
| being as being, or being in general. Such principles are
| therefore true of all things. If this seems very abstract,
| you would be right, as metaphysics concerns the most
| general things. Concrete-minded people will have a
| difficult time.
|
| Sadly, because of ignorance, many take philosophy to be
| some kind of idle speculation or some kind of put on where
| anything goes. This may be a result of either bad
| experiences or simply a lack of preparation to understand
| what is being said. Also, certain philosophical "schools"
| seem to be notorious for their unintelligibility (Derrida
| has this reputation). But read someone like Aristotle or
| Thomas Aquinas, or better yet, recent commentators and
| didactic works, and you will breathe fresh air and feed
| your mind. Perhaps it won't be easy, but the clarity and
| value are there and there is plenty to chew on.
|
| Philosophy also investigates the entailments of various
| held positions. For instance, your view of philosophy,
| science, mathematics, aesthetics, of what constitutes
| knowledge, etc, all very much present in your comment, all
| fall under the jurisdiction of philosophy. The assumptions
| you are making are philosophical in nature and they have
| profound logical consequences that make shock you and cause
| you to revise your views. For instance, a kind of
| quasi-/amateur positivist, scientistic materialism seems to
| be popular on HN. But a rather modest philosophical
| examination shows that logical positivism, scientism, and
| materialism are all self-refuting or incoherent. You can't
| escape philosophy. You can either do it well, or do it
| poorly.
| erulabs wrote:
| 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.
| msla wrote:
| > One cannot make a laboratory of the mind or use human
| beings as it's lab rats.
|
| That isn't the only way to subject philosophical ideas to
| empirical scrutiny, but whenever people use the historical
| evidence to determine things like how well different
| economic systems behave, for example, all of a sudden a lot
| of people get very angry and defensive and refuse to
| acknowledge the validity of prior experience.
|
| > People will say "philosophy is a soft science! No
| experiments!" Without understanding that experiments cannot
| be done in this realm.
|
| Some kinds of philosophy can be experimented on in some
| respects. For example: Does unquestioning obedience produce
| an ethical system that minimizes arbitrary killings? Well,
| I think we can look to the historical record and find the
| answer to that one, and conclude that it doesn't.
|
| More deeply, though, how do we conclude that we care about
| arbitrary killing? That's a kind of question that we can't
| answer through experimentation, because the world doesn't
| outright tell us what values we should adopt. The most we
| can do is reason through the problem and then use
| experimentation (even retrospective experiments, as in
| history) to try to figure out which ethical systems support
| those values best.
|
| That said... We're not blank slates. We're humans, we're
| social animals, so we care about certain things
| instinctively and, thus, some ethical systems are more
| _humane_ than others in their outcomes.
| attemptone wrote:
| 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.
| feoren wrote:
| [dead]
| mcphage wrote:
| > 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.
| justinclift wrote:
| > that got useful enough
|
| Does that mean "they figured out ways to make it
| reproducible and/or validate it"?
|
| Whereas the other subfields of philosophy don't (yet) have
| ways to fully validate them, and/or make them reproducible?
| dTal wrote:
| The problem isn't with "philosophy", which is at the heart of
| any inquiry into truth, as evidenced by https://en.wikipedia.
| org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosoph... . There are many
| perfectly fine articles on philosophy.
|
| The problem here is postmodernism, which is absolutely a
| meaningless word salad designed solely to impress the
| gullible.
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| D&G are a bad place to start with philosophy. I recommend
| watching these lectures by the late Professor Rick Roderick
| for a more accessible introduction:
| http://rickroderick.org/101-socrates-and-the-life-of-
| inquiry...
| soco wrote:
| Is D&G an established term for Deleuze&Guattari? Because
| for me it will always decode to Dolce&Gabbana...
| whitemary wrote:
| Yeah, it's slightly unfortunate but well-established
| inside and slightly outside of philosophy circles.
| whitemary wrote:
| Rick Roderick is the best! Great recommendation!
| ranting-moth wrote:
| You need to share whatever you're smoking with the audience
| before you post a text like that.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Is a tree a burrito or a sandwich?
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| I'm going to save this chart just to mess with plant nerds at
| parties. (lol jk i don't get invited to parties.)
| raldi wrote:
| Pineapple is "definitely a tree"?
| SamBam wrote:
| 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.
| proc0 wrote:
| 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.
| rovolo wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetable#Terminology
| brianpan wrote:
| 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.
| NovaDudely wrote:
| The best definition was from Dr Karl on ABC radio (Australia).
|
| If you put it with ice cream it is a fruit, if you put with a
| roast it is a vegetable.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| What is pineapple then?
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Well wait a minute, then, biologically what are cucumbers,
| green beans, asparagus, etc.? They're not fruits.
| scotteric wrote:
| Cucumbers and green beans are fruit. Fruit is a botanical
| term for the structure that a flower grows into once
| fertilized. Fruit has seeds.
| dekhn wrote:
| (and fennel is an herb, which is a vegetable, that makes
| fruits which have seeds)
| timdellinger wrote:
| I second the suggestion at the bottom of the (very enjoyable)
| post, pointing readers to the Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't
| content on YouTube - their passion and their approach are
| fantastic.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Minor warning, to my recollection, their language can be a
| little robust (that's a euphemism for sweary), but the creator
| is very interesting to listen to, and clearly very
| knowledgeable. Definitely a recommendation.
|
| If anyone knows of something similar for UK flora and fauna
| then please point me to it.
| donkeyboy wrote:
| Very fun article. Convergent evolution is so cool. At the end,
| the author asked: why don't plants also evolve into grasses?
|
| 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.
| mannykannot wrote:
| 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.
| blululu wrote:
| 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.
| mcv wrote:
| > why don't plants also evolve into grasses?
|
| Perhaps they're doing exactly that. But grasses evolved far
| more recently than trees.
| wardedVibe wrote:
| My partner, who is a biologist, hates this take as a mostly
| grammar trick. Then again, she has no patience for philosophy in
| general, so that probably explains it.
| dekhn wrote:
| 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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.
| dekhn wrote:
| 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".
| mauvehaus wrote:
| Are you proposing that we apply the notion of duck-typing to
| plants?
| bee_rider wrote:
| If it acts like a classification scheme, we should treat it
| as a classification scheme!
| suchire wrote:
| 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
| Kaijo wrote:
| The side you are on has already won. Sequence data are
| universally accepted in systematics as the ultimate
| arbiters of evolutionary relationships, just delve into the
| modern classification of any extant group. One example of
| where molecular evidence overturned physical evidence long
| thought to be unambiguous, leading to a complete and
| essentially uncontested taxonomic overhaul: coprinoid
| mushrooms. Morphological characters are still used in
| paleontology for obvious reasons, but again within a
| higher-level framework provided by molecular phylogenetics.
| dekhn wrote:
| Really? Cool! This was still pretty much unresolved in
| 2003 when I worked in the area and I had been told people
| were still arguing about this recently.
| soiler wrote:
| 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)
| dekhn wrote:
| 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
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| 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.
| jdlyga wrote:
| This reminds me of carcinisation. Where natural selection tends
| to heavily favor crab-shaped animals even though they come from
| different lineages. Natural selection seems a lot like physics.
| Given similar initial conditions and a population of organisms,
| you're going to get similar results across groups after a period
| of time.
| taliesinb wrote:
| Interesting article, though I thought this was going to be about
| the fact the the "phylogenetic tree" is not in fact a tree but a
| hypergraph, owing to the existence of sexual reproduction.
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| Surprised there's no mention of Lepidodendrons. OK, they're long
| extinct, but they were trees, even though they were closer
| genetically to club mosses and quillworts than any modern trees.
|
| > First, what is a tree? It's a big long-lived self-supporting
| plant with leaves and wood.
|
| Also, do pineapple and banana plants have wood? I didn't think
| so.
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