Lots of different and only loosely related types of plant have evolved to be tall with thick strong stems to get above other plants and capture the light.
That is a way of growing, and we call it a tree, but the point here is not "trees do not exist" but "lots of totally different unrelated types of plant came up with being tree-shaped independently."
We seem to cling too tightly to definition, as the expense of paying attention to the things as they are.
My point is resonant with the piece because it illustrates that conventional naming doesn't match taxonometric systematisation. I am happy to be wrong though, if it makes you feel better.
I mean, I like your attitude to the debate, but I don't really get it.
"A is not B." "No, A is a B, but B is not the same as A."
"Ah, but, there is no such thing as an alphabet, really, it's all just vibrations in the air or marks on paper."
You can dismiss almost any argument in science by deconstructing it to symbols and then saying that symbols are not real, but I don't see this as a valid contribution to the debate, myself. Your mileage clearly varies.
There absolutely is such a thing as "a tree". Trees are a real thing. They are an identifiable type of land plant.
But "tree" is a growth habit. It's not a family of plants. This is an important distinction and it's not a hard one to grasp. I still find it odd that it surprises people.
Similarly, I have zero time for this "no such thing as a fish" bollocks. Yes there is such a thing as a fish. It's an obligately aquatic, legless, gilled vertebrate.
It is quite easy to define what "fish" means in unambiguous terms that exclude tadpoles, axolotls, terrestrial vertebrates such as humans and so on.
The argument seems to rest on their being (at least) two families of fish. Big deal. Fish are real, trees are real. They aren't families, but they are identifiable groups.
https://www.reddit.com/r/evolution/comments/o6yja1/serious_a...
If you ever meet an evolutionary biologist at a party, ask them if apes are monkeys. I think the closest thing for a Web developer like myself would be casually dropping into conversation the comment that "an Englishman invented the Internet".
There is such thing as a fish, just not phylogenetically: all the different organisms that we think of as fish don’t form a group that includes all the descendents of all fish and all fish. Why is that? Some things we consider fish today have common ancestors that have legs, i.e. not fish.
https://evolution.berkeley.edu/fisheye-view-tree-of-life/wha...
Fish only exist in a duck-typing sense, not in an unambiguous ancestry tree sense.
Being a fish is better seen as an interface rather than an inheritance.
Which is how cyborg feminism sees those human categories, too.
In areas of cultural analysis, terms are often read rhetorically, meaning as merely social actions with a persuasive or claim-making intent. E.g., to say "I know that ball will go in the net!!" isn't a claim involving actual knowledge, but something like a rhetorical act which appeals to the literal meaning of "know" in, say, something like an ironic/exaggerated/fabricated/social way. If one analysed the term "know" as-if this rhetorical context were its primary meaning, then one would conclude that all knowledge is merely a social presentation, knowing itself is no real thing in the world, only a game of making claims.
This is a deeply implausible primary meaning of "know", because it makes inexplicable why anyone would claim to know (ie., why would playing this game have any persuasive force?). It only makes sense if a literal meaning is available in which it is possible, and indeed quite common, to actually know things in an ordinary way. Then claiming to know, and being ironic/etc., makes sense.
It's no coincidence then that from this fields of analysis, in which any term whatsoever can take this merely rhetorical meaning, are terms like "man" given such a reading. However, the claim that this constitutes the only or even primary meaning of "man" is quite implausible. Since in the vast majority of cases, e.g., in biology, law, science, medicine etc. the authors are not taking "man" to be a kind of social rhetorical assertion. For example, pension ages differ in law across men/women -- its implausible to suppose that this law concerns itself with merely rhetorical actions of individuals insofar as they make claims to be men/women.
Indeed, as above, unless there is a literal meaning of "man" the social act of claiming to be one in a variety of non-literal contexts becomes meaningless. Consider eg., "I'm not really a man, I'm just playing one on stage with a lot of makeup". Here I'd suppose "man" has to have a literal meaning of having the characteristics of (human, adult) males in order for social claims of the sort, "I am a man!" to make any sense.
The very contemporary move to re-read these terms as primarily rhetorical claims might make some sense from a political/cultural perspective; but its quite important to remember that this cannot be their literal meaning -- or else a vast amount of derivative rhetorical meaning, and indeed existing law/textbooks/discourse/etc. becomes meaningless.
In other words, it is a deliberate choice to “taxonomize” organisms by their origins, and not by some other thing. This seems like an assumption that no one really questions, and I wonder if it ultimately leads to some unforeseen problems, or at least a view of the world that’s less than true or optimal for human flourishing.
We know of course that taxonomy is only one way to group organisms. People use plenty of others, including ones more beneficial to the human experience.
We group plants by the hardiness zones they can tolerate, for example. If you go to a plant shop they'll likely have plants which thrive best in sun outside, while others which need shade are inside or covered.
A zoo might group animals by where they are found, with zebras, ostriches, elephants, and giraffes together in the savanna section, rather than place all of the mammals together and the birds elsewhere.
As others already mentioned, "fruits" and "vegetables" are culinary definitions, not biological ones. Far more people use the culinary term "vegetable" to describe a tomato than the botanical term "fruit".
We also have religious classifications, like the Biblical prohibition: "“Nevertheless, these ye shall not eat of them that chew the cud, or of them that divide the cloven hoof: as the camel, and the hare, and the coney: for they chew the cud, but divide not the hoof; therefore they are unclean unto you.”
This article is nice because it is both interesting in the purely rigorous sense (phylogenetically), and it highlights this divide between precise definitions and the words we find useful (most of all in that catchy title!).
The biological system of taxonomy is really for the biology of the organism. We have other categories we use (as humans who are not biologists), even though we borrow organizational structure from biologists! For example, the conceptual category of "vegetable" is a culinary term, not a biological one, and is a good example of a category not used by biologists.
There's a common saying, "Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it into a fruit salad". I believe that biologists should be categorizing organisms based on their origin, but people who are not biologists should not be bound by categories created by biologists.
For example, palm trees and bamboos are not trees biologically, but actually tall grass. The biological category of "tree" may not apply, but when you hire a landscraper, you aren't using the biological category of "tree", but rather the gardening category of "tree" (when you need a palm tree cut down). That's not a failure of biology, that's just because we use 1 word "tree" to describe 2 categories used by different fields.
Things became fish multiple times independently.
There is no "first fish from which all fish derived".
Phylogenetic existence refers to the evolutionary history and relationships of a species as represented in a phylogenetic tree. This tree is a diagram that depicts the lines of evolutionary descent of different species, organisms, or genes from a common ancestor.
So monkeys are phylogenetically related, because all monkeys that we know have common ancestors.
Fish came to be multiple times independently. Being a fish, a tree, or a crab is a strategy, not a species.
Which is ironic because we call it the "tree of life", but it should be "forest of life" (but since life originated in the sea, it should be the "sea of life"), since trees don't have a single phylogenetic root: There wasn't a "first tree that all trees descend from": Things became trees independent of one another, because being treelike is beneficial early on, much like being fishlike and crablike.
Basically, another way for nerds to demonstrate their superior technical knowledge on a subject, and afterwards a way for cool internet kids to demonstrate their superior knowledge of current memes.
a) There are fish. Sharks are fish. Trout are fish. So therefore humans are fish as we are more related to trout than we are to sharks. This is basically saying that "fish" is roughly the same as "any vertebrate" or "any vertebrate with teeth" (depending on where you draw the line).
or
b) There is no such thing as a fish. There are THREE things: sharks/rays, ray finned fishes, and lobed finned fishes (which includes humans)
That's the joke in the name of the British show.
I would delete but I can't, because there's a reply now.
I only answered because nobody else had commented on this post at the time.
Hmm. This is a circular definition. You need to invoke tree to define leaves and wood.
Lots of plants have leaves. A few don't, some primitive because they hadn't evolved them yet (e.g. algae) and a few because they lost them (broom, cacti). If there were no trees and nobody had ever seen a tree you could still explain leaves.
Lots of plants have wood. Things that aren't trees have wood. They're called bushes. Wood is a thing separate from trees. Not all trees have wood: bananas grow on really big herbs that people call trees because they are tree-sized, but they're herbs. Palm trees aren't really made of wood.
I don't think so?
All non-tree plants have leaves (almost all maybe? edit: not cacti, so not all but most). Wood can be defined biologically ("cellulose fibers embedded in a lignin matrix" or something like that)
EDIT: you could also have totally separate definitions on what wood and leaves are without talking about trees or plants, don't you think?
