BEHOLD! THE MAMMAL! IT GIVES MILK AND HAS HAIR!
(And has venomous claws, lays eggs, has electroreceptors, glows under UV, has 10 sex chromosomes, genetically it’s a mix of reptiles and mammals…)
sounds like average republican
Please do not insult the platypus like that!
but what if platypus is republican?
😵
i’m just sayin’. there are possibilities. you know the climate change, chemtrails - things get weird))
If the venemous claws fit.
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Proof that God is fucking with us
I tell you it’s just an Echidna that made love to a Lizard and that’s how we got the Platypus.
Was the duck an innocent bystander or willing participant?
Videographer that accidentally mixed his genetic juice with the copulating couple
Ok, but chickens produce milk too, just like coconuts:
wiki/Crop_milkAlso dis:
Some spiders also produce milk.
So they are coconuts.
One of our bioinformatics has a sign at his desk that says “taxonomy is a social construct”.
A paper I quite enjoy is “Queer Theory for Lichens” which argued that queer theory is genuinely a useful framework for studying lichens; Lichens resist categorisation in a manner that feels like they’re actively mocking our taxonomic efforts.
“taxonomy is a social construct”
i mean for bacteria it actually is because bacteria can exchange genes across “species” so it’s not really a species… at least not in the sense of eukaryotes (where species are defined such that different species cannot exchange genes with each other)
Even for anything else, it actually is. Taxonomy is our construct that we came up with as a society to classify life. We cannot ever be “right” about it, it can just be more or less useful for us to understand life.
in that case we cannot ever be “right” about anything, as any thought we have is just a model that helps us get through life?
Yes and it is very important to constantly remind ourselves that all our abstractions and classifications are just that. Helpful tools for us to view and understand the world. People tend to forget that and over time see their categorization as essential and natural. For example, sex and gender are both socially constructed but people forget that and then create a whole set of rules around it to reinforce that categorization including social stigmatization and infant mutilation.
ok then two comments:
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if nothing is strictly true, then that implies that the statement that “nothing is strictly true” is also not strictly true, i.e. there are exceptions which are strictly true …
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jokes aside, your comment reminds me of a funny story i once read where a biologist does research on clover (you might know this one). he investigates all clover he can find and finds that they all have 3 leaves. so he calls it a law of nature that clover has three leaves.
one faithful morning, he walks out of door and finds a 4-leaved clover in the garden (which is symbol of good luck in some cultures). however, he rebukes at that and tries to sue the clover for violating the law of nature …
kinda the same spirit as what you said above. people make observations, then make these observations into laws, and if somebody breaks them, that’s their fault. instead, the model was conceived inappropriately .
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We don’t decide the baskets, if any, that this primordial soup decides to branch into.
Real “taxonomy” probably looks more like a web with nodes.
fun fact: i have the conspiracy theory that the USB symbol:
represents the phylogenetic tree of live. there’s a big node right at the beginning which are all the bacteria that aren’t really species (as i explained in another comment in this thread) but groups that can all exchange genes with each other and are therefore “one big species” and a lot of eukaryotic species that a long time ago developed out of them which only branch out, but don’t come back.
Is there such a thing as real taxonomy or are there just different ways to classify life with their own pros, cons, and use cases?
It’s about as artificial as the concept of ‘nations’ I feel
Is there such a thing as real taxonomy
in the unlikely case that this is a serious question: yes, there is, at least for eukaryotes.
for eukaryotes (things that have a cellular nucleus) there are “species” which are groups of organisms that can’t produce offspring with each other. The reasons are typically (i think?) that the genetic differences between two species are too great and any offspring would therefore have such a self-incompatible set of genes that they cannot live with.
for prokaryotes (bacteria) the situation is a bit different. due to horizontal gene transfer, they can exchange genes with practically ever other strain of bacteria, as long as the environmental circumstances are right. (and the result is often viable, i.e. the resulting bacteria can live that way). as a consequence, there are not so clearly defined “species” for bacteria. however, there are still groups of bacteria that have a higher similarity to each other, so we still group them together and give them names.
This isn’t generally true for eukaryotes either. In plants, hybridization is a huge thing and also polyploidy. So for some groups of plants we struggle to put them in neat boxes as well.
And zooming out to a larger view on taxonomy, plant taxonomy has seen some huge changes in the last decades with the various APG (angiosperm phylogeny group) publishings rearranging many if not most orders, families and genera of angiosperm plants.
yeah … plants have hybridization, yeah, i’m still reading into this.
Are there not worthwhile distinctions between sepcies that can interbreed? I remember learning from an anthro professor there are horses for examples that literally have different amounts of chromosomes that can interbreed fine. I still don’t see how ability to have viable offspring isn’t also just an arbitrary distinction I guess, especially when there’s whole classifications of life that break that rule into pieces.
While a little arbitrary, we use “ability to produce viable offspring” as a metric of speciation. Two animals can bone and create an offspring, but that offspring has to have live gametes (egg/sperm) for the parents to be considered the same species.
Conservatives hate this one trick!
(The trick: literally everything in all aspects of reality, from the larges to smallest scales to every branch of life and consciousness is a motherfucking SPECTRUM. No hard lines. Nothing is solid. Not even the matter you’re standing or sitting on.)
“Yah but nuance is so hard! It’s so much easier to just hate everything I don’t understand”
I wonder how many people think that this;
is what a coconut actually looks like.
EDIT:
Coconut as it looks on the palm tree
That coconut is clearly not on a palm tree, mate. /s
To be honest, I’ve noticed that with lots of foods. I know what the thing looks like in stores, but I have no idea what it’s like in nature.
Cashews were another recent one, where I never would have guessed what they look like:
I just ate wholemeal rice and still would not have guessed rice. 🥴
- Brussels Sprouts? (Rosenkohl)
ya
I guess I assumed ‘sprout’ meant directly out of the ground instead of a “Brussels tree”.
I don’t recognize a few of the other ones.
They occasionally sell the Brussels sprouts on the stalk like that at the farmers market. I feel like some kind of vegetable wizard walking around with it.
Brussels sprouts, pineapple, asparagus, rice, peanuts, chocolate.
If that’s not a coconut, what the fuck have I been eating?
Edit: Ok. The edit makes it make sense lol.
Go get those weird looking white ones from an Asian grocery store, they look like styrofoam cylinders with carved pointed tops. Use a butcher’s knife to chop the point off. (carefully, they are full of juice, you might be able to cut it just right so it leaves just enough meat over the water cavity.) Insert straw and long spoon to carve the natural jell-o out with. Thank me later.
Edit: this is also a great date-night activity.
My preferred method is to use a half inch drill bit and a power drill.
Also not a nut.
It’s the coco fruit
Of the coco tree
From the coco palm family!
Which is not a tree.
I got to travel Southeast Asia for a time, it’s atrocious how much we’re missing out on in the USA.
Even the really fresh coconuts here just don’t compare to the ones you get fresh off a tree. It’s unreal. Don’t get me started on my Mango Rant.
They exist in FL and I’ve climbed trees to get em. I like em when they’re yellow. Delicious coconut water and basically a coconut “jelly” lining. I also lived in the Caribbean my early life (2-7) so had a lot down there too, plus fresh sugarcane, guava, mangoes, and a thing we called a plum but was a small tree fruit that I also loved yellow ripeness. After a quick Google evidently called a June Plum or a hog plum. Used to eat em straight from the tree.
I lived in the US Virgin Islands as a kid. Our back yard had a seemingly endless supply of mangoes, bananas, avocado, lime, oranges (the real stuff, not the engineered shit we eat in the mainland), grapefruit, bread fruit, acerola, plantains, and pigeon peas. It wasn’t even that big a yard. Shit just grows.
Have you tried a papaya growing off the roadside?
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Processed by extracting the liquid from the pulp of the coconut…
Am I just too tired to get the joke?
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This is not an equivalent process to extracting juice…
It literally is the same process. 🤦♂️
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Seriously you bucket of derps, the answer to this is the simplest of internet searches away
You’re right, it is. And guess what it says?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut_milk
coconut milk is a plant milk extracted from the grated pulp of mature coconuts.
dry and juiceless
Have you ever had a fresh coconut? They have water in them.
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Yeah, I know it is a joke and all, but coconuts doesn’t have hairs or contain milk, so that particular example doesn’t undermine “morphology-based phylogeny” at all.
that looks underripe to me
(from researchgate), Maturity stages of coconut: a) young; b) early ripening; c) ripeFrom experience: all stages of a coconut are distinct, edible and used for different dishes, treats, condiments and ingredients. It’s truly a wonderous plant and sad that most Americans are only familiar with the overripe, hard kind with hard flesh.
i think they’re only familiar with it (edit: the overripe stuff) because they don’t pay attention to their thai food. that has exploded in popularity over the last few decades and fuck yeah.
Underripe is when it’s nice and full of water. Best when thirsty. Dry and ripe, best when hungry.
On related news, the salmon fish is not salmon color… And beef comes in larger packages on nature.
the salmon fish is not salmon color…
Why, sure it is! 😬
Maybe we just disagree on what color “salmon” is, but the meat is what I would call that color. They’re like flamingos in that they take on pigment from their diet. For this reason, farmed salmon will not be “salmon” color unless their diet has been supplemented with the pigment.
Coconuts are tropical! This is temperate zone!
How is this the temperate zone?? You know how the internet works?
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Actually, it’s about the teeth.
Yes, wiki/Vagina_dentata.
If it doesn’t have a tail, it’s not a monkey, even if it has a monkey kind of shape.
Apes are a kind of monkey
Hmm… I am a quack, therefore I duck?
I think a rabbit would be more accurate. Seeing as how a chicken has a beak. Also something cloaca
in ancient greece, they asked a philosopher, “what is a man?”. he said “a featherless, bipedal creature”. and then diogenes entered the scene
That philosopher was Plato.
And then everybody clapped
It’s in reference to Diogenes being a dick to Plato.
Neat. I should read more
Just learn about Diogenes, he’s awesome as fuck, hung around with a pack of wild dogs, told Alexander the great to get out of his sunlight, while laying in a pile of trash, dude did not give a fuck.
The original punk
I’m a little sad that everyone’s focused on the coconut and missing the reference to the naked man who lives in a barell trolling the father of western philosophy.
Horror time https://youtu.be/F2E3qA4Vx_A
