Hopping off Sophia’s point:
Taxonomy is an entirely manmade concept. It doesn’t exist any more than borders between countries do. Classification only exists for us to study things in a tidy fashion. There are SO many things that resist easy classification. So we can broadly define things like “plant” and “organelle” to make academic study orderly, but there will always be things that aren’t easy to shoehorn into a box we made.
I’m very far from an expert in biology, but I teach a class in historical linguistics, which means a lot of talking about this—we say two languages are “related” if they share a common ancestor (like how French and Spanish both descend from Latin), and spend the whole semester discussing various ways to test and confirm these relationships. (The biology analogy works nicely, because languages also change over time, and one language becomes two when the population is divided and these changes pull them in different directions without any interactions to keep them in sync.)
Then the last two weeks or so are about “so, this is a useful model, but not an entirely correct one, and we’ve made a lot of simplifying assumptions; let’s talk about all the cases where it falls apart!”
My favorite example of this (which works in both linguistics and biology) is ring species, which I’m sure Sophia and Amanda can explain better than me. But they’re so cool!
Oh this 100% happened. The stigma around AIDS only really started to shift in the U.S. when more “appealing” people started getting it - tennis great Arthur Ashe got it through a blood transfusion, Magic Johnson through heterosexual sex, and the big HIV treatment program in the U.S. is still named after Ryan White, a white teenager (and hemophiliac) who similarly contracted it from a blood transfusion, and was barred from attending school because of a panic that he would infect the other kids… somehow.
I vote for a “linguistic breakdown” thread, whose, if one think well on, IS in-topic in an interactive fiction forum…
Best regards from Italy,
dott.Piergiorgio.
The language example is a little different, because there can be many more frequent opportunities for historically unrelated languages to exchange words and expressions.
However as I think about it, in biology as well, there are examples of genetic exchange across species (often through viral vectors, but perhaps through other mechanisms as well). I’m not sure how common this is in biology, but you’re right, things happen to complicate the tree model.
Things ALWAYS happen to complicate a tree model in Biology. Trees are sometimes useful frameworks, but they are very simplistic. I am (or was) a microbiologist, and how to even define something like “species” is a combustible topic in that arena. Laypeople should always remember that “species” is only a semi-useful word anyway and is, again, not a thing that really exists outside our minds.
I never considered this in linguistics, but it seems on first thought that regional dialects might be good examples of this?
In Bio, a ring species (which is a term that there’s some squabbling about) is like a spectrum of genetic groups which form a chain out from an ancestral group, changing with each link in the chain. The farther two chains get from each other, the less likely they are to be in the same group as the organisms farthest from them, even though each population along the chain may still be in the same group as its nearest links in the chain. It’s a nice example of the sliding scale nature of most genetic change, and of the difficulty with determining exactly where cutoffs for genetic groups are, or should be. I can easily imagine this with language, where the population farthest east in a chain of towns from the ancestral town can’t communicate at all with the population furthest west, although both might still be able to communicate with the people in the original town, and certainly with their nearest neighbors in the chain. Do I have this right for a language ring?
Exactly! You can draw a path from Rome to Lisbon where one end is definitely Italian, and the other end is definitely Portuguese, but you never cross a line where two adjacent villages or whatever can’t understand each other. This is actually how languages tend to work, in general—the places where we have a hard boundary line between “Spanish” and “Portuguese” come from modern states taking over new territory, imposing their language, and drawing boundaries between what each one controls. So in the areas of Iberia claimed during the Reconquista, we see these hard lines, and in the areas where the languages developed organically, we don’t!
That also means questions like “how many languages are spoken in sub-Saharan Africa” are nigh-impossible to answer, because there was never the equivalent of the Roman Empire down there forcing everyone on the continent to speak a single language. So it’s a huge, huge continuum where dividing one “language” from another in general is an impossible task!
As I understand it, the old Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species hierarchy has been largely obsoleted by modern genomics and many of the categories from it are absolutely useless from a Cladistics standpoint and stick around because of the inertia they’ve gained from long use.
Notably, in terms of clades, “Fish” don’t exist as a meaningful group. Either the animals we commonly call fish are spread across several clades, or all tetrapods(Amphibians, Reptiles, Birds, and Mammals) are fish. Also, Bass are more closely related to humans than to sharks.
The simplified Clade structure goes something like:
All chordates form a clade.
One of the first splits was Boney fish versus Cartilaginous fish, the former including bass, the latter sharks.
The next major split was between boney fish and tetrapods.
Tetrapods then split into Amphibians, Reptiles, and Mammals, and Reptiles into Reptiles and birds(via the avian dinosaurs).
Note, when I say a group split into x and y above, I really mean the common ancestors of x and the common ancestors of y that aren’t common ancestors of both.
Also, chickens are the closest living relative of the T-rex, all of the variation in human phenotypes is due to about 10th of 1 percent of DNA that varies between individuals and humans are about 98% chimp genetically speaking and about a quarter of modern humans have neanderthal ancestry and blue eyes in humans are a trait of Scandinavian descent. Oh, and animals are more closely related to fungi than plants, but humans and bananas still have about 7% of DNA in common.
Also, some forests are a single organism with many stems shooting up from a single root system and some fungi can do similar with their mycelium.
Also, things that aren’t crabs are so fond of evolving into things that are like crabs that biologists have a $10 word for things evolving into a crab-like form.
There is an infectious type of cancer that dogs get that, from a certain point of view, could be viewed as a single celled species of dog that has a pathogenic life cycle.
There’s a brand of australian beer that had to redesign their bottles… because they were too sexy for a particular species of beetle… Like, they weren’t having enough beetle babies because the males were too busy trying to mate with the beer bottles to do so with the female beetles.
Contrary to popular belief, dogs have color vision, though they are dichromats instead of trichromats like most humans. And speaking of humans, the same x-linked genes that cause the most common form of color blindness in humans can give female carriers of these genes tetrachromatic vision. Also, birds are usually tetrachromats and many insects can see into infrared or ultraviolet.
Cats have a reflective layer behind their retina that gives light that misses a photorecepter on the way in gets a second chance to be detected. As a result, taking a cat’s picture with a flash where their pupils are dilated can result in their pupils glowing in the resulting photograph from the flash reflecting off the back of their eyes.
Owls have eye cylinders, not eye balls., and in addition to excellent night vision, their ears are asymmetrically arranged so that can not only pin point the source of a sound left-right, but up-down as well.
The mantis shrimp has over a dozen kinds of photoreceptors in its eyes and can see the polarization of light. It can also deliver a supersonic punch.
Tartigrades aka moss piglets aka water bears are incredibly hardy having even survived extended exposure to vacuum.
Much of a mature tree’s mass is dead and some trees can survive their trunk being almost completely hollowed out.
Most of a tree’s mass comes from the air.
It’s possible to grow crops whose roots are exposed to the air. It’s called aeroponics and only requires occasionally spritzing the roots with an aqueous nutrient solution. It requires fewer raw resources than traditional soil-based farming or hydroponics(where the roots are submerged in the nutrient solution, and combined with vertical farming techniques and artificial lighting tuned to the optimal spectrum for photosynthesis, you could in theory build a skyscraper farm that could provide fresh produce for a sizeable number of urban dwellers without the need of large farmlands or needing to ship produce long distances from said farmlands to the city.
Also, as presented above, the selling blood thing sounds like another example of how the US is lagging behind the rest of the developed world(both in that we allow such incentives despite the good reasons not to, and that our baseline welfare systems are so shoddy that people are desperate enough to do so even when there are good reasons for them to not give blood. Not sure how to feel on the gays can’t donate front though… on the one hand discrimination bad, on the other, gay men might be more likely to engage in acts with a higher risk of transmitting things that make one unsuitable as a donor… whether that risk is actually high enough to justify the restriction is a question for the unbiased medical statistician, and I’m not sure such a thing actually exists… Still, not sure if the restriction is bound out of general anti-gay sentiment or similar to how anyone who was in the UK during the worse of Mad Cow isn’t allowed to give blood(though, as far as I know, there’s no way of screening blood for prions, not sure that holds for the kind of things a gay person might be at higher risk of contracting than a straight person).
Carcinization!
It runs in my family, which has led to all of us getting a bit of a reputation for unusual color preferences.
Well, that’s the issue. It’s true that gay people are at higher risk of HIV, but it’s also true that the stigma that gay people are unclean and unsafe to be around has led to a lot more harm than gay people donating blood has (all donated blood is screened for HIV now).
No one has ever observed eels breeding in the wild. We’ve long suspected where their breeding grounds are, and 2 years ago finally tracked some European eels to the Sargasso Sea. But we still haven’t observed them breeding, or found eggs. The whole eel life cycle is fascinating, such as that they don’t develop sex organs until they are ready to make their final breeding trip, at which time their guts also dissolve and they can no longer eat.
I’ve been massively geeking out over the nitroplast, a “new” organelle which was formally identified this year (although suspected for a long time). One of my major interests is organelle genesis from bacterial endosymbionts (like mitochondria and chloroplasts) and the process by which that occurs. In plain speak: some major organelles (cell parts) were once independent bacteria, which took up residence in larger cells, and over time co-evolved with their host to become part of the larger cell-- an organelle.
There are numerous cases of this process happening-- endosymbionts that aren’t organelles yet but probably will be given enough time, so we can see snapshots of this process through time. And the nitroplast follows everything we’d expect to see from this process of organelle genesis. Been slobbering over this paper (if anyone feels like reading some molecular genetics):
Because this also dovetails with another major interest of mine: minimal genomes.
It took a ridiculous amount of time to get to this point, but does then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s apology issued earlier this year count as an admission that the British government was at fault?
PM statement on the Infected Blood Inquiry: 20 May 2024 - GOV.UK.
Oh, good! I hadn’t heard of the results of the launched inquiry, though I’ve been aware it’s been in process for quite some time. (I’m Canadian, so this wasn’t really in our news cycle as prominently as it may have been abroad.) I believe since I graduated highschool, so sometime around 2018??? Jeez, I finished up my undergraduate degree, in the time since…
After some poking about, it appears that they have also opened up recompensation claims just this past month, which is also great to hear- many of the impacted patients struggled severely with health complications post infection, and hemophilia is already quite expensive to treat: its why I don’t undergo any prophylactic coagulation factor replacement therapy, and instead just grimly tolerate the pain of internal joint hemorrhages.
I wasn’t aware that this had been updated- this year has been quite eventful, to say the least. Thanks for sharing.
On the original topic of real-life mythological things: My favorite water organism: the Hydra!
And yes, it was explicitly named after the mythological Hydra, because it has extreme regenerative capabilities. Slice it in half? You now have 2 Hydras! Slice it in more parts? Even more Hydras!
You can literally put it into a cellular blender (that only jumbles them, not destroying them), and the cells order themselves again and form a Hydra.
Oh, and it’s also believed to be immortal (as in “doesn’t age”, not as in “can’t be killed”).
Well, if it doesn’t age and can regenerate from being blended, how do you kill a hydra?
On a related note, isn’t there a variety of jellyfish that can revert from its mature medusa phase to its larval polyp phase and best we can tell, there’s no limit to how many times it can do this?
Also, I think it’s funny we use “bird brained” as a means of insulting someone’s intelligence. Partly because owls are a symbol of wisdom, but more because corvids, including crows and ravens, have been found to have problem solving skills on par with a human seven year old. Plus, how many humans can make a journey of thousands of miles without need of a map? Granted, evidence has shown migratory birds have magneto reception that lets them navigate by the earth’s magnetic field.
Oh, and did you know, Humans are the most numerous mammalian species? After us, the most numerous mammals include rats, sheep, cows, goats, dogs, pigs, and cats… but mammals are kind of small fry in the grand scheme. There are 8 billion humans… but about 390 billion trees, in the Amazon alone, and ants are so numerous that the total weight of humanity is on par with the total weight of all ants, and bacteria are so numerous that bacterial cells outnumber human cells in the human body, though estimates put a good bowel movement as expelling around a third to half of all the bacteria living in and on you.
Oh, and it was estimated at some point during the pandemic that all the covid19 in the world had a volume between a 12 oz soda can and a 2 liter soda bottle.
I think the “standard practice” when facing a hydra (at least it was in our DND campaign) is to lop off its heads one by one, and cauterizing the stump so it won’t grow a new head… (referring to the mythological Hydra)
That’s the standard practice going back to Heracles/Hercules, so very old indeed! Though depending on the author, it may have had one immortal head that could never be killed, so after cauterizing all the other neck-stumps he had to bury the last one under a big rock.
The earliest attested versions of the myth just give it a bunch of heads but no ability to regrow them; like Medea killing her children, it’s possible the “two heads grow back” thing was invented by Euripides, or he might have just popularized an obscure version that didn’t survive to the present day, but either way basically all later accounts have taken Euripides’ version as canonical.
And then you have mathematical hydras, where you start with a branching tree of heads and every head chopped off causes a certain number of heads to grow from a node one level closer to the trunk than the node the chopped head was attached to and you have to chop heads until you only have heads directly attached to the body left and then chop all of those heads to kill it. Needless to say, the number of heads tends to grow pretty large before they reach the point they can no longer regenerate, though thankfully nowhere near Graham’s number or Tree(3)… in fact, at least for fairly reasonable starting configurations, the numbers remain in the realm of things humans can kind of comprehend. Relevant youtube link:
Though it’s very much a maths video, not a bio video.
Oh, I recently learned that dragonfruit grow on cacti.
And to go back to the issue of categories… watermelons aren’t melons… they’re berries. Bananas are also berries and don’t grow on trees. Oh, and strawberries, blackberries, and raspberries? None of them are berries. Oh, and bamboo is a grass, not wood. Also, most apples are clones and about the only thing apples grown from seed are good for is making hard cider because of how unpredictable the results of planting apple seeds is regarding the fruit. A big reason is that apple trees can’t self pollenate nor can they pollenate closely related individuals, leaving cloning as the only way of reliably replicating a desirable cultivar.
In short, botany is weird.
