Comment on Mom they're fighting again
runner_g@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
One of our bioinformatics has a sign at his desk that says “taxonomy is a social construct”.
“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.
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 and cons?
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”
AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net 5 months ago
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.