Comment on Mom they're fighting again

• gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  fun fact: i have the conspiracy theory that the USB symbol:

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  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.

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• nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Is there such a thing as real taxonomy or are there just different ways to classify life with their own pros and cons?

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  • icelimit@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    It’s about as artificial as the concept of ‘nations’ I feel

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  • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    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.

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    • flora_explora@beehaw.org ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      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.

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      • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        yeah … plants have hybridization, yeah, i’m still reading into this.

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    • nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Are there not 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 that’s not also and arbitrary distinction I guess.

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      • runner_g@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        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.

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