Reminder to new users here:
Cladistically, there is no such thing as a fish or a tree. Also, sharks have existed longer than Polaris, the North Star has.
Reminder to new users here:
Percentages are basically multiplication, and thus follow the commutative property and can be shuffled around accordingly. 25% of 128 is the same as 128% of 25, and may be easier to solve in your head.
Yup. Add to it that a lot of plants can grow in tree-like ways or bush-like ways depending upon context. Plants, they're tricky bastards; don't trust anyone who doesn't have a fixed body plan.
The English elm is an interesting example. Dutch elm disease has killed almost all the elm *trees*, but elm *hedges* can keep sending up suckers from the roots.
Yeah please don’t take this seriously I’m making a joke about things with an indefinite number of growing tips, and not talking about any chordates, in any of the wonderful, varied, and malleable forms we come in
And even descriptively it gets really fuzzy at the edges. What's a tree vs a bush? Or where do you draw the line between particularly hearty grasses and trees?
If I remember right, aren't bananas berries?
(And strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, cloudberries, etc, not berries. Pumpkins are berries though.)
Yeah, think I read that most plants have genes to go in a big strong tree direction or a smaller grassy herb direction & as species diverge they tend to go in one or the other direction
I have a book "Trees" which is basically a taxonomic encyclopedia of them, and was astounded to learn that Teak, is REALLY closely related to Basil.
(I've always described palms as "a grass that made it")
That’s an amazing factoid!
Was also going to speculate that all this would mean that midsized bushes are the intermediary between grasses & trees, maybe always slowly evolving in one direction or the other?
Not really. If you go back far enough, maples and mulberry trees have a common ancestor but that ancestor wasn't a woody plant. So they both evolved wood separately. eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/t...
That is true of all words. However, it's etymology gives you a good idea of what the goals are. The problem is that it got bogged down in inane philosophy about what "real" is in biology that paid zero attention to relevant theory and lost sight of the important evolutionary issues.
I Googled it, and you're right, Polaris is only 45 million years old. That's a long time from a human point of view, but absurdly young for a star. Very strange.
Sharks have existed for 450 million years, which is also strange, considering that chordates haven't been around much longer than that.
Incidentally, Polaris is only been aligned with the North Celestial Pole for about a thousand years. Which made me jump to the conclusion that you were committing some kind of semantic fallacy with a fancy Latin name. I'm glad I thought to use Google before going down that rabbit hole.
Polaris is technically three stars in a trinary solar system, and the main one, Polaris Aa is estimated to be between 45 and 67million years old. Sharks have lived on Earth for at least 455million years, first appearing in the Cenozoic Period.
I’d say that cladistically everything with a hinged jaw is a fish. Whales are fish (again), and so are we. Our ancestors were fish, so we are fish. That’s why I wrote the first book to teach evolution to preschoolers: www.grandmotherfish.com
