Eukaryote Writes Blog is a biology-minded blog covering evolution, bioweapons history, disease, and odd historical questions.
Commenters praise 'There's no such thing as a tree' as fantastic and cite the 'Barriers to Bioweapons' book review as a good example of its writing.
I don't think it's a real problem. It's a way that one group of humans agreed to label things, and that way is the currently dominant way. Even the agreed rules (whoever publishes first gets dibs on the name) are just an incentive for academics to publish. If there were another labelling system, it would have the same problems and would only serve to split the humans into multiple ways of doing the same thing.
But, ultimately, the naming is just for us humans. We care, the trees don't!
To quote Richard Feynman:
> The next Monday, when the fathers were all back at work, we kids were playing in a field. One kid says to me, “See that bird? What kind of bird is that?” I said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is.” He says, “It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn’t teach you anything!” But it was the opposite. He had already taught me: “See that bird?” he says. “It’s a Spencer’s warbler.” (I knew he didn’t know the real name.) “Well, in Italian, it’s a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese, it’s a Bom da Peida. In Chinese, it’s a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it’s a Katano Tekeda. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing—that’s what counts.” (I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something…
It's worth it. Goes straight at the philosophical underpinnings of software, maybe even knowledge, with a hacksaw. It's not much longer than its own Wikipedia page: https://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/language/johnWilkins.html
Foucault wrote: "This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought [...] breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other."
This is good too: https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/
But it all sums to "the map is not the territory".
Broadly agree with the thrust of what you're saying, disagree with some of the fine detail.
Engine-rich exhaust can still provide thrust.
People like their idealised models of the world, but they're fundamentally still just idealised and models.
It's somewhat illuminating to learn that all abstractions are leaky.
For example, you can't reliably represent "sex" using a "bit" type in a database. It's not just "M" or "F". You can have "unknown" (of course), "known but not willing to say" (whatever), intersex of all sorts, transexuals, genetically XY but physiologically female, etc...
The world is complicated and messy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_gonadal_dysgenesis
Similarly, there's no clear demarcation between species in many cases.
There's no such thing as a "tree" either: https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-tree/
I could go on and on.
Trees are also too many things to be one thing.
https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-tree/ crops up on HN periodically.
“Trees” are not a coherent phylogenetic category. On the evolutionary tree of plants, trees are regularly interspersed with things that are absolutely, 100% not trees. This means that, for instance, either: - The common ancestor of a maple and a mulberry tree was not a tree. - The common ancestor of a stinging nettle and a strawberry plant was a tree. - And this is true for most trees or non-trees that you can think of.
It's more that, as I understand it, "fish" isn't a coherent phylogenetic category so much as a convention-based descriptive grouping of certain characteristics. I don't think of whales as fish, no. But an exclusion based on eg tail fin orientation or lack of gills is based on convention rather than strict taxonomic practices. So if someone wants to weigh the characteristics differently and include whales in the term fish I would at least hear them out.
Different category but well explained here https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-tree/
The "there's no such thing as tree" concept is expanded here:
<https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/>
This was discussed on HN a few years ago:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29621646>
I think it's fair to argue that the palm forests noted in TFA filled a similar niche to that of current tree-like forests. All taxonomical groupings are ultimately grounded in practical organisational utility for humans.