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France is bacon
Knowledge is power.
My attempt at an explanation
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Ducks are dinosaurs: Ducks, as with all birds, evolved from theropods and are considered living dinosaurs.
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Horses walk on middle fingers: Ancestors of modern horses have 5 toes the size of a small dog. Eventually they evolved away the other toes and only the middle toe remain.
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Bees are crustaceans: Crustacea is not a single branch in the tree of life but a collection of multiple branches (i.e. paraphyletic). If we pick a point and said everything after that is considered the same group, then by necessity we have to put bees (and all hexapoda) and what we traditionally call crustaceans into a single group. That group would be pancrustacea. Is that exactly the same as saying bees are crustaceans? Are jackdaws crows? I’ll let you decide.
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Pterodactyls are fish: Fish is also not a single branch. By the same token, if we want to put what we traditionally counted as fish (such as sharks, carps, and lungfishes) together as a single group, we have to include all vertebrates (which includes pterodactyls, us, whales, etc.)
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Redwood are algae: I’m not too sure about this one. The wikipedia page for algae say that it excludes the land plants (embryophytes) which redwoods are part of.
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Humans are part virus: Viruses have the ability inject and splice their genetic material into our genome and have our cells do the cloning for them. Usually it is not passed on to the next generation. Apparently an ancient strain of virus from millions of years ago incorporated themselves into our genome and our germ cells (sperm and egg) and can be passed on to the next generation.
an ancient strain of virus from millions of years ago incorporated themselves into our genome
not just one. 5-8% of the human genome comes from viruses
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_retrovirus just in case anyone wants a search term
And provides fertile ground for evolution by providing space for gene duplication and divergence. Likely also for miRNA control systems.
That explains a lot.
Everything is virus: one of the theories of how cells went from RNA to DNA is viruses.
Forterre (2006) proposed that early cellular lineages diversified while still harboring RNA genomes, with viruses and cells coexisting from the beginning. In his model, the first fixation of DNA occurred in viruses, which subsequently transferred the enzymes necessary for DNA synthesis and maintenance into independent cellular lineages. Thus, RNA genomes in ancestral cells were converted into DNA genomes via viral intermediates (Forterre, 2002, 2006). The structural and functional differences among cellular replication systems would then reflect the independent viral origins of DNA replication machinery.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0303264725002813
The latest puzzle: what the viroids doin’ in our guts? Nobody knows, we are only just realised they are widespread and not exclusive to flowers or whatever Anton told me. Tiny simple RNA smudges that are too simple to even qualify as a virus.
I feel like they’re as close to abiogenesis as we’ll ever get, with these living fossils.
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Human are an advanced bio mech suit for bacteria. Human cells - 37 trillion (majority red blood cells). Bacteria in the human body - 38 trillion.
There is a non-zero chance that the human consciousness is the product of bacteria forming a mesh neural network that hijacks the human brain’s voluntary functions. It could explain why some people suffer emotional distress while under antibiotics (I get severe depression).
It could explain why some people suffer emotional distress while under antibiotics (I get severe depression).
More than 90% of the serotonin in your body is produced in your gut in a process that is regulated by bacteria. This serotonin not only aids in digestion, but interacts with nerves that communicate with the central nervous system to alter mood and mental health
If you experience severe depression under antibiotics, you might try to take some probiotic supplements that have strains including Lactobacillus and Streptococcus along with a helping of some soluble fiber.
It could explain why some people suffer emotional distress while under antibiotics
Or just that nuking gut bacteria messes with the gut brain axis…
I do like that the brain gives itself immune privilege and the blood brain barrier, it’s like “miss me with that shit” haha
Eeeeeehhhhlaborate
Ducks are avians, thus descended from dinosaurs.
Anatomically, the hoof of a horse is equivalent to a human middle fingernail.
There are “sea bees” tiny crustaceans that are pollinators of underwater plants. Both crustaceans and “bugs” are arthropods.
Not sure about the pterodactyl fish reference.
Redwoods and all plants really descend from photosynthetic algae.
About 8% of the human genome is composed of ancient viral DNA from viruses that integrated into DNA…
I believe the pterodactyl, like most (all?) dinos descended from aquatic life forms. Dunno, though.
Yeah, all life from the ocean but its a bit more of a stretch to say pterodactyl are fishes.
No argument there 🤣
It’s cladistics.
“Theoretically, a last common ancestor and all its descendants constitute a (minimal) clade. Importantly, all descendants stay in their overarching ancestral clade. For example, if the terms worms or fishes were used within a strict cladistic framework, these terms would include humans.”
so basically it’s a language problem, not a biology problem? people are incorrectly assuming that any group of species with a word to describe it must be monophyletic, and therefore include all unrelated species which would make it monophyletic?
I’m honestly surprised this isn’t better understood in this community, at least as an approach to the tree of life system of classification, with or without its merits. I didn’t go to college and went to public school that suppressed science education, but this was how I came to understand evolution and that all types of life had a universal common ancestor.
I’m not speaking to the accuracy of the meme, and the science community at large has its criticisms of cladistics, but I’m not sure I would define this as a problem of biology or language, or a problem at all. It is the most common method of evolutionary classification at this time.
Keep in mind I’m a blue collar worker on my lunch break and not a scientist nor college educated. I just like to learn in my free time about a bunch of stuff.
Pretty much. It helps if you think the word “dinosaur” has two partially overlapping meanings:
- Cladistic: every single descendant of the last common ancestor between the triceratops and a duck, including both.
- Popular: a bunch of extinct animals like the T-Rex, velociraptor, triceratops, etc. Plus animals visually resembling them, regardless of cladistic classification. Notably, it does not includes Aves aka modern birds.
So for example. Turkeys would fit #1 but not #2. Depending on the person, dimetrodons and pterosaurs would fit #2, but not #1 [see note]. A T-rex would fit both.
In other words if your kid asks you “I want to see the dinos on a screen!”, do not bring them to see a rotisserie chicken being roasted. I repeat, do not. They’re using “dino” for meaning #2.
NOTE: pterosaurs aren’t from the clade Dinosauria, but from a distantly related clade called Pterosauria. Dimetrodons are synapsids so they’re closer to us mammals than to Dinosauria.
Redwoods are algae???
Yeahhh, I looked it up and I don’t know what OP meant. there are redwood lichen who live symbiotically with the trees but are separate life forms.
Then there’s the “redwoods of the sea” huge kelp like algae structures that resemble tree growth patterns but… like aren’t the actual redwood trees.
soooo yeah. I dunno.
deleted by creator
You’re forgetting our first land ancestor, the fish that decided to come up on land. By certain definitions, all land animals that descended from that ancestor are fish.
It’s an obscure biology joke. Doesn’t play into day-to-day conversations. It is the same logic that causes biologists to say that birds are dinosaurs though—because they descended from dinosaurs. But by the same logic, birds also evolved from lizards, and before that amphibians, and from before that fish, etc. This definition is more like putting all of life into nested boxes. Or perhaps it’s more like the saying “all tigers are felines, but not all felines are tigers”.
This definition is helpful for evolutionary biologists to talk about evolution at grand scale and how we might share certain genes with fish. But it’s admittedly not very helpful for day-to-day conversations that say humans are pretty distant from fish and don’t resemble them much at all now. (Though I admittedly love little biology facts like how our middle ear bones evolved from gills.)
Anyway. I get silly excited about this stuff. Random nerdy rant done.
Every tetrapod evolved from fish, including humans and pterosaurs.
ok well yeah I don’t disagree all terapods evolved from ancestors we call fish but then… they and we were also single cell life forms? OP is trying to say they ‘are fish’ and that’s just a random pull from history instead of direct lineage.
sorta like
pTeRodActYLs ArE StaRStUfF
I mean, all eukaryotes are Asgardarchaeota ¯\(ツ)/¯
Single-celled is physiological description, though. But I like OPs point. We have a lot of “some group except” categories. Algae (photosynthesizers except land plants), fish (vertebrates except tetrapods), some definitions of protists (eukaryotes except animals, land plants, and fungi). Practically, we use dinosaurs for the long (>65mya) extinct lineages of the clade that also includes birds. But we don’t have another name for the clade, so the point is lost.
Okay, I don’t think people would call purple bacteria algae, it is a bit more complex, algae are basically cyanobacteria and eukaryotes with plastids except land plants.
“Pterodactyls are fish” seems disingenuous to insert when two of the previous ones are about pedantic taxonomy facts (which are true). “Fish” are paraphyletic and thus not an actual taxon, but as a practical group, it’s all non-tetrapod vertebrates – and order Pterosauria are decidedly tetrapods.
It’s trying to be pedantic in a cheeky way but just ends up being wrong.
Edit: Just so I balance this out, though, anyone wanting to be humorously pedantic about aquatic taxonomy should check out WoRMS (the World Register of Marine Species). They’ve always been, to me, the most up-to-date source on the taxonomy of marine, freshwater, and brackish biota short of reading the actual scientific literature.
I find pedants are often wrong or completely missing the point.
Sometimes it triggers a fun discussion. and sometimes it’s just tedious.
(
ghoticould never be pronounced like “fish” because “gh” only sounds like an F near the end of a word afterauorou, but ghoti is at least an interesting way to bring up the topic of weird inconsistencies of the english language, even if it’s wrong)My favorite way to slap an English speaker in the face with the silly irregularities of English pronunciation is to show them the 1920 poem The Chaos.
Humans are full virus
Careful you don’t get banned for being an eco fascist. 🫣
Eco-rebel, TBF. ☝🏼
You know, I’m starting to think that our whole universe is just a cancerous 3+1D polyp on the ass of an entire, proper universe with more dimensions, mass, and energy, and less corruption.
Everything but that last bit, yep. Simulation or unfathomable surreality, same same. Corruption, though, isn’t a thing the universe GAF about. It’s just physics. 🤪
I can at least hope, right? Hope that whoever is on the other side of the brane isn’t as dogshit at life as humans are?
What’s a brane?
If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a dinosaur.
“Humans are viruses” shuld be at the top.
A virus got your “o”.
h n !
