You must log in or register to comment.
Actually, this is how I look at people who think stating that insects are animals makes them big brains… Its right up there, with “Spiders arent incests because they have 8 legs.” or “The sun is actually a star!” or “America is actually a continent”. Its always the most basic of shit that people who try to make others feel small use during these annoying conversations.
Try telling anybody that Humans are animals too and there’s a better than 50% chance they will argue with you about that as well.
Or that we are quite literally apes.
We share a common ancestor with mushrooms amd sea horses
That’s suspiciously specific.
And imagine telling someone that Sun is a star…
Correct me if I’m wrong but like isn’t every living thing an animal? Like trees and fungi too? Or is there something I’m missing?I was wrong yall
Animals are one group or “kingdom” of life. Plants (such as trees) and fungi (such as mushrooms) each have their own kingdoms, and so do bacteria and a few other forms of life. They’re organized this way to represent how closely related they are. Every single living thing in the animal kingdom is more closely related to every single other thing in the animal kingdom than to anything in any other kingdom.
As an example, chimpanzees, starfish, and earthworms are more closely related to each other than to a sunflower, so we call chimpanzees, starfish, and earthworms animals but not sunflowers. This is called “taxonomy” and there’s a ton of different levels of how related things are, ranging from very distantly related to so closely related you can barely tell them apart. Kingdom isn’t even the most broad!
You might have also heard that fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants, but that doesn’t mean that fungi are animals, just that the lifeform that branched into fungi and animals did so a lot later than the one that branched into plants. In the end they’re still distinct enough that we call them different kingdoms!
That was a well explained reply, thanks!
Thank you for putting my thoughts into much more eloquent words!
This is where the Chinese Language comes to shine. Animal, 动物, literally “moving object”, so if it has roots (aka: plants, fungi), it cannot move on its own, therefore, not a 动物, Animal.
Like the words are self-explanatory, so beautiful.
(Please excuse me for interjecting my knowledge of the Chinese Language into everything lolz)
No worries I know someone from hk who loves linguistics this will get me some brownie points
No trees are plants and fungi are fungi. Animals are multicellular organisms that are mobile and seek out food at a very basic description. Plants are multicellular non mobile that make their own food and fungi are somewhere between that. Closer to animals but not. Then there’s the single cell life of bacteria and archea.
Animals are multicellular organisms that are mobile and seek out food at a very basic description.
Sea sponges are animals and don’t move.
Animals are a specific lineage of eukaryotic multicellular (mostly) organisms that lack cell walls.
The problem with evolution is that it likes to make exceptions to any descriptor based taxonomy. Any taxonomic category will ultimately be attempting to say “this genetic lineage”. If a sea sponge species eventually develops chlorophyll and cell walls it’ll still be an animal, but just a really fucking confusing one.
Yep, traditional (non-phylogenetic) taxonomy creates problems like protists, the grab bag of eukaryota.
There are more species labeled protists than the sum of all their descendants.
Are they animals, plants, or fungi? Sure, why not!
Some are heterotrophs (eat things), some are autotrophs (energy from sun or chemicals), and others are mixotrophs (some of both). Some are motile, others immotile. Some are multicellular, most unicellular.
The problem is all taxonomy is arbitrary, and traditional taxonomy is pretty inconsistent. Phylogenetic taxonomy is still arbitrary, but using evolutionary relationships instead of “this monkey looks like other monkey” at least gets you more consistency in that system.
I wish we could use photosynthesis, even if it’s just as a supplement like a hybrid vehicle.
I know some folks who spend their time in Brinstar who’d like a word.
Before they attach to a rock they move around in a larval stage, same for anemones and some jellyfish species. There are exceptions to all of our classifications because nature doesn’t have to play by any rules besides physics. Even the concept of species has no set definition because no matter what we come up with there are exceptions. Also “seek out” was a bit too specific, they have to take in food from outside themselves as they can’t make their own energy like plants.
Paralyzed people too
But that’s due to some sort of injury or disorder, not how they function standard.
I’m impressed how common these “sightings” are given how rare I would have assumed this type of person would be. But lo and behold…
I was visiting the aquarium some years ago and there was an expert at one of the exhibits talking about “these animals this and these animals that” when suddenly I heard a woman who had several children with her exclaim “Fish are animals?”
I don’t recall at the moment how the staff member responded, other than I remember being impressed because it was a very non-judgmental and informative reply to her.
Admittedly, my partner in crime and I were struggling with the darker elements of our animal nature – beet red from holding back our laughter and our eyes-only conversation wasn’t helping.
Guess that dealing with public in that context everyday ot would be a common occurece and they already have a easy non judgmental answer for that
When I was in third grade I had an argument with my teacher who told me that insects were not animals. I was really into nature documentaries and books at the time and I knew that insects were in the animal kingdom. I remember going home and being really mad about it. That really soured me on school for the rest of my life. I’m still bitter about it!
I had a teacher in 6th grade who told us that God placed the earth the perfect distance from the Sun; a few inches closer and we’d all burn, and a few inches further and we’d all freeze. I got detention for standing on top of my desk and asking why I wasn’t on fire yet.
That kinda shattered my view of teachers being arbiters of knowledge.
Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, “This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!”
- Douglas Adams
“Oh no, not again”
- bowl of petunias
he’s out of line but he’s right
I wish teachers like that actually learned from these experiences
deleted by creator
Silimar, I had a teacher ask us to write down the first animal that came to mind and I wrote, “wolf spider” because to an 8 year old, there are few more bad ass sounding animals.
She said “really? That’s the First animal you think of?” Eye roll
Me: looks down at doodles of giant spiders battling tanks that shoot lightning, “it’s the only animal I’m thinking of right now…”
autism has entered the chat
Maybe. I’ve wondered if I’m on the spectrum. Either way that teacher was definitely wrong.
I’m mostly joking, but not getting over it so many years later is a symptom of autism, fyi
I was mainly joking, I’m definitely over it.
My third grade teacher told me that negative numbers aren’t real.
Reflecting back on it thirty years later, it’s clear what she meant, but the poorly communicated statement and arguments she made were very upsetting to me, someone who at the time was very proud of having just learned the concept.
In the moment, I had the same reaction as you. Shortly thereafter, my mom - who was not at all a fan of that teacher - took my brother and me out of public school and we started homeschool.
I really wish teachers understood that the correct response to that is “yes, but that’s something you’ll be learning later, for now we’re going to not deal with that.” That’s how my Jr high math teacher dealt with me forgetting algebra and attempting to invent calculus because the rate of change seemed the easiest solution to the problem.
That said, I’ve met education students. You’ve got some bright people who really love kids or teaching, but you’ve got plenty of people who never really understood stem subjects. It was a revelation to learn that yeah a lot of grade school teachers don’t get math.
Sometimes teachers repeat a lesson plan over and over, and a small innocuous statement grows in intensity with each retelling and each argument with students as the teacher digs in their heels, until it’s ballooned into something silly. I’ve also heard that suction and centrifugal force are a myth.
OK, I understand that you’re trying to make a point to better my understanding of the material you are currently teaching, but now I’m hung up on this weird thing you said. It usually comes down to something “the language to describe this thing is insufficient when expressed this way” but the way they say it is like “this concept is a lie, full stop, no more thinking.”
Maybe they initially wanted to use more definitive statements to make students listen in class or something.
I think language plays a factor in how you think.
When I think of the English word “Animal”, I think of a picture of a deer or a cow in a textbook. When I think in Chinese, 动物, I extrapolate the meaning of the word, 动 which means “moving”, and 物 meaning “object”, 动物 = “moving object”, so its easy to know what is and isn’t a 动物 (animal), the word is self-explanatory.
A lot of words in English are based on similar patterns, with roots in Latin or Greek. “Animal” isn’t a compound example like 动物, but it does have a root in the Latin “anima”, which has more of a spiritual basis.
The English word “animal” derives from the Latin word animale, a neuter form of the adjective animalis. The ultimate root of the word is the Latin noun anima, meaning “breath,” “soul,” or “vital principle”.
The etymology traces the concept of an “animal” back to the essential quality of having life, specifically the presence of breath or a soul that distinguishes a living being from an inanimate object.
Arguably also a little bit outdated, considering the discovery of phosphorous in pee and how it proved there was nothing fundamentally different about matter in living beings vs matter in inanimate objects.
Effectively both have more or less the same meaning, considering ‘anima’ is the same root for animate.
Problem with latin roots is that the root words don’t really get used anymore, meanwhile the individual characters that compose Chinese words are still used and taught to this day.
I wonder if this causes a similar confusion about sea cucumbers and venus fly traps.
Tbf, when they coined those terms, they probably haven’t discovered like most of the variety of species yet, but that was the best term they had at the time.
Edit: Also: Venus Fly Trap does not have legs to move. It technically does move, but it’s still pretty much stationary relative to the ground. the 植 in 植物 (plants) basiclly includes the character 植, meaning “to plant”/“to establish”, so anything within the 植物 category cannot relocate itself (excluding via reproduction, spreading seeds, which doesn’t count for this purpose).
Also, doesn’t sea cucumbers move? I mean, snails are animals, theres no confusion about that lol.
OMG in still confused at this.
“I don’t eat animals”
“Do you eat fish?” (My thinking people say they are vegetarian but are actually pescaterian but don’t like saying it for some reason)
“Yea but thats not an animal”
“Hahaha yea it is”
“No it isnt”
“Wait what? … If its not an animal what is it? A tree? Haha”
“It’s a fish!”
“Which is an animal”
“No! An animal is an animal, and a fish is a fish!”
“Fish are animals. Look, we can look it up to check if you want”
“I’m not going to look it up because I know a fish isn’t an animal. I don’t need to look it up!”
“… … I guess I can’t argue with that”
This all took place during pre drinks which is why I thought I was getting fucked with at the start. But I never realised how so many people are walking around blindingly, confidently, unshakeably wrong. She got mad.
It’s wild to me… And then to get mad? Like “how dare you make me learn something”
Proud ignorance is basically a religion in the US now.
Not the US BTW.
I was just speaking to my own experience here.
This is how I felt as a kid when my peers insisted the thumb is not a finger. Like what are you talking about bro? If I asked before this came up, you’d have said you have ten fingers, not eight.
this is how I feel as a Spanish speaker when English tell me toes aren’t fingers
In English, they aren’t. Toes and fingers are both digits, but not both toes or fingers.
I acknowledge that you are right, however I also acknowledge that I don’t like it and I rather be wrong about it
Language created a thing where Spanish speaker have twice the finger than English speakers.
You can always call them foot fingers in English if you like, although you might get some strange looks.
to differentiate them from hand toes
I’m able to understand conceptually that “meat” doesn’t literally mean any animal’s muscle tissue in every language. Sometimes it’s a more vague concept of a large mammal’s meat and excludes fish, poultry, etc. And that’s okay. But I also hate it.
I’ve never once voiced this thought out loud, but every time someone says something like “I don’t want fish, I want to eat meat” I think “Well, you’re wrong, but OK.” There’s some arbitrary dividing line people assume is logical, but I don’t think it would hold up to serious scrutiny.
My mom often cooks “meat free”. There’s always some sausage in there like Chorizo. Tastes great, but it’s certainly not free of meat.
“reduced meat” doesn’t sound as good
What about “meat lite”?
Are organs other than muscle not meat?
They are kind of right … there is no such thing as a fish.
If I went down that rabbithole I think she would have punched me
Of course there’s such a thing as a fish! A fish is any swimming vertebrate (or its descendant), such as a tuna, or a duck, or a human.
Being cold blooded and living “wholly in water” are also requirements.
Nah, phylogenetically speaking, all descendants of fish must also be fish, by definition. Therefore, “being cold blooded” cannot also be a criterion (not that it would work anyway since tuna are warm blooded, BTW, and nobody would argue tuna aren’t fish).
The “living wholly in water” criterion actually works, though: land-fish (e.g. humans) live inside a bag of water that we carry with us.
You believe in cladistics or you don’t, cowards!
Podcast mentioned.
Still an animal though
No such thing as birds.
Yes there are, they’re a kind of dinosaur
Ok, but you are wrong. While biology means animal is a member of animalia, people usually mean an animal that is capable of higher functions, e.g. a dog, sheep etc.
Most fish don’t express themselves in an understandable way. Mussels barely have neurons.
You gotta relax. Any sane human being should have clearly understood where they draw the line.
You also do wrong stuff all the time because it is useful to be wrong.
I don’t think people “usually” mean that at all. And even if they did, why would I care what people mean by it if it’s wrong?
Yeah, that’s not what animal means.
Mussels aren’t fish.
Now that I think about it “shellfish” a misnomer
Cuttlefish are molluscs. Smart mussels then!
I’ve only ever known Christians to think fish aren’t animals. I’m pretty sure that’s something random that the Vatican decided for bending lent rules or some shit.
at least in my life most people do not have a “reasonably underseood line” where they arbitrarily stop considering animals as animals due to their perceived lack of communication. they have a line where they stop caring about them, but that’s usually about how cute they are, not about how they communicate. if more people understood koalas better they’d be way less popular. they barely have a brain, can’t communicate much, sound absolutely awful…
most people just don’t actually think that much about it. trivia is for the people that do think about things. and it certainly should at least have its answers checked on google.
I’ve only ever known Christians to think fish aren’t animals. I’m pretty sure that’s something random that the Vatican decided for bending lent rules or some shit.
iirc from a class I took 17 years ago (I probably don’t), that is essentially correct. I believe it was to help with getting Scandinavian and/or Baltic countries to convert to Christianity. At least that’s the gist of what I remember.
and it certainly should at least have its answers checked on google.
Just not the LLM part since it’s often wrong
I don’t understand your nonsense… you must be a fish.
What the fuck are you on about???
You’re somehow both wrong, and useless here. How did you manage to disprove yourself so thoroughly?
I think you mean fish don’t express themselves in a way you understand. Some are lone hunters who have to rely on their wits to survive, while some have complex social interactions. Some even pass the mirror test.
I don’t think you should make excuses for why some things deserve life or kindness and others don’t. I think it’s better to just be honest with yourself about your personal biases and say you like dogs too much to hurt them, but that you don’t care as much about fish.
And they get mad when you tell them humans are, too.
I was at a trivia night and a question was, “Apart from humans, what’s the two highest populated species in the animal kingdom?”
Now, I’m not the smartest brain inhabiting a future corpse, but I did do basics in school.
I say to my group, “Maybe plankton? But I don’t know if there’s some technicality over that being a plant or something. If I were to guess, probably ants and then flies.” We agreed and went with that.
NOPE!!!
Cats and dogs apparently!!!
This didn’t even make sense to us if considering just the mammals.
I protested.
The quiz master said “The question is about the animal kingdom.”
“Well, if insects aren’t animals, what are they?”
He dug in his heels, we weren’t getting the points. And to make things even more bizarre, most other teams said cats and/or dogs to get 1 or 2 points.
We found a new trivia night.
If he meant mammals the answer is mice and rats.
Humans aren’t even in the top 10. They’re probably not in the top 100, really.
im really intrested. what is their answer for if insects were not animals?
They didn’t have one and just doubled down on them not having vertebrae so therefore weren’t part of the animal kingdom.
There might be the nuance that there are many species of ants and flies, though still idk if any one of them outdoes humans, their pets and chickens.
Wikipedia’s page on biomass says that ants can compete with humans in global biomass (though the estimates vary wildly), but there are 15700 species of ants.
Antarctic krill is the safest bet with shittons of them in just one species.
Also isn’t there like 12 bazillion chickens per person? No fucking way could it be cats/dogs.
26 billion chickens globally, apparently.
That’s a lot less than I expected.
We probably churn through that amount every six months 🫤 But would they even still exist without us? The existential crisis of the chicken.
Fucker crosses the road gets made kebab.
Rats? There are millions and millions of them. They breed rapidly. But, I would’ve assumed it was some type of insect.
Yeah, we had originally thought mice until our brains went exoskeleton.
Edit: That makes it sound like we were so open mind d our brains fell out 🤣
If they’d fallen out you’d probably have gone with cats and dogs like the other brain dead people at that quiz.
Cats and dogs aren’t even species; they’re vague categories. I tried to find the actual answer to this question, but trying to nail down individual species is proving impossible. Every source is like “copepods” or “ants” like that isn’t incredibly broad. ChatGPT says it’s the Antarctic krill with 5x10^14 individuals. Going from there, the WWF says there’s over 7x10^14 , and Wikipedia only says they’re one of the most abundant species. I’m not going to get an answer to this question, and I’m going to be mildly annoyed about it infrequently for the rest of time.
I know it’s the formatting being goofy, but 7x1014 is a very, very large number.
Krill were my first choice, squids might be up there too, but the word ‘species’ instead of a more broad taxonomic term is a special limit.
Some kind of jellyfish might be a good candidate, but I’d probably go with smaller plankton for sheer numbers (as opposed to biomass).
The most annoying part of that is that cats and dogs both eat meat! He thinks there are more cats and dogs than the chickens and cows (etc) we feed them? What demented food web did they teach him in elementary school biology?
I would have guessed ants, but I think they’re just in the top 10? I wonder if humans are even in the top 1000, lol.
“What animal breathes through its butt”
I answered sea cucumber. They wanted sea turtle. But we complained and they accepted our answer too :)
Arson out of the question due to rain?
Or that mushrooms aren’t plants.
mutters to self don’t take the bait
Chill, he’s just being a fun guy!
If you’re serious, I think you’re mistaken who’s making the statement. I’ve had conversations with humanity majors who made comments about mushrooms being plants despite the obvious fact that they don’t photosynthesize. Never mind that they breath oxygen in and release co2.
Mushrooms were considered plants until the 70s, maybe they just had outdated textbooks in school.
Maybe. He’s old enough, but he also gets a lot of his “science” from old scifi novels.
Um, ackshully, mushrooms are vegetables!
Then why is the mushroom (that we see) called the fruiting body?
Mushrooms are obviously fruit.
Because eating them turns frogs gay.
keep your crockpot ideas out of my biology forum
Mushroom = sex organ of alien invaders
same with birds, like some (old) people don’t count them as animals where i live
This is historically the case in Japan (birds and fish/seafood not being considered “meat”/animals when it comes to eating them). It started with Buddhism proscribing a meat-free diet, with that being impractical for the vast majority of the population unless some animals were still okay to eat.
Today I learned about a whole new type of stupid I didn’t even know existed 😩
i’m guessing it’s some old kind of classification idea, where only furry things are counted as animals, so not stupid per se, just an outdated thing people were taught decades ago
It’d be more like a century and a half… I’m guessing it might be from the places that teach creationism, if there’s no evolution there’s no tree to clarify things into I guess. It’s very sad
I would be more inclined to believe that it is due to the archaic Linnaean classification
Even Linnaeus classified everything as “animal vegetable or mineral”
Like mammal = animal?
yeah, even my father in law, a farmer, argued with me honey isn’t animal product because it’s made by bees, i guess it’s similar to the meaning of “alcohol”, for normal people it’s an alcoholic drink, mainly hard liqor, for a chemist it’s everything with a Carbon connected OH group, not only ethanol or methanol, but also menthol, sorbitol or even cholesterol
It’s annoying as shit though, in some countries when you ask if a restaurant has vegetarian options and it turns out they mean the ones with chicken because they don’t consider chickens animals.
I was staying with my aunt and uncle in France when I was around sixteen, after about 12 years of vegetarianism, due mainly to my squeamishness, and we went to my aunt’s mother in law’s (my grandmother/great aunt in law?) for dinner. My aunt was desperate for me to behave perfectly because of some family drama I was too young for and made me promise to eat the dinner.
My uncle’s mother was a rural French woman born in ~1910 who was not familiar with the concept of vegetarianism (or maybe she was being an asshole to my aunt, but she seemed very sweet to me, just extremely formal), so she prepared whole rabbits just for me to avoid all of the examples my aunt listed.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen or eaten rabbit meat, but it looks like a dead cat with tons of tiny bones and tastes oppressively gamey and greasy. I know how it tastes because I’m a fucking bro, but it was awful. I couldn’t eat the whole portion I was given, but we implied that I had my period, which she accepted and changed the conversation topic asap.
It sounds like your great aunt just doesn’t know how to cook rabbit.
Could be, but honestly, even if it was great, I wouldn’t have been into it. It really looked like a cat and I stopped eating meat at age 4, so anything other than chicken breast would probably be too gamey for me.
That’s definitely fair. I’ve never eaten a whole rabbit, but I’ve had it cooked properly and it’s not bad at all.
But I’m half Cajun, and the rule of Cajun food is not to think too hard about what’s in it. So that philosophy bleeds into other foods as well.
A chicken is a vegetable that can count and ask for hugs.
That’s insane wow
Same thing with fish
That’s pretty normal, historically-speaking. The modern classification system isn’t really very old compared to how long we’ve been talking about animals.
Aristotle thought bugs and fish and birds are all animals. I literally don’t know any classification system, or definition, that doesn’t.
Exactly! Everyone in this tread is hating on people that just learned a different “truth”. In 50 years everyone here will be wrong about something as fundamental as the animal kingdom and insist on being right. Science advances and previous truths become false.
There is also the aspect of biological classification not being very useful for everyday live. Do people go “uhm actachully biologically fish don’t exist” every time they see a meal advertised as “fish …”. People can have a concept of “animal” that is different from the taxonomy. And classifying mammals+reptiles+amphibian(+birds) as something different than fish and different than insects is a pretty reasonable classification (based on phenotype and not on phylogeny)
Well, yeah. They are government drones. (/s just in case someone needs it)
You think these people know biology nowadays? Come on now, look around you. If anything, they’re trying to get rid of biology courses in schools
Really they’re trying to get rid of education as a whole in schools.
Indeed, especially science that explains reality in any form
In the US, yes.
Everyday language don’t care about biology. Language is about communicating concepts. Sometimes the evolution history may be of relevance. Sometimes it is a hindrance.
Don’t worry ladies and gentlemen, language doesn’t matter anymore.
I’m an animal too
You too!?
Heretic!
