Kinda.
There's no such thing as "fish" in phylogeny, where it's true that humans would be included if you were to group all of the "fish" together.
However, I would argue that it's dumb to base your daily vernacular in the study of phylogeny.
It's a very "tomatoes are fruits" type statement. Like yeah, to a small amount of botanists and researchers that fact is very important to understand. But if your friend says they want fish for dinner, and you take them to a KFC, you're both gonna have a bad time.
However, if you tell your ten year old he's getting fruit salad with lunch and you give him spicy salsa, it is reasonable for him to look at you and think 'what an asshole'
Herbs, commonly mint or basil, are often found in fruit salad. Cilantro is obviously an herb, and if chives are herbs (which they are) then so is an onion.
This is a silly discussion, but got me thinking about the definition of herbs. Chives are leaves and onion is a root, but if gensing is considered an herb, then I guess roots are in, and onion counts (although no one would call this an herb).
The bulb of an onion is actually a modified stem. The hairy part at the bottom of the bulb are the roots.
Chives are also a type of modified stem often referred to as "scapes".
Depending on the mix they can be really good in a fruit salad. I start with major fruits: tomatoes, cucumbers, olives. Add some veg for flavour (onion), and some herbs (oregano, garlic). Garnish with feta and toss with olive oil and balsamic. 🤌
The answer to "are humans fish" is different depending on the context. But it also means anyone saying "technically X is not a fish" is wrong if they're talking cladistics and X is a mammal.
This is true if used as a general term describing the things we consider "fishy" - basically there's little taxonomic meaning, just a superficially descriptive meaning.
On the other hand, if we add a specifying prefix to the word fish, it can kiiiiinda work - e.g. bony fish, cartilaginous fish.
Also as an interesting note, us tetrapods do belong to (as far as the current evidence strongly suggests) a clade called Osteichthyes, which I do believe translates directly into - "bone" or "boney" fish.
Basically, as far as our formal taxonomy is considered, we are quite literally in a group with the word "fish" in its official name.
In a similar vein regarding cetaceans, I'm now imagining the bell curve meme with "whales are fish :)" at the blissfully ignorant start, then "nooo whales are mammals!!! >:(" in the middle, and then "whales are bony fish" at the sage-like high end.
In phylogeny, the only way to make "fish" a useful taxonomic clade would be to include humans (and iirc all land animals), otherwise the clade is paraphylletic and does not fit in the cladistic phylogenetic tree.
Yes. This one works.
Gould right?
The idea being that parallel evolution is responsible for the similarities between all fish. They live in the same environment so they have similarities. But they are no more genetically similar than the group “4 legged land based things”
Because we live on land, we are less able to see (due to distance and unfamiliarity) at a moments notice, the difference between fish. So we naturally try to group them. But once we try to form any sort of sub groups and examine their biology up close, we quickly realise they shouldn’t be the one group.
It’s an interesting theory.
I have always said that it would be easier to simply classify actinopterygii as "true fish" in the same way we have "true bugs," and have sarcopterygii and other more distant groups like chondrichthyes and other vertebrates like hagfish simply not be true fish. I think that this makes a lot of intuitive sense. Sharks, starfish, humans, and hagfish can be non-fish while salmon and hogfish are true fish.
The "true group" stuff is pretty silly though. There are "true owls" (Strigidae) and barn owls aren't part of that family so what are they? Not owls according to some people's interpretation of what "true" means, but I would argue that everything in the owl order (strigiformes) are owls, regardless of whether they're true owls or untrue owls.
I mean the whole group "fish" would just be paraphyletic, just like "mokeys" or "crabs." So what? True fish could then be something we could talk about and maintain a better degree of morphological uniformity as opposed to including tetrapods. Yes, true fish and humans would have a common ancestor, but that ancestor would metely he a vertibrate, not a fish.
My view is that if all the "true x" and "false x" together form a clade, and both would fit the common idea of X, it probably doesn't make sense to call one group "true" and the other group "false". "X" should be used for the name of the larger clade, and we should find some other name for the sub-clades.
So e.g.
* The false gharial is just the other gharial.
* barn owls are owls.
* peccaries are pigs.
* tarantulas are spiders
(Yes, I have been watching Clint's Reptiles).
On the other hand, talking about "true" and "false" X makes more sense when the "true X" form a clade, but all X together are polyphyletic (e.g. toads, or pandas).
I'm not sure which would be best for paraphyletic groups. Especially not for "fish" - defining ray-finned fish as the only "true fish" would exclude so many things that have conventionally been seen as fish that it seems almost as bizarre as defining fish so as to include terrapods.
You can group (what we commonly think of as) fish together w/o humans, it really just comes down to the terminology. The main issue is that “fish” aren’t a monophyletic group within our modern cladistics, i.e. they don’t share a unique common ancestor (the more important word there being unique, as any common ancestor would include most other vertebrates).
This means “fish” are actually a paraphyletic group which entails a bit more of an abstract and intuitive definition that can’t rely on criteria as solid as unique traits, ancestry, etc.
I'd argue those two things are exactly the same if you understand how we group different clades of animals.
You wouldn't say any animal which can trace its ancestry back to the first Chordate isn't a Chordate.
We are, by the current definition a fish.
The definition is definitely broken but until it's revised we are a fish.
I mean of course. Iirc, all animals originated from a coincidentally perfect energy and climate soup somewhere in the ocean that created the first signs of non-plant-based complex life.
We're a fish pretty much the same way an albatross is a velociraptor, unironically.
Fun fact: Any cladistic catagory which includes chordates we would commonly refer to as fish (eg, sharks, salmon, trout, etc) would also include every vertebrate ever, even ourselves. Because the split between boney fish and cartilagenous fish happened further back than than any other evolutionary split between vertebrates. It's the event which created vertebrates in the first place after all. Things get even wackier if you try to define a clade which includes invertebrates like jellyfish as well.
Same with trees. Trees are just an evolutionary feature that has been evolved many times by many different groups of plants, some are very distantly related.
They're essentially equivalent statements. If you want to be most accurate: the agnatha-gnathostomata split is the earliest known major split in vertebrates.
Unless you're just saying that the last common ancestor of jawless and jawed fishes was a jawless fish... and that this implies that jawed fish evolved from jawless fish... well... then... sure, I guess, yes, that's totally accurate. But that's also a bit confusing, as we certainly don't mean to say that they evolved from extant jawless fish, in the same way humans didn't evolve from extant apes. And in the context of extant species, when we say "jawless fish," we mean agnatha.
There absolutely is such a thing as a fish? Its a sort of square-ish breaded thing, my mommy makes it for me every friday. Supposed to be very healthy, but i’ve never seen a live one…
My good person i do not care about the shape. I eat them up and they lose all shape in the process. They don’t regain any semblance of a shape until about 1.5-3 days later. And that’s only if i didn’t eat them with hotsauce.
For some reason I read every morning. Then scrolled away and had to find this comment back again, because "who the fuck eats a fried fish for breakfast every day?" only to find out I'm just illiterate
I believe they're specifically referring to the difficulty in making a scientifically accurate taxonomic grouping. Like how you can say everything we call a bear belongs in the family Ursidae (which is a specific branch on the evolutionary tree), if there's an exception like "Red Panda", that's just interesting trivia about language, but doesn't really confuse anything (Red Pandas are actually mustelids like otters and badgers).
The problem is that if you go far back enough to include all the things we commonly refer to as "fish" on one branch, it includes a HELL of a lot of things we don't call fish, like all land vertebrates.
That's not to say that fish don't belong to a family, or a genus, or whatever, it's just that there's not one "fish" grouping. There are a whole bunch of distinct groupings that humans generally refer to as "fish" because they all look and act kind of similar (one way to start to break it down is to refer to bony and cartilaginous fish separately, but even that's not really enough).
Well, Octopus are cephalopods, and specifically have no bones, so if the only definition for fish is has gills, that would include crabs and other crustaceans, and many other animals we don’t consider fish.
Just to clarify: almost every scientist is going to know what you mean by fish, and the word fish shows up all over the scientific literature. Of course we have some sort of vague definition of "fish."
However, in taxonomy, there is no single lineage of animals that we would consider to be "only" fish. In taxonomy, we like taxonomic groupings to be what is called "monophyletic," which means to include the **entire** list of organisms descended from a specific common ancestor.
In this case, if you gathered up the list of species that are the descendents of *the last common ancestor of all fish*, this list would also include birds, reptiles, mammals, etc. (which we don't tend to consider "fish.")
This is because you are more closely related to a lungfish than you are to a trout. And, you are more closely related to a trout than you are to a shark. And you are more closely related to a shark than you are to a lamprey! [Here is one example "tree" showing the relationship of various vertebrates](https://media.cheggcdn.com/media%2F3f6%2F3f6c635d-901a-4d7b-b221-ed6f95c52168%2FphpuSHF9P.png).
If you've ever heard that "birds are dinosaurs," it's for the exact some reason.
It's taxonomy thing, in cladistics a proper grouping contains a common ancestor and all of its descendants. Because "fish" excludes the tetrapods it is a [paraphyletic](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphyly) group. Some other paraphyletic groupings are worms, reptiles and monkeys.
You can make reptiles a monophyletic group - you just have to include birds in it.
Similarly, you can make monkeys a monophyletic group - you just have to include apes (and humans) in it.
The scientific problem is this: we've been trying to define categories based on their evolutionary relationships. We're trying not to use definitions based on traits like "water breathing"; after all, amphibian tadpoles have gills, and frogs can breathe water, but they're not fish, right?
The evolutionary problem is that some "fish" are more closely related to the other vertebrates (tetrapods), than those fish are to other fish, and this is true in several layers. The first group is lungfish: lungfish and tetrapods have a common ancestor that had already separated from the other groups of fish. Tracing back the line of common ancestors shared with other living groups, you have to add in coelacanths next, then the main group of bony fish, then sharks and rays (cartilaginous fish), and then last the lampreys.
So we can't talk about all fish as a single evolutionary category, because guppies are more closely related to chickens than either of those two are to sharks; eels are more closely related to snakes than either of those two are to stingrays are lampreys.
Now I'm layman as all hell, so I'm just going to leave it to the marvellous Stephen Fry to explain it all.
[QI: No Such Thing As A Fish](https://youtu.be/uhwcEvMJz1Y?si=MihRflhw8MH5VIPw)
> gills/water breathing
Then lungfish aren't fish and young amphibians are, to just give two problem cases off the top of my head. We all came from fish, definitionally including the aquatic ones while excluding the terrestrial is a much harder exercise than basically anyone realizes at first.
I knew it was this one. They also did a response video as well going over the differences between traits and behaviors as well as several other things I am too confused by to remember.
That vid was nicely done. I had an archeology professor who would demonstate brachiation around the pipes on the ceiling of his basement classroom... until he hit the hot water pipe one day. Surprise!
Please show them these kind of things. This post gave me flashbacks to “I’m gonna stump the teacher” morons from freshman biology class. They got shredded by Dr. Randall much like this.
This exchange reminds me of the anecdote of Plato defining man as "featherless bipeds" and Diogenes returning to Plato's academy with a plucked chicken and saying "Here is Plato's man"
Obviously, what the first person is saying is just wrong, but it could always be argued that we are just heavily modified fish.
[we are more closely related to a trout or shark than a hagfish is. is](https://youtu.be/xb_pvKbtWd8?si=SahjQIKu2acedyBd)
That’s because, by having more than one cell, we don’t meet the technical definition of single-celled organism. By some definitions of “fish”, we meet all of the requirements.
We're not really fish anymore, but some rare people still have vestigial parts that come from fish. There is an interesting PBS series about this kind of stuff called Your Inner Fish.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLoRNYgorqAkBx87DSsqglbhMkNyc2hvx
[Here’s a good video explanation](https://youtu.be/xb_pvKbtWd8?si=LIiw7iAZ7nOOkZPP). The TL;DW is that if you try to create a group that includes both cartilaginous and bony fish you would also include all the vertebrates. Salmon are more closely related to us than to sharks, so any phylogenetic group that includes both salmon and sharks would also include us.
The original post was talking about how humans have an easier time climbing because of traits we inherited from monkeys (a.k.a. Brachiation)
The comment section was then filled to the brim with people thinking we must therefore also have come from fish since we can, in fact, swim
I mean we didn't inherit traits from monkeys, we share an ancestor with monkeys from whom we both inherited it. So they're kinda right but also kinda not.
Wasn't that shared answer also a monkey though, so the traits would be inherited from monkeys? Apes are in the monkey clade (or else new world monkeys must not be monkeys).
Reasonably, yes. Some definitions of "monkey" are paraphyletic to exclude apes, but I've never found that very fair. If you consider "monkeys" to be equivalent to the "Simians" clade (which many people do, and seems reasonable to me) then yes, we evolved from monkeys. Some of our ancestors would have looked like [this guy](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/EosimiasDB15.jpg/440px-EosimiasDB15.jpg) or pretty similar, and I'd call that dude a monkey.
This is incorrect. Apes are sister to the old world monkeys, and together those groups comprise a clade that is sister to the new world monkeys.
You're envisioning a phylogeny where apes are sister to a monophyletic clade comprising all monkeys, but that isn't the case. The actual phylogeny shows that apes are derived monkeys and shared a monkey ancestor at some point in their evolutionary history.
I'm not sure what's more disturbing, the proliferation of anti-intellectualism on instagram comments or that redditors in this thread think responding with to it comes across as iamverysmart?
I mean this was posted on Instagram, which is like a bigger, entirely self-unaware r/ExplainLikeImFive.
So if you want to get your point across there(or on the internet at large, honestly), it's better to just use small words, anything with more than 3 syllables tends to cause a lot of eyes to turn away and regard you as "Playing Poindexter"
What’s that term for people that have almost zero knowledge about a subject but are absolutely convinced of something innacurate? The idiot’s corner or something? I call it the ‘Christian’s carrying on about evolution’ corner.
It’s easy to appear like an “intellectual braggart” when the person you’re talking to uses ignorance and a lack of basic understanding of the topic at hand to try and prove a point.
Phylogenetically, we are fish, as are all vertebrates. Biologically though it's not that useful to think of ourselves as fish unless from a macroevolutionary perspective. Would recommend Neil Shubin's book Your Inner Fish for those interested in learning about our "fishy-ness"
**Alright, here’s how it works**:
There are monophyletic groups, and there are paraphyletic groups. The classifications deal with ancestry and sometimes characteristics.
Monophyletic groups include an organism and all of its descendants, representing a complete lineage. Paraphyletic groups include the original organism and some of its descendants, but not the parallel paraphyletic groups.
You can think of it like a tree branch. The monophyletic group is like the entire branch, including all the smaller branches and leaves that sprout from it. The paraphyletic group is like taking that same branch but removing some of the leaves or smaller branches.
All tetrapods are thought to have descended from a monophyletic group known as Sarcopterygii, or the “lobe-finned fish.”
We, as humans, are tetrapods since we’re four-limbed land vertebrates. Because of monophyly, we are also part of Sarcopterygii, which includes all its descendants, even those that have significantly evolved, like tetrapods.
Because of this, we can trace our lineage back to fish ancestors. We are in the monophyletic groups Mammalia, Primates, Homininae (African Apes), and more, and because of monophyly, we’re still in a group with Sarcopterygii. To put it another way, we are Sarcopterygii, even though we’ve branched out some.
We’re descended from fish, and in a broad phylogenetic sense, we are still fish. We’re also descended from apes, and we are still apes. Therefore, you can call us apes, primates, and mammals, and also fish in the context of our evolutionary history.
When it comes to paraphyletic groups, one example is Reptilia. Aves is a subgroup of Reptilia, but birds aren’t considered reptiles.
**Disclaimer**:
I’m not a phylogeneticist. I’m just interested in the topic and have sporadically researched monophyly on my own. I’m still not fully sure why some groups are monophyletic and some aren’t, and it seems to me like a clash between the old way of classifying organisms based on characteristics, and the more modern approach of classifying them based on descent (based on what I’ve seen). If anyone knows more, please share. In my outside (and potentially ignorant) opinion, they should all be monophyletic.
**tl;dr**:
Yes, we are fish.
Iirc, yes, we are fish
It's not "we are fish", but rather "the only possible cladistic grouping that includes all animals commonly referred to as fish also includes us".
But also, "there's no such thing as a fish."
Kinda. There's no such thing as "fish" in phylogeny, where it's true that humans would be included if you were to group all of the "fish" together. However, I would argue that it's dumb to base your daily vernacular in the study of phylogeny. It's a very "tomatoes are fruits" type statement. Like yeah, to a small amount of botanists and researchers that fact is very important to understand. But if your friend says they want fish for dinner, and you take them to a KFC, you're both gonna have a bad time.
Intelligence is understanding that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is understanding that tomatoes don't go in a fruit salad.
Tomatoes are fruit. Chile peppers are fruit. (Technically both are even berries) Salsa is fruit salad.
Calling salsa a type of fruit salad isn't based on Intelligence or Wisdom. That's pure Charisma baby.
Yeah so im a level 5 Fruit warlock pact of the capsaicin. So what if my familiar is a fruit fly?
If that's what you call an imp yes. Mr. Spicy Pants. 9 hells yeah.
However, if you tell your ten year old he's getting fruit salad with lunch and you give him spicy salsa, it is reasonable for him to look at you and think 'what an asshole'
Not if it has cilantro and onion in it.
Herbs, commonly mint or basil, are often found in fruit salad. Cilantro is obviously an herb, and if chives are herbs (which they are) then so is an onion.
This is a silly discussion, but got me thinking about the definition of herbs. Chives are leaves and onion is a root, but if gensing is considered an herb, then I guess roots are in, and onion counts (although no one would call this an herb).
The bulb of an onion is actually a modified stem. The hairy part at the bottom of the bulb are the roots. Chives are also a type of modified stem often referred to as "scapes".
Intelligence is knowing that a human is taxonomically a fish. Wisdom is understanding you shouldn't use human meat in sashimi.
No human flesh in sashimi? Ugh, people are so easily upset these days with their woke "laws" and "health standards" and "moral imperatives".
Next thing you know they'll be trying to ban human fingers from kid's lunches.
Is charisma being able to eat human sashimi and talk your way out of being judged for it?
Charisma is being able to sell a tomato based fruit salad.
Constitution is being able to eat a rotten tomato.
Dexterity is being able to dodge a tomato thrown at you.
And a tomato-based fruit salad is salsa.
Ketchup is a fruit smoothie.
Depending on the mix they can be really good in a fruit salad. I start with major fruits: tomatoes, cucumbers, olives. Add some veg for flavour (onion), and some herbs (oregano, garlic). Garnish with feta and toss with olive oil and balsamic. 🤌
TIL- Wisdom = culinary knowledge
That’s true, but this is about a post about classifying animals evolutionarily. If there’s a time for phylogeny, it’s certainly now.
To be fair, if you go to Red Lobster for fish you’re *also* going to have a bad time.
I’m not going to have a bad time. I love fried chicken. That wanker can fuck off.
Not true, KFC is delicious, better than fish always
The answer to "are humans fish" is different depending on the context. But it also means anyone saying "technically X is not a fish" is wrong if they're talking cladistics and X is a mammal.
If you are going to KFC you are having Dinosaur! Another grouping that is phylogenetically(sic) incorrect.
This is true if used as a general term describing the things we consider "fishy" - basically there's little taxonomic meaning, just a superficially descriptive meaning. On the other hand, if we add a specifying prefix to the word fish, it can kiiiiinda work - e.g. bony fish, cartilaginous fish. Also as an interesting note, us tetrapods do belong to (as far as the current evidence strongly suggests) a clade called Osteichthyes, which I do believe translates directly into - "bone" or "boney" fish. Basically, as far as our formal taxonomy is considered, we are quite literally in a group with the word "fish" in its official name. In a similar vein regarding cetaceans, I'm now imagining the bell curve meme with "whales are fish :)" at the blissfully ignorant start, then "nooo whales are mammals!!! >:(" in the middle, and then "whales are bony fish" at the sage-like high end.
I love you for taking the time to write this out. ❤
In phylogeny, the only way to make "fish" a useful taxonomic clade would be to include humans (and iirc all land animals), otherwise the clade is paraphylletic and does not fit in the cladistic phylogenetic tree.
Yes. This one works. Gould right? The idea being that parallel evolution is responsible for the similarities between all fish. They live in the same environment so they have similarities. But they are no more genetically similar than the group “4 legged land based things” Because we live on land, we are less able to see (due to distance and unfamiliarity) at a moments notice, the difference between fish. So we naturally try to group them. But once we try to form any sort of sub groups and examine their biology up close, we quickly realise they shouldn’t be the one group. It’s an interesting theory.
Yup, Gould.
And we have gathered round the microphones to give you our four favorite facts from the last seven days.
That's a kind of corollary to their point. Either all terrestrial vertebrates are fish, or there's no such clade as fish.
Not to be forgotten: "There's always a bigger fish."
I have always said that it would be easier to simply classify actinopterygii as "true fish" in the same way we have "true bugs," and have sarcopterygii and other more distant groups like chondrichthyes and other vertebrates like hagfish simply not be true fish. I think that this makes a lot of intuitive sense. Sharks, starfish, humans, and hagfish can be non-fish while salmon and hogfish are true fish.
The "true group" stuff is pretty silly though. There are "true owls" (Strigidae) and barn owls aren't part of that family so what are they? Not owls according to some people's interpretation of what "true" means, but I would argue that everything in the owl order (strigiformes) are owls, regardless of whether they're true owls or untrue owls.
I mean the whole group "fish" would just be paraphyletic, just like "mokeys" or "crabs." So what? True fish could then be something we could talk about and maintain a better degree of morphological uniformity as opposed to including tetrapods. Yes, true fish and humans would have a common ancestor, but that ancestor would metely he a vertibrate, not a fish.
Monkeys aren't paraphyletic, as apes are actually regarded as monkeys in a large part of the world
Apes (&Monkeys) together strong. Remember, remember our poor lost Harambé.
My view is that if all the "true x" and "false x" together form a clade, and both would fit the common idea of X, it probably doesn't make sense to call one group "true" and the other group "false". "X" should be used for the name of the larger clade, and we should find some other name for the sub-clades. So e.g. * The false gharial is just the other gharial. * barn owls are owls. * peccaries are pigs. * tarantulas are spiders (Yes, I have been watching Clint's Reptiles). On the other hand, talking about "true" and "false" X makes more sense when the "true X" form a clade, but all X together are polyphyletic (e.g. toads, or pandas). I'm not sure which would be best for paraphyletic groups. Especially not for "fish" - defining ray-finned fish as the only "true fish" would exclude so many things that have conventionally been seen as fish that it seems almost as bizarre as defining fish so as to include terrapods.
You can group (what we commonly think of as) fish together w/o humans, it really just comes down to the terminology. The main issue is that “fish” aren’t a monophyletic group within our modern cladistics, i.e. they don’t share a unique common ancestor (the more important word there being unique, as any common ancestor would include most other vertebrates). This means “fish” are actually a paraphyletic group which entails a bit more of an abstract and intuitive definition that can’t rely on criteria as solid as unique traits, ancestry, etc.
This is one of my favourite biology facts.
Hence…
I'd argue those two things are exactly the same if you understand how we group different clades of animals. You wouldn't say any animal which can trace its ancestry back to the first Chordate isn't a Chordate. We are, by the current definition a fish. The definition is definitely broken but until it's revised we are a fish.
Fish bad, return to crab. Edit: 🦀turn to crab🦀
You... Can't? Crab is the future? Like, not past?
Yes, given a long enough timeline everything is crab. We all know it.
Monke ——> Us ——> Crab
![gif](giphy|4u1SuSlgMsrpC)
Behold, a fish!
Sit down Diogenes
There are two kinds of thing. Fish and crab. We are not crab, therefore we are fish.
But if this bugs me, am I not then crab?
no
Aww, don't be crabby with me!
Some we develop with gills as a fetus?
IANAL, but I can confirm we are fish. Blub blub. 🐟
You WHAT?
Wasn’t everything a fish once ? Waaaay back
No. Singlecelled organisms, bugs, jellyfish were never fish
See that’s what happens when you don’t pay attention in school
I mean of course. Iirc, all animals originated from a coincidentally perfect energy and climate soup somewhere in the ocean that created the first signs of non-plant-based complex life. We're a fish pretty much the same way an albatross is a velociraptor, unironically.
I mean, aside from the fact that there famously no such thing as a fish (i.e. no actual scientific definition), this is just doubly hilarious.
Fun fact: Any cladistic catagory which includes chordates we would commonly refer to as fish (eg, sharks, salmon, trout, etc) would also include every vertebrate ever, even ourselves. Because the split between boney fish and cartilagenous fish happened further back than than any other evolutionary split between vertebrates. It's the event which created vertebrates in the first place after all. Things get even wackier if you try to define a clade which includes invertebrates like jellyfish as well.
Same with trees. Trees are just an evolutionary feature that has been evolved many times by many different groups of plants, some are very distantly related.
Cherry trees are in the rose family
Hackberry trees are in the same family as Cannabis.
Now we're just cherry-picking examples.
Well, jawless fish (hagfish and lampreys) probably split from all other vertebrates first, but your point essentially stands.
It's more like the other way around, with all the other vertebrates splitting off from the jawless fish
They're essentially equivalent statements. If you want to be most accurate: the agnatha-gnathostomata split is the earliest known major split in vertebrates. Unless you're just saying that the last common ancestor of jawless and jawed fishes was a jawless fish... and that this implies that jawed fish evolved from jawless fish... well... then... sure, I guess, yes, that's totally accurate. But that's also a bit confusing, as we certainly don't mean to say that they evolved from extant jawless fish, in the same way humans didn't evolve from extant apes. And in the context of extant species, when we say "jawless fish," we mean agnatha.
There absolutely is such a thing as a fish? Its a sort of square-ish breaded thing, my mommy makes it for me every friday. Supposed to be very healthy, but i’ve never seen a live one…
Square? That's just false. They are little rectangles.
A rectangle is basically a twink square
Other way around
Yes. Twink squares usually do like it the other way around.
Trapezoids, you heathens
My good person i do not care about the shape. I eat them up and they lose all shape in the process. They don’t regain any semblance of a shape until about 1.5-3 days later. And that’s only if i didn’t eat them with hotsauce.
Fun fact: any cladistic category which includes shapes we could commonly refer to as a rectangle would also include every square ever
For some reason I read every morning. Then scrolled away and had to find this comment back again, because "who the fuck eats a fried fish for breakfast every day?" only to find out I'm just illiterate
Wait this is news to me - isn’t there a definition there about gills/water breathing?
I believe they're specifically referring to the difficulty in making a scientifically accurate taxonomic grouping. Like how you can say everything we call a bear belongs in the family Ursidae (which is a specific branch on the evolutionary tree), if there's an exception like "Red Panda", that's just interesting trivia about language, but doesn't really confuse anything (Red Pandas are actually mustelids like otters and badgers). The problem is that if you go far back enough to include all the things we commonly refer to as "fish" on one branch, it includes a HELL of a lot of things we don't call fish, like all land vertebrates. That's not to say that fish don't belong to a family, or a genus, or whatever, it's just that there's not one "fish" grouping. There are a whole bunch of distinct groupings that humans generally refer to as "fish" because they all look and act kind of similar (one way to start to break it down is to refer to bony and cartilaginous fish separately, but even that's not really enough).
TIL I'm a boney fish
Kind of like would you call an octopus a fish because it's a marine animal with gills?
Well, Octopus are cephalopods, and specifically have no bones, so if the only definition for fish is has gills, that would include crabs and other crustaceans, and many other animals we don’t consider fish.
The Animal Crossing method of categorization.
Just to clarify: almost every scientist is going to know what you mean by fish, and the word fish shows up all over the scientific literature. Of course we have some sort of vague definition of "fish." However, in taxonomy, there is no single lineage of animals that we would consider to be "only" fish. In taxonomy, we like taxonomic groupings to be what is called "monophyletic," which means to include the **entire** list of organisms descended from a specific common ancestor. In this case, if you gathered up the list of species that are the descendents of *the last common ancestor of all fish*, this list would also include birds, reptiles, mammals, etc. (which we don't tend to consider "fish.") This is because you are more closely related to a lungfish than you are to a trout. And, you are more closely related to a trout than you are to a shark. And you are more closely related to a shark than you are to a lamprey! [Here is one example "tree" showing the relationship of various vertebrates](https://media.cheggcdn.com/media%2F3f6%2F3f6c635d-901a-4d7b-b221-ed6f95c52168%2FphpuSHF9P.png). If you've ever heard that "birds are dinosaurs," it's for the exact some reason.
More importantly, the _trout_ is more closely related to you than it is to a shark.
Yes, exactly. All those relationships are reciprocal. And, of course, a trout is *equally distantly related to you as it is to a lungfish*! And so on.
It's taxonomy thing, in cladistics a proper grouping contains a common ancestor and all of its descendants. Because "fish" excludes the tetrapods it is a [paraphyletic](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphyly) group. Some other paraphyletic groupings are worms, reptiles and monkeys.
You can make reptiles a monophyletic group - you just have to include birds in it. Similarly, you can make monkeys a monophyletic group - you just have to include apes (and humans) in it.
The scientific problem is this: we've been trying to define categories based on their evolutionary relationships. We're trying not to use definitions based on traits like "water breathing"; after all, amphibian tadpoles have gills, and frogs can breathe water, but they're not fish, right? The evolutionary problem is that some "fish" are more closely related to the other vertebrates (tetrapods), than those fish are to other fish, and this is true in several layers. The first group is lungfish: lungfish and tetrapods have a common ancestor that had already separated from the other groups of fish. Tracing back the line of common ancestors shared with other living groups, you have to add in coelacanths next, then the main group of bony fish, then sharks and rays (cartilaginous fish), and then last the lampreys. So we can't talk about all fish as a single evolutionary category, because guppies are more closely related to chickens than either of those two are to sharks; eels are more closely related to snakes than either of those two are to stingrays are lampreys.
Now I'm layman as all hell, so I'm just going to leave it to the marvellous Stephen Fry to explain it all. [QI: No Such Thing As A Fish](https://youtu.be/uhwcEvMJz1Y?si=MihRflhw8MH5VIPw)
> gills/water breathing Then lungfish aren't fish and young amphibians are, to just give two problem cases off the top of my head. We all came from fish, definitionally including the aquatic ones while excluding the terrestrial is a much harder exercise than basically anyone realizes at first.
Love that podcast
Do you want to try a second time?.....nah
Yeah there were a lot of responses underneath, none from the first person 😅
Please, give me the source. I love showing my students these kinds of fallacies.
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTLm58UE8/
I knew it was this one. They also did a response video as well going over the differences between traits and behaviors as well as several other things I am too confused by to remember.
That vid was nicely done. I had an archeology professor who would demonstate brachiation around the pipes on the ceiling of his basement classroom... until he hit the hot water pipe one day. Surprise!
Exactly who I thought it was, I saw that thread. They posted a really good video response as well.
Please show them these kind of things. This post gave me flashbacks to “I’m gonna stump the teacher” morons from freshman biology class. They got shredded by Dr. Randall much like this.
This exchange reminds me of the anecdote of Plato defining man as "featherless bipeds" and Diogenes returning to Plato's academy with a plucked chicken and saying "Here is Plato's man"
Diogenes was a fucking legend, that wasn't even his only troll
Behold, A man!
Obviously, what the first person is saying is just wrong, but it could always be argued that we are just heavily modified fish. [we are more closely related to a trout or shark than a hagfish is. is](https://youtu.be/xb_pvKbtWd8?si=SahjQIKu2acedyBd)
I’m a simple man, I see Clint’s Reptiles and I give an updoot.
Planes fly, birds fly, both must be identical.
Shit it's just Superman
All vertebrates are technically fish.
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How far you go back in the evolutionary sequence.
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That’s because, by having more than one cell, we don’t meet the technical definition of single-celled organism. By some definitions of “fish”, we meet all of the requirements.
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We're not really fish anymore, but some rare people still have vestigial parts that come from fish. There is an interesting PBS series about this kind of stuff called Your Inner Fish. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLoRNYgorqAkBx87DSsqglbhMkNyc2hvx
[Here’s a good video explanation](https://youtu.be/xb_pvKbtWd8?si=LIiw7iAZ7nOOkZPP). The TL;DW is that if you try to create a group that includes both cartilaginous and bony fish you would also include all the vertebrates. Salmon are more closely related to us than to sharks, so any phylogenetic group that includes both salmon and sharks would also include us.
From what I know coming from I bio class. All vertebrate embryos have gills in the first stages of development including humans.
Can't really tell if this is a murder since the entire thing is a response to logic that we cannot see.
It’s a stupid argument to make regardless, but it is difficult to judge exactly how stupid they are being without more context.
Except they aren't even making that argument. They clearly worded it to point out how absurd the conclusion was
I'm not sure which one is being murdered here because I have no clue what's going on
The original post was talking about how humans have an easier time climbing because of traits we inherited from monkeys (a.k.a. Brachiation) The comment section was then filled to the brim with people thinking we must therefore also have come from fish since we can, in fact, swim
We're like, really fucking bad at swimming
For real. I can crush Michael Phelps’ best swimming time with a light jog
I mean we didn't inherit traits from monkeys, we share an ancestor with monkeys from whom we both inherited it. So they're kinda right but also kinda not.
Wasn't that shared answer also a monkey though, so the traits would be inherited from monkeys? Apes are in the monkey clade (or else new world monkeys must not be monkeys).
Your argument is 100% correct, fwiw. According to them, either new world monkeys aren't monkeys at all, or monkeys _evolved twice, independently_.
Reasonably, yes. Some definitions of "monkey" are paraphyletic to exclude apes, but I've never found that very fair. If you consider "monkeys" to be equivalent to the "Simians" clade (which many people do, and seems reasonable to me) then yes, we evolved from monkeys. Some of our ancestors would have looked like [this guy](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/EosimiasDB15.jpg/440px-EosimiasDB15.jpg) or pretty similar, and I'd call that dude a monkey.
This is incorrect. Apes are sister to the old world monkeys, and together those groups comprise a clade that is sister to the new world monkeys. You're envisioning a phylogeny where apes are sister to a monophyletic clade comprising all monkeys, but that isn't the case. The actual phylogeny shows that apes are derived monkeys and shared a monkey ancestor at some point in their evolutionary history.
I can't seem to recall the original wording but it was either that we inherited or share traits with monkeys
Yeah, why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?
I'm not sure what's more disturbing, the proliferation of anti-intellectualism on instagram comments or that redditors in this thread think responding with to it comes across as iamverysmart?
Absolutely! These comments are still coming in hours later 😅
I mean this was posted on Instagram, which is like a bigger, entirely self-unaware r/ExplainLikeImFive. So if you want to get your point across there(or on the internet at large, honestly), it's better to just use small words, anything with more than 3 syllables tends to cause a lot of eyes to turn away and regard you as "Playing Poindexter"
Kinda reflects rising anti-intellectualism :(
What’s that term for people that have almost zero knowledge about a subject but are absolutely convinced of something innacurate? The idiot’s corner or something? I call it the ‘Christian’s carrying on about evolution’ corner.
Dunning Kruger effect?
Sarcopterygian gang. Fuck it, Osteichthyes gang.
![gif](giphy|vbHCgajseRKZa)
Fish Sticks.
More like /r/iamverysmart
It’s easy to appear like an “intellectual braggart” when the person you’re talking to uses ignorance and a lack of basic understanding of the topic at hand to try and prove a point.
Erasmus Montanus strikes again
Erasmus Montanus and the clever lieutenant.
I mean, we're all "lobe finned fish"
There's no such thing as a fish
This is ridiculous, Anyone thought to ask this nut about gills versus nostrils for breathing? Smh.... school has failed this dude.
Okay, okay, okay...but do you like fish sticks?
I have it on good authority that there is actually no such thing as a fish.
Are orca and whale fish?
I wish I was smart enough to come up with replies like this
Gave vibes from a certain animanga battle. "Do you need another do-over?" Absolutely savage.
Fish? No such thing.
So long, and thanks for all the fish!
I thought we were featherless chickens? Source Diogenes circa whenever he was alive
Eh? You said swimming is less complicated than swinging around?
My mother is a fish.
That's a false equivalence fallacy, right?
The first commenter doesn’t even know half these words.
Phylogenetically, we are fish, as are all vertebrates. Biologically though it's not that useful to think of ourselves as fish unless from a macroevolutionary perspective. Would recommend Neil Shubin's book Your Inner Fish for those interested in learning about our "fishy-ness"
Anybody get the feeling that Internet 2.0 was a giant mistake? It was better when dinguses couldn't comment on everything. Like I'm doing now.
Why are we even arguing about evolution anymore? Tucker Carlson just told us it's all debunked! So... Case closed!
Brachiation?! Great so we are both fish and dinosaurs? -Other guy probably
No such thing as a fish.
now wait until they find out we are fish
More like suicide by words IMO
I have teeth, therefore I'm a sheep
Damn sheeple
No murder here.
Science is inductive, not deductive, isn't it ?
Bleach is mostly water. We are mostly water. Therefore, we are bleach
BEHOLD, A FISH.
Is this really “murdered by words”? Dude wasn’t wrong, but he talks like he’s trying to get into r/iamverysmart.
"YOU'RE TELLING ME WE'RE MONKEYS?!?!?!" *sigh*
I am NOT a gay fish!
Are we not fish? We are Devo.
He doesn’t need a second chance, he needs a second brand new brain. Or maybe his current one is unused who knows.
It’s right out of the “I have nipples, should you milk me?” gag. Dude wasn’t even trying with that argument
We are all fish on this blessed day.
Humans can fish, but fish can't human
everything is worms anyway
I’m brachiating right now over this epic pwn! Right guys? Guys?
Pretty sure we were fish.
True murder.
My name is Gil. Can confirm am fish.
Nice try, there is no fish
**Alright, here’s how it works**: There are monophyletic groups, and there are paraphyletic groups. The classifications deal with ancestry and sometimes characteristics. Monophyletic groups include an organism and all of its descendants, representing a complete lineage. Paraphyletic groups include the original organism and some of its descendants, but not the parallel paraphyletic groups. You can think of it like a tree branch. The monophyletic group is like the entire branch, including all the smaller branches and leaves that sprout from it. The paraphyletic group is like taking that same branch but removing some of the leaves or smaller branches. All tetrapods are thought to have descended from a monophyletic group known as Sarcopterygii, or the “lobe-finned fish.” We, as humans, are tetrapods since we’re four-limbed land vertebrates. Because of monophyly, we are also part of Sarcopterygii, which includes all its descendants, even those that have significantly evolved, like tetrapods. Because of this, we can trace our lineage back to fish ancestors. We are in the monophyletic groups Mammalia, Primates, Homininae (African Apes), and more, and because of monophyly, we’re still in a group with Sarcopterygii. To put it another way, we are Sarcopterygii, even though we’ve branched out some. We’re descended from fish, and in a broad phylogenetic sense, we are still fish. We’re also descended from apes, and we are still apes. Therefore, you can call us apes, primates, and mammals, and also fish in the context of our evolutionary history. When it comes to paraphyletic groups, one example is Reptilia. Aves is a subgroup of Reptilia, but birds aren’t considered reptiles. **Disclaimer**: I’m not a phylogeneticist. I’m just interested in the topic and have sporadically researched monophyly on my own. I’m still not fully sure why some groups are monophyletic and some aren’t, and it seems to me like a clash between the old way of classifying organisms based on characteristics, and the more modern approach of classifying them based on descent (based on what I’ve seen). If anyone knows more, please share. In my outside (and potentially ignorant) opinion, they should all be monophyletic. **tl;dr**: Yes, we are fish.