[lproven]

True but the wrong point here.

Lots of different and only loosely related types of plant have evolved to be tall with thick strong stems to get above other plants and capture the light.

That is a way of growing, and we call it a tree, but the point here is not "trees do not exist" but "lots of totally different unrelated types of plant came up with being tree-shaped independently."

[jl6]

Also missing from “no such thing as” discussions is the idea that it’s perfectly fine and useful to use the word tree casually when the general shape and appearance are what matters, and also perfectly fine to want to avoid that term when something more precise is what matters.

[willguest]

And we name them 'tree' because they have a certain shape and configuration. Then we created taxonomies and "discover" that tree isn't a single thing

We seem to cling too tightly to definition, as the expense of paying attention to the things as they are.

My point is resonant with the piece because it illustrates that conventional naming doesn't match taxonometric systematisation. I am happy to be wrong though, if it makes you feel better.

[lproven]

Um.

I mean, I like your attitude to the debate, but I don't really get it.

"A is not B." "No, A is a B, but B is not the same as A."

"Ah, but, there is no such thing as an alphabet, really, it's all just vibrations in the air or marks on paper."

You can dismiss almost any argument in science by deconstructing it to symbols and then saying that symbols are not real, but I don't see this as a valid contribution to the debate, myself. Your mileage clearly varies.

There absolutely is such a thing as "a tree". Trees are a real thing. They are an identifiable type of land plant.

But "tree" is a growth habit. It's not a family of plants. This is an important distinction and it's not a hard one to grasp. I still find it odd that it surprises people.

Similarly, I have zero time for this "no such thing as a fish" bollocks. Yes there is such a thing as a fish. It's an obligately aquatic, legless, gilled vertebrate.

It is quite easy to define what "fish" means in unambiguous terms that exclude tadpoles, axolotls, terrestrial vertebrates such as humans and so on.

The argument seems to rest on their being (at least) two families of fish. Big deal. Fish are real, trees are real. They aren't families, but they are identifiable groups.

[willguest]

I was not going for the semiotic-reductionist interpretation, but it's a fair assumption to think that that's what I meant by 'name ≠ thing named'.

My point was more to do with the construction of meaning and the general trend of clinging to knowledge at the expense of learning, hence the Taoist addage, since this is a phenomenon that is driven primarily by Western scientific thought.

To put it more verbosely - taxonomies, especially those driven by classification based on gene presence and regulation, will end up with lots of loose ends and contradictions, because this is not the fundamental mechanism by which new forms emerge. The metric is distorted and, by extension, so is our understanding of the morphogenetic space that it is attempting to describe. Calling it phylogeny is somewhat circular because it insists on genes being the regulating mechanism, whereas the article specifically draws attention to the limitation of this category-system, instead looking at the direct experience of a tree, which would more aptly be described as its morphology: "a big long-lived self-supporting plant with leaves and wood."

I do not see nature (of which we are a part) as entirely gene-regulated, though obviously they are involved. But what else is there? Following Michael Levin, I say 'agential material', meaning that life solves problems with full acknowledgement of an unpredictable context. In this interpretation, it is no surprise that a dandelion can become a tree, or vice versa; what matters is the needs that the plant expresses and the responses given by the environment it is exploring. This is cell-level cognition; heretical and beautiful.

[lproven]

Maybe there are other levels so that it is not as simple as "this is not a cladogram".

A cladogram tries to show common descent and relatedness.

There are other meaningful analyses which are also true. Physical resemblance is valid: the concepts of legs, and wings, and lungs, and eyes, get re-invented over and over. "Animals that fly with wings" is a valid group but doesn't fit on the cladogram.

Cladograms are essentially 2D. Just going to 3D might not be enough, but while I can just about barely hold a simple 4D shape such as a tesseract in my head, computers make this easy. I never needed Excel's pivot tables, but thousands use them as a daily tool.

Maybe a 4D or even n-dimensional chart can usefully allow all these different categorisations to coexist, and for feeble human brains like mine to see different cross-sections of them?

And maybe if we can construct those, then they will expose interesting new conceptual relationships we didn't know about before?

Genetics has changed massively since my 1989 degree, with methylation and epigenetics and horizontal gene transfer, and shotgun DNA analysis. Who knows what non-cladistic relationships may be in there to be traced?

I mean, the genetics of lignin are not well known AFAIK, but the invention of lignin and hence woody plants was, what, very roughly 400MY ago.

The evolution of basidiomycota able to digest and eat wood was very roughly 300MY ago.

That 100MY interval formed coal. Coal and oil aren't dinosaurs. Coal is trees, oil is plankton, extremely roughly.

Fossil fuels caused the industrial revolution ~250Y ago and the emissions will very probably end technological civilisation by 2050 at the accelerating rate we are going.

So, 2 superficially minor bits of the evolutionary development of biochemistry 300-400 million years ago began and ended the reign of some slightly smart bald apes over the last 300 years. That's interesting. It would be interested to nail down how and why.

We came down out of the trees but the trees will have the last laugh: we will chop them all down or burn them, but their ancient Carboinferous era ancestors will burn us in revenge.