What they meant when they said "planets" was the 8 (previously 9, previously to that 8, previously 7...) known and named planets in our own solar system. A hypothetical "Journal of Planets" that was actually about solar system astronomy wouldn't necessarily have known what to do with a new paper about 51 Pegasi b published 30 years ago. They're thinking "when we said planets, we actually always meant solar system planets, it just never came up until now".
The reviewer of this paper is saying that by biology they always meant naturally evolved cellular biology, not synthetic biology - there's just never been an example of the latter before.
I think the take is wrong, the receiving journals should be excited to expand their scope rather than frustratedly redefine their scope more narrowly, but definitions and categorization are hard.
Who is "they", and how do you know what they meant?
The relevant fact is that the claim "Exoplanets also aren't planets" is simply wrong -- exoplanets are by definition planets outside the solar system. It's like claiming that a brown furple isn't a furple -- the claim is wrong, regardless of what one thinks a furple is.
> The reviewer of this paper is saying that by biology they always meant naturally evolved cellular biology, not synthetic biology - there's just never been an example of the latter before.
> exoplanets are by definition planets outside the solar system. It's like claiming that a brown furple isn't a furple -- the claim is wrong, regardless of what one thinks a furple is.
If only language was so logical.
While I happen to agree that exoplanets are planets, as with my point in the other comment, I aver the stronger claim ("regardless") does not follow in this context.
Stonehenge, after which the concept of a henge is named, does not meet the current archeological definition of a henge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henge
Chinese checkers is German and plays nothing like checkers. Peanuts are not nuts, strawberries are not berries, hamburgers do not generally contain ham, a killer whale is actually a dolphin, etc.
I don't need an off topic point-missing lecture on how language works that could have and might as well have been written by a clanker. The fact remains that exoplanets are by definition a type of planet, regardless of whether Jerusalem artichokes are a type of artichoke -- proper names as adjectives work differently, and the "mincemeat" example is simply bad faith ... actually, the whole pushback here is bad faith argumentation.
And "gas giants are failed stars and shouldn't count as planets" is completely irrelevant -- at best it's a fallacy of denial of the antecedent.
The argument you describe is as if Neil deGrasse Tyson took a course about “How to be even more extremely and inappropriately pedantic,” and decided he wanted to become the undisputed world expert at that.
Anyone who says “exoplanets aren’t planets” really needs to think a little harder about the actual meaning of what they’re saying.
Actually, that is the IAU stance. And their definition for exoplanet includes small, non-rounded objects orbiting stars which would be asteroids (or comets or whatever) if they happened to be around the Sun.
All that debacle around dwarf planets to prepare for future observations, and yet the distinction ceases to apply the moment you go outside the Oort cloud...
But really, that's just the naming systems being bad, obviously common people don't think asteroids around other stars are "exoplanets" or should be called that way
I'm not talking about edge cases like asteroids or planetoids or dwarf planets. I'm talking about actual planets. Like a gas giant orbiting a star. It's obviously a planet even if it's not orbiting Sol.
As the easiest to discover exoplanets (and all the early ones except pulsar planets) are gas giants, and the comment I was directly replying to had "Like a gas giant orbiting a star. It's obviously a planet", therefore "gas giants are failed stars and shouldn't count as planets" is not at all irrelevant.
Even further up to the point of if these are or are not cell, it illustrates how taxonomical categories are made by humans for humans. Historically, any connection to natural laws in taxonomies is often mere coincidence.
The reviewer of this paper is saying that by biology they always meant naturally evolved cellular biology, not synthetic biology - there's just never been an example of the latter before.
I think the take is wrong, the receiving journals should be excited to expand their scope rather than frustratedly redefine their scope more narrowly, but definitions and categorization are hard.