Why would this be surprising when the definition of tree is so:
> First, what is a tree? It’s a big long-lived self-supporting plant with leaves and wood.
I have some vines that are clearly capable of wood formation and sometimes seem to do so at places for reasons I can't understand.
“tree” is clearly a horizontal classification; it is as surprising as as that not all animals that can fly have common ancestors that can.
> You know birds? Imagine if actually there were amphibian birds and mammal birds and insect birds flying all around, and they all looked pretty much the same – feathers, beaks, little claw feet, the lot. You had to be a real bird expert to be able to tell an insect bird from a mammal bird. Also, most people don’t know that there isn’t just one kind of “bird”. That’s what’s going on with trees.
When folks say "forest", like "I'm going to go hiking in the forest", they usually don't specify what species or genus of tree. A street could be lined with "trees", or a "tree" could fall on someone's car.
We categorize trees together because they tend to occupy the same enough overall role and profile.
Now if there was a "baobob tree" forest, or a "palm tree" fell on a car, those are distinct to merit specification.
> When folks say "forest", like "I'm going to go hiking in the forest", they usually don't specify what species or genus of tree. A street could be lined with "trees", or a "tree" could fall on someone's car. We categorize trees together because they tend to occupy the same enough overall role and profile.
That sounds like something that could very much be different in different languages.
> When folks say "forest", like "I'm going to go hiking in the forest", they usually don't specify what species or genus of tree.
well, no, because there aren’t usually multiple forests that could be meant that would be disambiguated to a single forest (warranting the definite article) by genus of trees, there is either one candidate (requiring no qualification) or multiple but needing some other qualification (like specific name of the forest or direction from the current location.)
I disagree. Within walking distance of my suburban (Eastern US) home, there’s a patch of woods that’s mostly oaks and maples, a larger patch that’s oak-hickory, and a large park that’s primarily beech-maple. Out West, you could walk among redwoods, or bishop pine, or coast live oak or tanoak.
Do you call certain tall woody growths something else, then?
The birds bit is an analogy. It's not about looking identical, it's about looks (tall woody thing) and shared name (tree) not corresponding to phylogenetics.
In particular, many trees grow from a central strem that is nearly perfectly vertical, and many have a more organic growth pattern. I see no reason to assume these have common ancestors that were trees any more than crabs and jellyfish.
I agree bamboo doesn't really meet the definition of tree, but many/most people will argue that bamboo (the material) it isn't wood. I disagree with that... it is woody enough to meet my definition, and the non-contiguousness of trees supports that.
I would also argue that bamboo isn't wood, it's a cane.
Woody hollow stems which don't grow rings, are canes. If less woody and more herbaceous, it's a reed.
The "tiebreaker" if you will, is palm wood. No rings, but it's dense, not hollow, it has a grain and it's lignin-rich. You can make planks with it. It's a weird wood, but it's wood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut_timber
I agree completely, what I'm trying to do is describe how these words are used by people with a stake in the matter. Woodworkers, for example.
Canes take the adjective "woody" but not the noun "wood". Bamboo can make some interesting laminate materials, but these are not normally referred to as wood either, although they are lumber.
Yeah, either a woodworker or a botanist might have different definitions than "regular people". But "wood" is an everyday word. There are various things in my house -- trays or spoons or boxes or the like -- made of bamboo, but that I would refer to as "wood" simply because I never even looked closely enough to notice that technically it is bamboo (or maybe I have, but the distinction seems extremely minor in practice).
I've done a fair amount of woodworking, but I don't think I've ever worked with bamboo. But if I were to, I'd be a lot more attuned to the distinction.
Ah, that wasn't entirely clear to me, this makes more sense.
Palm trees do "grow from a central stem that is nearly perfectly vertical", and are woody, and conventionally are considered trees. Bamboo matches both of those criteria, in fact, but it has a "just look at it" grassness to it. Growing in clusters from rhizomes is pretty un-tree-like, but no one of these things is diagnostic.
What is and isn't a tree is more cultural than biological, which is, I believe, the original author's point.
it is so strange how things evolve in parallel in various fields. We used to love object oriented modeling with inheritance hierarchies, until the point we realized how it was so hard to have any hierarchy perfectly match a given domain.
Then we moved to composability + interface, realizing it's easier to compose attributes (often related to a given set of functions) to make any graph of structures instead of just a tree.
Just two days ago looking at how virus recombined themselves in the most random ways, i wondered if the species classification of the previous centuries based on trees were not destined to follow the same path.
> First, what is a tree? It’s a big long-lived self-supporting plant with leaves and wood.
That is such a broad thing that it's hardly remarkable. I find carcinization, or independent evolution of eyeballs from completely different tissues to be more remarkable.
This is no more remarkable than that animals independently evolved to be large, and in doing so evolved different hard support structures to support this, which for instance worms lack.
There are something very interesting about structures and costs here. Perhaps two types of costs, cost-to-execute and (meta-)cost-to-transform. In general one can argue that hierarchy optimises for cost-to-execute while composition optimises for cost-to-transform.
Maybe in some way most things can be viewed from the lense of a compiler/interpreter. "Structures" are really just existing meta-cache for how to efficiently traverse the language to enforce semantics that result in computations.
e.g. tail call optimizations are basically structures in the compilers that help to traverse a subset of the language (i.e. tail recursion) more efficiently time-and-space-wise
I think jocaml had chemical reaction inspired programming model. Throw a large bunch of functions / object in a swarm to compute large scale / low coupling.
> We used to love object oriented modeling with inheritance hierarchies, until the point we realized how it was so hard to have any hierarchy perfectly match a given domain.
You're describing a (for the lack of a better term) "fad cycle". Our industry, like all, goes through cycles where a given practice is declares holy and sacrosanct, doctrine evolves around it, eventually flaws in the idealistic view appear and because the entire foundation before was "this is flawless and essential" and turns out it's not flawless and essential, the practice is wholly rejected. It's swinging to extremes. Neither of which is useful.
Experienced developers neither considered inheritance crucial property of OOP, nor they avoid it completely now.
Inheritance is static decoration. Decoration is a form of composition. It's all forms of the same thing, where you can make some choices AOT and some choices JIT and you pay for AOT vs JIT in terms of ending up with a different performance/flexibility balance.
there definitely a fad cycle , however i think it's also due to the fact that when exploring a problem we often try the simple approach first, up until we reach the limits of that approach, then move to a more complete one.
I don't think we'll ever get back to modelling purely with strict trees of concepts, because this is simply not how things are in the real world.
We never did model strictly with trees IMHO. The closest I've seen is probably OOP widgets, but there it makes sense (and yes I've seen stupid stuff in those libraries, but in general they make sense).
When multiple disparate states evolve towards the same end, you're probably looking at what's known as an attractor - a state in state-space that is a stable local maxima. If evolution is an algorithm that optimises environmental fitness then some combinations of traits will just be really good at survival and reproduction and species with nearby traits will often evolve towards that specific set of traits.
Evolution is a state space search and some states in that space are more optimal than others, so yeah it can be looked at from a systems perspective as having attractor states.
what was important to me is that a state space search can generate similar walks even though the species might have no genetic legacy link [0], which makes evolution trees just too shallow an abstraction (but again, I never read real books about the matter, maybe the trees we see regularly are only one part of the theory)
[0] two organism can evolve light sensing because of appropriate context and some luck for instance, but you can't search for a common ancestor based on this
In my phylogenetics course I learned that “rooting” a tree can be rather arbitrary. What you get is not a hierarchical structure, but rather links between different species.
As I recall, this is due to the difference between plant cell walls and animal cell walls. Trees, in particular, assume that if it’s inside them, it’s mostly legitimate.
Nevertheless, an unrooted tree is still a tree, in the graph sense of the word. (Not that this matters for the article though; they're talking about botanical trees)
All these "foo is not bar biologically" types of articles make me think that is biology lacking some categorization or model that actually corresponds better with the world as we perceive it.
Imagine that we had grouped together all of the animals that were purple. Or all of the animals that were edible. That wouldn't mean that there was an evolutionary link between them that could distinguish them from all the things that weren't purple or edible.
I think the point is that relatedness is just one property, and not the one that actual matters in an immediate practical sense. Does it really matter that whales and dolphins are mammals, and technically aren't fish? Yeah, it's why they hold their breath instead of having gills- but whalers/fishermen work off of long lists of specifics, not biology textbook classifications.
In terms of practicality, a duck-typed classiciation system that means that deals neatly with convergent evolution sounds great. Keep your phylogenetic tree system for looking at phylogenetic trees, give me the classification that groups together everything that's purple, everything that swims, etc.
Well it could matter if someone has, say, a ‘tree nut’ allergy, and we are trying to determine whether a ‘nut’ from a plant that doesn’t seem tree-like visually could potentially trigger that allergy...
We can throw all those properties in a database and we’re done. A name will never be exhaustive categorization, because we still need names to resemble "what it looks like" and "what it looks like" doesn't have to correspond to "what it works like" or "where it came from".
I was talking to an astrobiologist a couple years ago, wondering what she looks for as signs of life. We got into talking about all sorts of things, from prions to the LUCA (last common universal ancestor). At some point when had asked enough questions about what is and isn’t alive, and she basically said it’s not even clear what is and isn’t biology.
Local decreases in entropy seems like some kind of definition of life, but presumably it has to get big enough to start changing the atmosphere for anyone to notice it from another planet.
It’s not a stupid question at all. Entropy is a made up number like energy. In a physical system it is related to how many arrangements of atoms/molecules/things there can be that would result in the system being in the state you can see.
Energy tells you how difficult it is to put a bunch of particles (atoms, for example) in a given state. Entropy is how many of such states are possible. Ordered states (like crystals) have lower entropies than disordered states (like liquids), because there are fewer ways of arranging atoms and still get a crystal compared to the combination of possible positions for each atom in a liquid. In systems that are isolated (i.e. they cannot exchange energy with anything else), entropy cannot decrease on average. In non-isolated systems, anything goes and entropy can go up or down locally all the time.
We don’t measure it directly. What we can do usually is measure how much something heats when we give it energy, and work from there to deduce any entropy change using equations from thermodynamics or statistical Physics. It is impossible to measure an absolute entropy in general (in the same way as it is impossible to measure an absolute energy in general).
There are lots of caveats, asterisks, and cases that look like exceptions; that’s a quick and dirty description.
> In a physical system it is related to how many arrangements of atoms/molecules/things there can be that would result in the system being in the state you can see.
Mind if I ask follow-up question, what is a "state"?
Doesn't the entropy change when I change my definition of the state? If I go to the extreme and there is only one kind of state, an actual arrangement of particles, fields etc., the entropy would be the same of each and everything (one possible arrangement per state).
Does that make entropy an entirely subjective measure?
> Mind if I ask follow-up question, what is a "state"?
Sure. Actually there are two main things we call states. The first one (macroscopic state, or macrostate) is what we think as characteristic properties of a bit of matter, e.g. "1 kg of liquid water at 300 K under atmospheric pressure" compared to "1 kg of solid water at 250 K under atmospheric pressure".
The second one (microscopic states, or microstate) is the way the particles that constitute this bit of matter are arranged. The naming is a bit unfortunate and it can get technical quite quickly, but the distinction between macroscopic and microscopic states is crucial.
So, a more precise version of my previous post would be something like that. In the liquid example, there are many, many ways of distributing the H2O molecules that would result in the same macroscopic description. This means that there are many microscopic states that are consistent with the macroscopic state we observe. And, looking at a glass of water, we cannot say where the molecules are.
On the other hand, in a perfect ice crystal, the positions of all the atoms constituting al the H2O molecules are uniquely determined by the crystal structure. So, looking at a perfect ice cube we can say where every molecule is. It gets a bit more complicated in reality because no crystal is ever perfect. There are defects that introduce some disorder, so there are more than one microscopic state, but much fewer than in the liquid.
Entropy is larger for things that have more microscopic states consistent with their macroscopic state. You can also see here a hint of the link with information entropy in CS, if you think about the number of microscopic states as our knowledge of the molecules' positions.
> Doesn't the entropy change when I change my definition of the state? If I go to the extreme and there is only one kind of state, an actual arrangement of particles, fields etc., the entropy would be the same of each and everything (one possible arrangement per state).
It does sound very subjective. The conventional naming is a bit unfortunate and a consequence of the historical roots of statistical Physics in 19th-century thermodynamics. After all, there is no clear boundary between macroscopic and microscopic.
If this bothers you, you can say that "macroscopic" refers to the thing you are looking at as a whole, and "microscopic" to its constituents. This framework works as long as the stuff you are studying is made up of smaller things. We commonly use atoms and molecules in examples because it is somewhat intuitive, but you could consider an atom itself as a macroscopic system and its quarks as its constituents. Or the universe and its galaxies clusters.
The caveat is that the mathematical formalism is exact in the limit where the number of constituents is infinite, but might break down if their number is too small. That's why the distinction between macroscopic and microscopic is helpful.
> Does that make entropy an entirely subjective measure?
In a way, a bit. You can define the constituents seemingly arbitrarily (like considering molecules, or atoms as separate entities or not, adding electrons, etc). Adding more details gives a more accurate answer, but at some point it becomes irrelevant. So it is actually less subjective than relative.
To keep (ab)using the water example, a molecule is made up of 3 atoms, each one having a position (3 positions, each one being a 3-dimensional vector, so 9 parameters in total). But when grouped in a molecule these positions are not independent, and need to be consistent with the O-H bond length and the H-O-H angle. A molecule is characterised by a position (3-d vector), an orientation along the axes of the reference frame (3 other parameters), an angle and two bond lengths (again 9 parameters in total). So there is no more information if you describe the ice cube as a collection of atoms than as a collection of molecules, even though the choice seems arbitrary.
Take a deck of cards, say, a pre-ordered one (technically, you know what microstate it's in) - so let's say that its "disorder" is "zero", and your entropy about it is zero.
Now shuffle it face down really well, now both its "disorder" and your entropy about it is pretty high (it has a specific microstate that you don't know, and the ensemble of all potential microstates form a macrostate).
Now look at this shuffled deck face up again - it's "disorder" is still high, but now your entropy about it is zero again, because you know what microstate it's in.
Be careful that when you're doing that you basically add variables to your macrostate, to the point where entropy itself is meaningless. This type of example is commonly used in CS, but does not correspond at all to a physical system. Bear in mind that information theory's entropy and statistical Physics' entropy are quite different in the details.
The state of each card. If you define a macrostate in such a way as it can have only one microstate, then yes, entropy is 0. It is also completely artificial.
I am not impressed with that website in general, but in this instance I don't see anything wrong with that section. Note in particular:
> Very roughly speaking, the items higher on the list can be assigned to the “information theory” camp, while the items lower on the list can be assigned to the “thermodynamics” camp. However, there is tremendous overlap between the two camps.
There is indeed some overlap (I have personally worked for a couple of years on applying information theory to calculate entropy in glass-forming materials), but not enough that you can just apply random concepts from one field to the other. Basically, your interpretation is that "we know a lot about the system, therefore entropy is low", whilst in a physical system it's the other way around: "entropy is low, therefore we know a lot about it". Knowing something does not change the state of the system you are observing.
Entropy goes to zero when spins align, but it does not mean that entropy is non-zero until we check that the spins are aligned. Entropy itself is whatever it is even before we bother calculating it, and we can estimate it different ways. Sure, we can use Shannon's formula in some cases, which is really just Boltzmann's formula with different units.
Entropy is a thermodynamical property of a bit of stuff, regardless of what we know about it. The conservation of Gibbs free energy does not suddenly break down because we stop (or start) looking.
> The state of each card. If you define a macrostate in such a way as it can have only one microstate, then yes, entropy is 0. It is also completely artificial.
Obviously, a deck of cards can be in a lot of different microstates, I'm not sure what do you mean ? Consider that "macrostate" is another name for "distribution" ?
> There is indeed some overlap (I have personally worked for a couple of years on applying information theory to calculate entropy in glass-forming materials), but not enough that you can just apply random concepts from one field to the other. Basically, your interpretation is that "we know a lot about the system, therefore entropy is low", whilst in a physical system it's the other way around: "entropy is low, therefore we know a lot about it". Knowing something does not change the state of the system you are observing.
This is why having two different terms "entropy" and "lack of information" that correspond to the same underlying physical concept is problematic : it causes this kind of confusion.
Knowing a lot about a system is equivalent to having low entropy about it.
> Entropy itself is whatever it is even before we bother calculating it, and we can estimate it different ways. [...] Entropy is a thermodynamical property of a bit of stuff, regardless of what we know about it. The conservation of Gibbs free energy does not suddenly break down because we stop (or start) looking.
"Looking" (aka "measurement" or "observation") is not a "free" operation. To go back to the example of the deck of cards, the deck would have needed to be prepared beforehand to be "ordered", and the action of "looking" at it and to check in what order each card is in is not "free" either. In the same way, neither constructing an aligned spin system nor checking its alignment are "free".
As another example, consider the Szilard engine, which allows us to "extract" energy "from" information :
(Semi-)Classical entropy is defined in terms of probability, it's a functional that depends on a specific probability distribution (aka macrostate) : it's the expected value (aka weighted average) over the surprisals (aka information contents) of all the possible outcomes (aka microstates).
(There's also a generalization of it for the situations where we have entangled microstates and quantum mechanics really come into play.)
As far as we know, this model works for all the situations where the two nuclear forces and/or relativistic effects can be neglected.
I was using a very loose definition of entropy there, more like organization, but for instance if the atmosphere starts displaying large amounts of oxygen or the surface is suddenly covered in metal then something is happening there.
I honestly thought this article would be about the other kind of trees - the "trees of life". Because these aren't trees either. General population is just taught they are, which is one of those categorization that doesn't correspond well with the world.
Life is just one big chemical reaction that's been going on for a billion years. It's structured only so-so - not perfectly. In sexually reproducing organisms, genes of two parents mix up randomly(ish) to create offspring, which would suggest a tree structure - except when it doesn't. Sometimes genes mix wrong. Gametes can and do accumulate random mutation. Viruses occasionally inject genes into places where they can get carried to future generations. Incest happens. Not all life forms reproduce sexually. Cells can pick up free-floating genetic information from the environment. At the level of single-cellular organisms, this is arguably the bulk of what's happening. Bacteria exchange genes like people exchange cooking recipes.
The way you take this messy reality and arrive at a "tree of life" (and it's always a tree of life, not the tree of life) is by looking at how some set of genes seem to have spread across life forms. It's always conditioned on what particular genetic marker you're looking at, and is equivalent to selecting an interesting spanning tree in a highly interconnected graph. Pick a different genetic marker, you'll get a different tree.
Sure, once you get to studying trees and dogs and humans, gene transfer becomes more tree-ish - but it's a difference of degree, not of a kind.
Agreed. Sexual reproduction suggests a unidirectional acyclic graph.
Unidirectional acyclic graphs also allow for Neanderthals reproducing with humans, for random mutations, for bacteria exchanging genes asexually, and for genes inherited from virus infections. But "tree of life" is just so much more sexy than "unidirectional acyclic graph of life"
Why not? I've heard it before in conversations. Search "inferring species networks from gene trees". Look at the math in RaXML, MrBayes, etc. The intersection of two different fields is often the most interesting, if you can communicate between both.
Nope. If you actually look at the biological / evolutionary biological literature you’ll find that there is no shortage of people who have thought deeply about biological ontology. To get you on the right track, most biologists agree that recognized entities should correspond to the historical evolutionary process. Plenty of discussion about the details there though.
In this case the problem is everyday language, more than biology. There are lots of things that have the same common name but are quite different from a biological point of view. Several species or entire genera can have the same English name.
The world will always be more complex than our models (irrespective of the field). Even Math is by definition incomplete. Its nice to take a step back and appreciate the complexity of the world that we live in without judging our models.
That's a rather naive take that you're attacking all of "biology" with. The article doesn't even state what you criticize it for - it doesn't say that there is no such thing as a tree, it says there is no such thing phylogenetically.
All of these systems of categorization are necessarily arbitrary in a way, since all of life is a big messy tangle of related organisms, and there is nothing to clearly tell you where to draw lines to separate them. That's the source of your confusion right there. Turns out, groupings that seem obvious to someone who hasn't looked closely can be really difficult to delineate clearly.
So, biologists try to define rules by which to do that, which they can apply unambiguously. One of the possible rules to apply is that groups should be paraphyletic, i.e. only contain (some of the) organisms with a shared common ancestor, or monophyletic, i.e. contain all of the organisms with a shared common ancestor.
Other groupings do not fulfill those criteria, those are called polyphyletic. Grouping organisms that way has somewhat gone out of fashion, now that evolution is well understood. What this article is saying is that trees form a polyphyletic group. In addition to that, even just defining a group (for example, based on structural or functional properties of the plant) that neatly maps to what people usually consider to be a "tree" is harder than it sounds. Since all of that might be surprising, you see it here on HN.
> What this article is saying is that trees form a polyphyletic group.
This example seems reasonable in that way because there isn't some parallel definition of "tree".
A layman, on hearing that (according to evolutionary biologists) "birds are dinosaurs" might reasonably assume that evolutionary biologists will also say that dolphins are fish. Alas, no -- "dinosuar" has a parallel phylogenetic definition that differs from the lay one, but "fish" doesn't.
Botany is a source of this sort of confusion a lot. Raspberries and strawberries and blackberries are culinary berries, but not botanical berries. (A tomato is a botanical berry, though. -EDIT, said culinary originally.)
I'm of two minds about it. If you need a word, maybe it's best to use an existing one when there's a large overlap. But then again, the closeness of many legal terms ("murder", say) to their lay definitions arguably causes more confusion when those definitions differ. With biologists "just assume their meaning is totally different to yours" is a good heuristic, and with lawyers (or mathematicians talking about "knots" and "sets") the similarity causes perhaps more difficulty.
I mean, dolphins are fish, in the sense that the most recent common ancestor of all modern fish is also the common ancestor of all modern dolphins. Very few animals aren’t fish in this sense though. Birds are also fish.
What’s surprising is that you can exclude sharks and rays from your definition of ‘fish’ and this statement will still be true - you are more closely related to a salmon than a salmon is to a shark.
This is true, when you zoom in closely, but when you zoom out, it is quite treelike. phylogeny isn't useless just because the process of speciation isn't instantaneous.
It’s very helpful to learn to recognize lumper versus splitter arguments. Pointing out that lumping things together or splitting things apart is arbitrary just isn’t very interesting. What is interesting is why some things are lumped and some are split. For example why are polar bears and grizzly bears considered different species? They can breed just fine after all.
Right, and when you notice that a bunch of organisms share a trait, the fact that they share that trait in spite of their common ancestor not sharing it is inherently interesting, right?
We know that traits are heritable, so when you have a bunch of different organisms that exhibit the same characteristic, if you can trace back and determine they are all specialized descendants of some ancestor which first developed that characteristic, that’s the complete story right there.
But when we see the same behavior appear in different organisms without them sharing a common root for that characteristic that’s interesting precisely because we need another means to explain it.
I mean, if grizzlies and polar bears could interbreed even though their nearest common ancestor was, say, some kind of small Cretaceous rodent, then weld have some explaining to do, right?
I am not the parent and I don't speak for the parent, but I think I share some of the same sentiment.
I'm not confused about the categorical parts of biology. I don't understand it all, but that's OK, I don't need to. What's irritating is the pedantry that comes from articles like this.
If I wrote an article like, "There's no such thing as a strawberry, cryptographically," I imagine it would be entirely uninteresting.
If I write a tree categorization algorithm that categories what I call a "tree" as something else, my algorithm would be buggy.
I guess people who make precisely classifying millions of objects their job need to be a little on the pedantic side to do that well. ;)
But, in all seriousness, I didn't think the article was like that at all. The title is meant to grab your attention and then tell you lots of (to me, at least) interesting things about the evolution of trees.
If you were able to write insightfully about strawberries from a cryptography perspective, that title you suggested might be completely fine.
That said, I, too, remember people telling me things about how X wasn't actually Y because ...
IMO, these types of arguments come across as pedantic when they're framed as basically being just about using words the right way, without also telling you something deeper about why something looks like an X but in many non-obvious ways is closer to a Y.
My favorite example of that is the statement "Black is not a color". I heard that a lot as a child, and I would agree that that is unnecessarily pedantic. Learning about how color perception works, and how black is unlike other colors, is still super interesting.
But important thing to understand is that phylogeny isn't just some arbitrary classification scheme -- it is dealing with the actual world and its history. It's an interesting observation about the real world that things people call "trees" evolved independently.
I'm sorry, I should have explained the jargon here.
A "monophyletic" set of organisms is defined to be a set for which there exists a common ancestor, which ancestor has no descendents outside the set. (Try to ignore sexual reproduction when thinking about that; think about "lineages" of "species" first.)
This concept is the basis of modern biological taxonomy.
A "tree" is a plant with very pronounced woody structures.
There is nothing about the botanical concept of a "tree" that immediately suggests they should be monophyletic. At least to someone with general biological knowledge, it would seem entirely possible that this woody morphological form could have arisen multiple times independently, and indeed that is what one would suspect, given knowledge of the prevalence of convergent evolution elsewhere.
I haven't had my medicine this morning, and your comment sent me in to the weirdest daydream about mountains transforming into trees and bushes dancing around.
This was popularized by a YouTube video called "There Are No Forests On Flat Earth Wake Up". For those who feel like going down a flat earth rabbit hole :)
And if you want a chaser for any flat Earth material check out https://youtu.be/JTfhYyTuT44 "In Search of a Flat Earth" probably the best documentary I have seen on conspiracy theories.
Actually I’m not sure whether it was on YouTube originally. It’s not now, as far as I can tell. But there are some interesting mainstream articles on it if you Google that string.
But I really wished they would have picked something else. There are tons of posters and "legitimate"-sounding text positing this theory, which very likely has led to people harming birds to "expose" the truth of mechanization
Can you elaborate on "the guy" I'm making up? Because the Birds Aren't Real movement is quite far-reaching; I've seen posters around Canadian and U.S. cities; their cult seems to extend throughout Canada and the U.S. at least.
Their posters typically just say "Birds aren't real" with a link to the website - https://birdsarentreal.com/
A cash grab no doubt (the merch is front-and-centre after all), but their claims are presented with the closest thing to a "straight face" one can muster online.
Reducing reality to semantic ontologies is a risky sport and a pleasure for the inquisitive ones.
Forget Gödel's wall (incompleteness theorems) and keep digging searching for imperfect answers to build our existencial puzzle. Thank you for the post.
The first line of this essay talks about fish not existing either. For anyone interested in this subject (albeit from a different angle) I highly recommend the book “Why Fish Don’t Exist” [1].
It’s only really a little bit about fish, the founding president of Stanford (who was an obsessive ichthyologist), and his eugenics agenda. It’s also part memoir. I found it very touching and quite good 4 the ole empathy.
I prefer to look at it from the other angle, which is that all vertebrates are fish. I had a professor who was mainly an ichthyologist, but overall a really old school natural historian. He always said that we were all just highly derived fishes. If you spend any time at all looking at evolutionary biology, it really does hold true. Bones in our heads can be traced back to the gill arches in bony fish. The pelvic girdle and shoulder bones developed from the pelvic girdle and pectoral bones of early fish. We're really just fish adapted to land.
I've been watching a lot of bonsai YouTubers lately. The amazing thing about trees is how much abuse they will tolerate and still figure out some way to grow. You can find videos of somebody pruning all the leaf-bearing branches and half the roots off of a bonsai like it's nothing, fully expecting the tree to recover. Plants have a very flexible instruction set, something like a list of inner if-statements, which bonsai artists understand almost completely and use to dictate their growth. It seems like the default execution of this instruction set looks like "tree" when there are no particular challenges, but the plant would adapt to almost any trauma short of cutting it down to a 1ft high stump... and even then, you will find stumps growing branches.
I have a weed bush I deal with called buckthorn, and you can cut every branch down to the ground and that sucker is coming back in a week or two unless you get a stump grinder.
Specifically it suggests cutting it to the ground and then, if you don't want to use herbicide, to cover it with a black plastic for one to two years. And it says the seeds it drops remain viable for five.
I live in a suburban enough area that I strongly suspect that'd be illegal, even if I felt confident I wouldn't burn down the trees I don't want to burn down.
Frangula must be unburied but the seeds will return shaped as a pigeon.
Native here. Is the host of two nice butterflies and a terrific an totally unexpected substitute for conifers. Many people would mistoke it by a small Cypress.
There is an old method of forest management which I can't immediately remember the name of which does exactly this, cut down trees to their stumps and let the new growth build up for a number of years and repeat.
Sounds like you're talking about coppicing. Some tree varieties will continue to produce young shoots from the stump, and those can be left to grow and harvested.
On the Pacific Coast you can see this in action with redwood 'fairy rings'. The old redwoods got chopped down and then the roots sent up shoots in a ring about the stump. It all grows into pretty big ring of trees.
Great for making forts in as a kid.
Tall, hard woods. Great smells of the dank forest floor and the tannins of the redwoods. Birds twittering, squirrels barking.
Dust, duff.
Your imagination running buckwild about ancient castles or being an ewok. Mom calls at dusk for dinner, red spaghetti and bugjuice.
Coolness creeps in and the scrubjays squawk at another.
Just dark enough for flashlight tag.
And running through church columns in twilight and you never get tired and you never get old.
There's also quite a few trees that can be a pain if you want them gone. You can cut them down to stumps and they'll just send suckers up and try to grow again. My dad has been having it out with a lilac bush since I was a kid. He gets pissed off at it - I don't know why as it's a lovely bush - and lops it down to the ground. It's usually back within the year. I know sumac in particular is incredibly stubborn. When you're trying to remove them in prairie management, the general practice is to lop them off a couple inches above the ground and then apply herbicide to the cut. Otherwise and sometimes even in spite of this, they just grow right back.
Historically, the prairies would burn every couple years. Native prairie grasses and flowers are adapted for this and regrew, but shrubs and less-established trees didn't fare as well. When humans figured out how to prevent the wildfires, those shrubs and young trees started to move into the grassland. Sumac tends to be one of the first infiltrators. Once a sumac stand is established, they shade out the grass. Larger trees follow and what was once grassland becomes a forested area.
It's odd that we have such fine-grained words for this practice, but this is coppicing, not pollarding. Coppicing is done near ground level, pollarding higher up the trunk of the tree.
A testament to how important agroforestry was to the English people, I suppose.
>Why don’t more plants evolve towards the “grass” strategy?
Fun story!!! Seagrasses are like whales, in that their ancestors lived on land, and now they live completely submerged.
Seagrasses are nowhere closely related to grasses. Quote: 'They just… both did that.' They're at least three, maybe four distinct 'back to the sea' events in the seagrasses, with distinct lineages that went back separately, but show convergent loss of genes.
Most seagrasses look a lot like grasses, bringing me back to OP's 'grass strategy' - under water it's a very successful strategy!
Complete side-tangent: as a British-English speaker living in the US I have just about grown able to tolerate the American pronunciation of ‘herb’ with a silent H, so it doesn’t jar me too much when I read a text that says “an herb”.
But I haven’t encountered enough scientific spoken American to have developed an instinct for whether or not Americans actually pronounce the ‘h’ in ‘herb-‘ words like ‘herbivore’ or ‘herbaceous’; so in this text I was a bit thrown by encountering both “a herbaceous plant”, and “an herbaceous plant”. Wondering whether this is situational pronunciation? A variation on the hyper correct ‘an precedes words that start with H if the first syllable is unstressed’ rule that gives you “an hotel” and “an historic event”? Just error?
If I personally say “herbivores and omnivores” I find myself wanting to pronounce the h sound. But my Merriam Webster dictionary implies with parentheses that some Americans do not pronounce it:
True, but I tend to think of choosing the indefinite article appropriate to how I pronounce the word. So if I pronounce the h then I’d choose a, but since I don’t I always go with an. But for herbivore, it would be a for me. :)
I thought you just softly swallow the `h` when there is an `an` so it starts with a vowel sound. I can't think of any time I've ever heard or said "an hotel" and it sounds very awkward to me, but herbaceous and historic can warble.
That’s not an error. It can be an affectation, but in my native southern English middle class somewhat Radio 4 accent it’s perfectly reasonable to pronounce ‘an historic’ basically the same as ‘unhistoric’ - or equally to pronounce ‘a historic’ with a stressed a, basically the same as ‘ahistoric’. Pronouncing it with an unstressed schwa for ‘a’ then an unstressed ‘his’ sounds awkward to my ear. And I would never drop the ‘h’. That would sound common :)
American here (Northeast USA). It varies by person and possibly by local accent. But people are generally consistent in whether they pronounce the leading "h" or not. Most people do not pronounce the "h".
As for "an" and "a", I was taught to follow the rule you stated in school. To my eye, using "a" is informal and mimicking speech, whereas "an" is "correct".
> Usage Note: In writing, the form a is used before a word beginning with a consonant sound, regardless of its spelling (a frog, a university, a euphemism). The form an is used before a word beginning with a vowel sound (an orange, an hour). · An was once a common variant before words beginning with h in which the first syllable was unstressed; thus 18th-century authors wrote either a historical or an historical but a history, not an history. This usage made sense in that people often did not pronounce the initial h in words such as historical and heroic, but by the late 19th century educated speakers usually gave their initial h's a huff, and the practice of writing an before such words began to die out. Nowadays it survives primarily before the word historical. One may also come across it in the phrases an hysterectomy or an hereditary trait. These usages are acceptable in formal writing.
I don’t think that answers my question. The article contains both ‘an herbaceous’ and ‘a herbaceous’. And does not appear to be 18th century in origin.
I think it would depend on pronunciation. Since "herbaceous" isn't a term you hear often, most people likely don't have a good instinct for how they "should" pronounce it. Seems plausible that the author concluded one pronunciation made more sense at one point during writing and the other pronunciation at a different point. Or maybe one was just a typo. ;-)
According to the Usage Notes, both "an" and "a" are correct in written form (since both pronunciations are correct). If you're reading it out loud, "an herbacious" should be pronounced with a silent "h", and "a herbaceous" should be pronounced with an aspirated "h".
> as a British-English speaker living in the US I have just about grown able to tolerate the American pronunciation of ‘herb’ with a silent H, so it doesn’t jar me too much when I read a text that says “an herb”.
As someone who grew up in the US and has never left the country, "an herb" really bothers me because I've always pronounced the "h".
Americans for the most part don't pronounce the aitch in herbivore or herbaceous. I've never heard an American say "an hotel", and the only Americans who say "an historic" are pretentious twits.
I don't think anyone has really answered your question about why you encountered both in this article. "A herbacious," was only present inside a quote in the article. The author of the article seems to prefer using, "an," in their own writing. I don't know of any situational difference in pronunciation in play here, just regional or formal preferences as mentioned by other commenters.
For so many species to have indepently developed wood, it must be a highly beneficial (or, at least, not detrimental) adaptation that is relatively easy for plants to mutate. I would not expect a more complicated fundamental structure (an eye, for example) to have developed indepedently numerous times, but something a bit simpler like wood is not terribly surprising.
I am expecting responses to the tune of "eyes are not that complicated" and "wood is actually incredibly complex."
Do all creatures with a brain share a common ancestor? Even more fundamentally, do all creatures share a common ancestor? The answer appears to be "maybe," which I find to be fascinating [1].
The eye has been developed twice - check out cephalopod eyes. If anything, their design is superior (no blind spot, nerves on the rear vs front, hard lens vs soft deformable lens for focusing)
2.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_evolution
> Parallel evolution is the similar development of a trait in distinct species that are not closely related, but share a similar original trait in response to similar evolutionary pressure.
Those categories feel a bit arbitrary and overlapping: The difference between 2 and 3 seems to be whether there is a shared "similar original trait"... So, wouldn't every process of convergent evolution, where a similar trait arises independently in different species -- after a while automatically and inevitably have become parallel evolution, because after some time the once-new trait has of course become a pre-existing one?
OK, OK, I'll go check on that debate... But given the quotes of the definitions you posted here, it sure seems pseudo-.
There are also compound eyes. The mantis shrimp's eyes cover a far larger part of the spectrum at better spectral resolution than our crummy vertebrate eyes. The can distinguish polarization and have some degree of depth perception within a single eye.
I've been looking into plants recently and they are mind-blowing.
I don't even know where to start.
In re: TFA, most annuals that we use for crops have perennial versions. I just planted a "thicket bean" (Phaseolus polystachios) which should grow for years! There are perennial kales that grow into small tree-like "canes". There's a thing called a "strawberry tree" that is exactly what it sounds like: a tree that grows strawberry-like fruit. It goes on and on.
One take-away is that agriculture as it has been practiced is about the dumbest way to grow food. :( Check out Gabe Brown's videos on regenerative agriculture to see how we can grow food and increase fertility and volume of soil by incorporating more species and doing less work. See also the "food forest" concept: imagine a park or botanical garden where every species is edible. It takes a while to set up but then it is self-sustaining with low labor, you mostly just harvest.
Another take-away is that we mostly already have all the technology we need to make a really fun and enjoyable civilization. We have all these species that can develop food, medicine, clothing, fiber, wood, etc. such that the vast majority of our needs can be fulfilled in a garden.
Gabe Brown makes money. His neighbor ignores him. What can you do?
It does seem like folks are catching on though. Business can be slow to adapt, especially in agriculture, but farmers are pragmatic. Brown's talks seem well-attended.
I think ideas like "money represent value" are tru-ish enough approximations from a distance but comments like this show just how easy it is to slip into seeing them as definitions or absolute truth.
I'm not sure why you think I was defining 'money is value','value is money' or some other absolute truth. I did not say such a thing.
Money does represent value of some kind, right? Whether that's time, labor, or [fill-in-the-blank]. It's a tool to represent generic value.
I'm interested to hear what you think a better unit of measurement might be for determining whether or not an idea is 'valid' or worth doing. Can you elaborate?
I suspect there's trade-offs that aren't being thoroughly considered in this equation. That's the case in every full-on 'everything we're doing is wrong, and there's a perfect solution' claim.
Nope, in this case it's just science. Specifically ecology.
It turns out that when we understand what the plants and animals are doing in detail (through science) we can arrange them in time and space in ways that are vastly more efficient than what we've been doing these last ~12k years.
Think about it, if it wasn't so that would mean that our ancestors discovered optimal farming in antiquity, eh?
Just think: we used to burn chaff rather than composting it. It turns out that that is not a good idea. It's that sort of thing that I'm thinking of when I call ag "the dumbest way" to grow food.
> Think about it, if it wasn't so that would mean that our ancestors discovered optimal farming in antiquity, eh?
Farming has undergone several fundamental changes throughout history after that though, notably in medieval times and then everything industrialization brought
Can you name some that can't be reduced to "but on a [insert new machine]"? The only one I can think of is artificial fertilizer, which isn't a sustainable practice in the long run either.
Bosh-Haber process increased food supply several times in less than a decade. There was no starvation in a developed country ever since it got adopted on mass scale. It happened less than 100 years ago.
Compared to that every other revolution in farming was insignificant.
It may take years for new practices to be widespread and accepted, but I assure you, if you can make that chart continue to go up, ~every grain farmer in the US will happily be on board.
There is a certain world-view and a romanticizing to farming, but at the end of the day, farmers are businessmen who just want to grow as much food as possible, as cheaply as possible. They may grumble as much as a software developer when forced to learn new tools, and they won't drop everything for an unproven promise, but they'll happily abandon their old ways in favor of new ones once they're proven.
> It turns out that when we understand what the plants and animals are doing in detail (through science) we can arrange them in time and space in ways that are vastly more efficient than what we've been doing these last ~12k years.
This assumes both systems are optimizing for the same thing.
We know that evolution is optimizing for continuation or duration (technically "evolution" isn't a thing, it's a non-volitional chemical tautology with no purpose or intrinsic meaning so "it" cannot optimize, however, in practice, life is optimizing for more and continued life, overcoming radiation, impacts, and it's own consequences (like the advent of oxygen and aerobic metabolism)) so what is the other system optimizing for?
(As an aside, is "life is optimizing for more and continued life" a definition for "life"?)
The difference is between hobbyist agriculture and commercial agriculture. In the latter, consistency, pests and disease become more complex issues to deal with. IMHO there are a lot of analogies to software engineering. Small projects can engage in practices that don't scale, like skipping QA, not adequately testing, inconsistent coding standards.
In large farms, seeds are mass produced, engineered, and go through a QA and testing process to prevent certain diseases. There are many good reasons, BTW, why farms don't grow perennials and engage in mono-cropping, or use herbicides and genetically engineered crops instead of no-till. The trade-off in abandoning these practices almost always involves sacrificing yields and the mechanization of labor.
Orchards of fruit/nut trees are both commercial agriculture, and centered around perennials. Are industrial orchards less productive than industrial farms?
Thinking about the cost per calorie of apples versus oats, to pick an example that works for me, I would say the answer is very much yes. And ultimately, from the plant's perspective productivity should be a question of efficiently storing energy.
> In the latter, consistency, pests and disease become more complex issues to deal with.
> There are many good reasons, BTW, why farms don't grow perennials and engage in mono-cropping, or use herbicides and genetically engineered crops instead of no-till.
But sometimes the pests and disease are caused by these same practices, right? Like, I'm aware the Cavendish banana we all eat is very susceptible to a fungal disease that is slowly spreading around the world. Because we produce so much of a single variety, where all plants are clones, a single disease can be highly disruptive. If production was evenly distributed over many varieties, and if plantations had banana plants separated by other useful crops, the whole system might be more resilient.
I have a lot of respect and even awe for modern agriculture. It's incredible what we've done.
> The trade-off in abandoning these practices almost always involves sacrificing yields and the mechanization of labor.
The problem (that cannot be escaped) is longevity. Any system of agriculture that does not increase over time soil fertility and volume/mass is doomed.
Systems of agriculture that deplete [various measures of biological health] over time are akin to mining. Once the underlying resources are exhausted the story ends (the resources in question could be water, or biodiversity, or climate stability, etc...)
Even if we compensate with technology, we are substituting our managed system for a automatic system that has been (meta-)stable for billions of years. We should proceed carefully.
The billions of people who owe their lives to the Haber-Bosch process (and other innovations) may come to rue it if we crash due to environmental destruction. By some scientific estimates this is the decade when our biomass and the biomass of our agriculture outweighs naturally occurring biomass. For better or worse the world has become our farm.
That's why Gabe Brown (et. al.) seems so important to me: he is integrating modern practices with new (scientifically-validated) regenerative practices and his farm is both profitable and healthier year after year.
> There's a thing called a "strawberry tree" that is exactly what it sounds like: a tree that grows strawberry-like fruit. It goes on and on.
Cool reference that I hadn't heard of before, so I just looked this up. The fruits of this tree look absolutely nothing like strawberries (more like lychees, IMHO), so I don't think this is a good example for what you're describing.
I'm not sure it's connected to the origin of the word, but when I saw straw laid down in strawberry fields like this [1] I thought the name comes from that custom. I believe (still, I could be wrong) that the straw is put there to prevent weeds from getting sunlight.
There are multiple theories as to where the name strawberry comes from, but that one is known to be wrong, because the name dates back to before they were cultivated. The one I find most plausible is that it comes from "strewn berry". Similarly, gooseberries never had anything to do with geese, the name is supposed to come from a Dutch or French or German or Japanese word, none of which sound much like gooseberry.
How strange. Growing up in sweden we used to put wild strawberries on straws of grass. It's a simple way to hold multiple berries without some kind of container and without risking crushing them. A quick google search for "smultron på strå" turns up loads of pictures so it seems to be quite a common occurrence. I've never really considered that the word strawberry could have a different origin.
Speaking of which, the Raspberry Jam Tree, also called Jam Wattle, of western Australia, does not grow raspberry jam, but smells like it when cut with a saw.
No plant nursery will sell you a Raspberry Jam Tree, but you can buy seeds on Etsy: "Acacia acuminata".
They are interesting also because the leaves (which aren't leaves, but "phyllodes") and bark have a high concentration of interesting tryptamine alkaloids.
There are many other fascinating details about A. acuminata. Millions of fenceposts in Australia more than a century old (and more every year!) are made of its wood.
If they taste like strawberries is all that would matter to me. Then again I'm one of those people that will often mix what's on the plate and don't really care a whit about "presentation" when it comes to food. My gf hates me for that. Growing up poor in the south will often lead to inclinations such as that.
Sadly, they taste nothing like strawberries. They're a little sweet, though, and can be used as a filler if one takes good care to strain out the seeds & skin.
They're very common in the bay area as street trees. The fruits are decent, but indeed don't look or taste anything like strawberries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbutus_unedo
> how we can grow food and increase fertility and volume of soil by incorporating more species and doing less work
It still loses in profit per investment to modern industrialized farming, so (almost) nobody cares. If you want people to care - tax soil degradation.
Turns out with artificial fertilizers and modern technology neither work nor soil degradation is as important as quick adaptation to market forces and economies of scale.
I know about regenerative agro and I find it amazing as well.
I just want to point out that the way modern agriculture came to be is not dumb at all, the thing is that its focused on maximizing yield above other things. 7 billion people eat something (almost) everyday, I find it quite impressive that the infrastructure to support that, exists.
I hope the world could be stopped (as it happened, more or less, with COVID) in order to fix some of these problems, but in the case of food, it's going to be hard to ask people to stop eating for a while.
You grow each year a different crops, because they have different fertilizer requirements (and some even fix Nitrogen) and also helps to reduce some plagues. It's also possible to plant different crops in succession, so you get multiple harvests in the same year.
The fruit of a strawberry tree is nothing like a strawberry. The skin is made of small, fibrous scales which stick to the tongue and insinuate themselves into every crevice of one's mouth. The flesh is shot through with dozens of hard pips, its texture is mealy like cream of wheat, and the flavor is bland with a hint of sweetness. A strawberry has a very distinctive shape, but the strawberry tree's fruit is a droll spheroid. These enticing looking fruits must be useful for something, right? Well, be careful -- fermenting them produces a lot of wood alcohol, so it requires careful distillation to be safe. To top it off, the strawberry is not properly a berry, but if I'm reading things right, the fruit of a strawberry tree is. About the only thing they have in common is their red color, but thanks to internationalized agriculture, proper strawberries have almost entirely lost that characteristic in favor of a year-round supply.
But if you like those, you should try the berries of haw and ash. They're similar in texture, lack of flavor, and seediness, but their mouthfeel is significantly improved by the lack of scales.
Ah, you mean the Arbutus unedo. Yeah, the fruits are completely different. You can't compare the strawberry with these fruits. When not yet full ripe, the fruits are brightly yellow-orange, not a reddish-white of strawberries.
However the honey from them is absolutely special and delicious. The honey is bitter. I fell in love with the honey from the strawberry trees in Corsica.
There is a well-maintained “food forest” near my home which is a real pleasure to stroll through and pick berries from occasionally. There’s an incredible mulberry tree, thickets of autumn olives, plums, wild greens of all varieties, sea buckthorn, figs, medlar, and more.
It takes volunteers real work to keep it tame enough for a city, but they’ve done it for as long as I’ve lived here and it’s a really beautiful spot.
How do they keep birds from eating the fruit? In my personal but limited experience, birds tend to eat certain kinds of fruit long before it ripens enough for human consumption.
The birds do eat some, but that's fine. The birds in this city don't appear to have any shortage of food. Some plums or berries will be ruined or taken, but mostly the garden manages itself just fine. Same as you'll find wild berries in huge numbers – many have already been eaten by wild animals, but there's still plenty left too.
One perk of this style of gardening is that, for various reasons, pest moderation seems to happen automatically. No pesticides are required, the garden is watered by humans only a handful of times in summer, and no fertilizers besides city compost are used. Everything is lush and happy. Insects are everywhere, and perhaps birds are eating those instead of berries. It's hard to say exactly how each biome functions, but this one is very productive and animals aren't a problem for it.
Wait, why is banana classified as a tree in this diagram? I'm pretty sure they don't have any wooden core.
I'm definitely no expert, but as kids in the nineties, banana plants were always cited as the example of how large plants are not always trees. Did they get recategorized?
I was entertained to learn that silversword and yucca, which live in similar conditions, look quite similar, and have similar flowering habits, are utterly unrelated. One is a dicot and one is a monocot!
> While natural selection is commonly thought to simply be an ongoing process with no “goals” or “end points”, most scientists believe that life peaked at Welwitschia.
Is this (joke) because it's a living fossil with a long lifespan, or something more?
On one level this is the same thing as a biologist saying "there's no such thing as a fish". The semantic category of "fish" includes sharks, bony fish, lung fish/coelecanths and lampreys and hagfish. They're only distantly related.
On another level, should we obtain knowledge of a distant, life-filled world orbiting a distant star, we could expect it to be forested by woody plants, and filled with crabs.
Mostly unsurprising, given that flowering plants is one of the major divisions of plants, and conifers are most definitely trees and are not flowering. And palm trees are nothing like either flowering trees nor conifers.
To me "tree" simply has to do with being big and tall. Just like the term "whale" excludes porpoises and dolphins, purely based on size, with toothed whales and baleen whales being the actual biological subdivisions of cetacean. (and of course with the oddity that dolphins and porpoises are not whales per se, but they are members of toothed whales i.e. odontocetes)
> So you’ve heard about how fish aren’t a monophyletic group?
> When we say a bird is a dinosaur
Lol no, you're not getting away with that. As long as you bastards are going to keep harassing the populace with the "fun fact" that birds are dinosaurs, then fish are monophyletic, dinosaurs are fish, birds are fish, and so are whales. Eat what you ordered.
214 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 286 ms ] thread> First, what is a tree? It’s a big long-lived self-supporting plant with leaves and wood.
I have some vines that are clearly capable of wood formation and sometimes seem to do so at places for reasons I can't understand.
“tree” is clearly a horizontal classification; it is as surprising as as that not all animals that can fly have common ancestors that can.
> You know birds? Imagine if actually there were amphibian birds and mammal birds and insect birds flying all around, and they all looked pretty much the same – feathers, beaks, little claw feet, the lot. You had to be a real bird expert to be able to tell an insect bird from a mammal bird. Also, most people don’t know that there isn’t just one kind of “bird”. That’s what’s going on with trees.
I do not find trees looking similar at all.
When folks say "forest", like "I'm going to go hiking in the forest", they usually don't specify what species or genus of tree. A street could be lined with "trees", or a "tree" could fall on someone's car. We categorize trees together because they tend to occupy the same enough overall role and profile.
Now if there was a "baobob tree" forest, or a "palm tree" fell on a car, those are distinct to merit specification.
That sounds like something that could very much be different in different languages.
well, no, because there aren’t usually multiple forests that could be meant that would be disambiguated to a single forest (warranting the definite article) by genus of trees, there is either one candidate (requiring no qualification) or multiple but needing some other qualification (like specific name of the forest or direction from the current location.)
I've certainly heard people mention the kinds of trees when talking about small stands of trees (ex: "this stand of pines over here.")
The birds bit is an analogy. It's not about looking identical, it's about looks (tall woody thing) and shared name (tree) not corresponding to phylogenetics.
What trees are you talking about ? or you mean in general ?
In particular, many trees grow from a central strem that is nearly perfectly vertical, and many have a more organic growth pattern. I see no reason to assume these have common ancestors that were trees any more than crabs and jellyfish.
Some examples where your description doesn’t hold up so well
- palm trees
- bamboo
- fringe tree (Chionanthus virginicus)
- Hydrangea paniculata
- sunflowers
- crape myrtles can have so many variations that it’s crazy
It's not very much like e.g. an oak tree. More like a scaled-up celery.
It is pretty obviously an enormous grass. Woody? Yes. Tree? No.
Woody hollow stems which don't grow rings, are canes. If less woody and more herbaceous, it's a reed.
The "tiebreaker" if you will, is palm wood. No rings, but it's dense, not hollow, it has a grain and it's lignin-rich. You can make planks with it. It's a weird wood, but it's wood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut_timber
Ultimately "wood" is just a word, people will use it however they do.
Canes take the adjective "woody" but not the noun "wood". Bamboo can make some interesting laminate materials, but these are not normally referred to as wood either, although they are lumber.
I've done a fair amount of woodworking, but I don't think I've ever worked with bamboo. But if I were to, I'd be a lot more attuned to the distinction.
Palm trees do "grow from a central stem that is nearly perfectly vertical", and are woody, and conventionally are considered trees. Bamboo matches both of those criteria, in fact, but it has a "just look at it" grassness to it. Growing in clusters from rhizomes is pretty un-tree-like, but no one of these things is diagnostic.
What is and isn't a tree is more cultural than biological, which is, I believe, the original author's point.
Then we moved to composability + interface, realizing it's easier to compose attributes (often related to a given set of functions) to make any graph of structures instead of just a tree.
Just two days ago looking at how virus recombined themselves in the most random ways, i wondered if the species classification of the previous centuries based on trees were not destined to follow the same path.
> First, what is a tree? It’s a big long-lived self-supporting plant with leaves and wood.
That is such a broad thing that it's hardly remarkable. I find carcinization, or independent evolution of eyeballs from completely different tissues to be more remarkable.
This is no more remarkable than that animals independently evolved to be large, and in doing so evolved different hard support structures to support this, which for instance worms lack.
Maybe in some way most things can be viewed from the lense of a compiler/interpreter. "Structures" are really just existing meta-cache for how to efficiently traverse the language to enforce semantics that result in computations.
e.g. tail call optimizations are basically structures in the compilers that help to traverse a subset of the language (i.e. tail recursion) more efficiently time-and-space-wise
- The Tao of programming by Geoffrey James: https://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html
- An Analytical Approach to Programs as Data Objects by Olivier Danvy https://cs.au.dk/~danvy/DSc/00_dissertation-for-printing.pdf
- Maps of Meaning: Gautama Buddha, Adam and Eve by Jordan B Peterson - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7T5cg1a77A
- Theories of Programming Languages by John C. Reynolds https://www.amazon.com/Theories-Programming-Languages-John-R...
Have you ever been into chemistry-oriented programming models ?
You're describing a (for the lack of a better term) "fad cycle". Our industry, like all, goes through cycles where a given practice is declares holy and sacrosanct, doctrine evolves around it, eventually flaws in the idealistic view appear and because the entire foundation before was "this is flawless and essential" and turns out it's not flawless and essential, the practice is wholly rejected. It's swinging to extremes. Neither of which is useful.
Experienced developers neither considered inheritance crucial property of OOP, nor they avoid it completely now.
Inheritance is static decoration. Decoration is a form of composition. It's all forms of the same thing, where you can make some choices AOT and some choices JIT and you pay for AOT vs JIT in terms of ending up with a different performance/flexibility balance.
I don't think we'll ever get back to modelling purely with strict trees of concepts, because this is simply not how things are in the real world.
[0] two organism can evolve light sensing because of appropriate context and some luck for instance, but you can't search for a common ancestor based on this
Imagine that we had grouped together all of the animals that were purple. Or all of the animals that were edible. That wouldn't mean that there was an evolutionary link between them that could distinguish them from all the things that weren't purple or edible.
In terms of practicality, a duck-typed classiciation system that means that deals neatly with convergent evolution sounds great. Keep your phylogenetic tree system for looking at phylogenetic trees, give me the classification that groups together everything that's purple, everything that swims, etc.
Energy tells you how difficult it is to put a bunch of particles (atoms, for example) in a given state. Entropy is how many of such states are possible. Ordered states (like crystals) have lower entropies than disordered states (like liquids), because there are fewer ways of arranging atoms and still get a crystal compared to the combination of possible positions for each atom in a liquid. In systems that are isolated (i.e. they cannot exchange energy with anything else), entropy cannot decrease on average. In non-isolated systems, anything goes and entropy can go up or down locally all the time.
We don’t measure it directly. What we can do usually is measure how much something heats when we give it energy, and work from there to deduce any entropy change using equations from thermodynamics or statistical Physics. It is impossible to measure an absolute entropy in general (in the same way as it is impossible to measure an absolute energy in general).
There are lots of caveats, asterisks, and cases that look like exceptions; that’s a quick and dirty description.
Mind if I ask follow-up question, what is a "state"?
Doesn't the entropy change when I change my definition of the state? If I go to the extreme and there is only one kind of state, an actual arrangement of particles, fields etc., the entropy would be the same of each and everything (one possible arrangement per state).
Does that make entropy an entirely subjective measure?
Sure. Actually there are two main things we call states. The first one (macroscopic state, or macrostate) is what we think as characteristic properties of a bit of matter, e.g. "1 kg of liquid water at 300 K under atmospheric pressure" compared to "1 kg of solid water at 250 K under atmospheric pressure".
The second one (microscopic states, or microstate) is the way the particles that constitute this bit of matter are arranged. The naming is a bit unfortunate and it can get technical quite quickly, but the distinction between macroscopic and microscopic states is crucial.
So, a more precise version of my previous post would be something like that. In the liquid example, there are many, many ways of distributing the H2O molecules that would result in the same macroscopic description. This means that there are many microscopic states that are consistent with the macroscopic state we observe. And, looking at a glass of water, we cannot say where the molecules are.
On the other hand, in a perfect ice crystal, the positions of all the atoms constituting al the H2O molecules are uniquely determined by the crystal structure. So, looking at a perfect ice cube we can say where every molecule is. It gets a bit more complicated in reality because no crystal is ever perfect. There are defects that introduce some disorder, so there are more than one microscopic state, but much fewer than in the liquid.
Entropy is larger for things that have more microscopic states consistent with their macroscopic state. You can also see here a hint of the link with information entropy in CS, if you think about the number of microscopic states as our knowledge of the molecules' positions.
> Doesn't the entropy change when I change my definition of the state? If I go to the extreme and there is only one kind of state, an actual arrangement of particles, fields etc., the entropy would be the same of each and everything (one possible arrangement per state).
It does sound very subjective. The conventional naming is a bit unfortunate and a consequence of the historical roots of statistical Physics in 19th-century thermodynamics. After all, there is no clear boundary between macroscopic and microscopic.
If this bothers you, you can say that "macroscopic" refers to the thing you are looking at as a whole, and "microscopic" to its constituents. This framework works as long as the stuff you are studying is made up of smaller things. We commonly use atoms and molecules in examples because it is somewhat intuitive, but you could consider an atom itself as a macroscopic system and its quarks as its constituents. Or the universe and its galaxies clusters.
The caveat is that the mathematical formalism is exact in the limit where the number of constituents is infinite, but might break down if their number is too small. That's why the distinction between macroscopic and microscopic is helpful.
> Does that make entropy an entirely subjective measure?
In a way, a bit. You can define the constituents seemingly arbitrarily (like considering molecules, or atoms as separate entities or not, adding electrons, etc). Adding more details gives a more accurate answer, but at some point it becomes irrelevant. So it is actually less subjective than relative.
To keep (ab)using the water example, a molecule is made up of 3 atoms, each one having a position (3 positions, each one being a 3-dimensional vector, so 9 parameters in total). But when grouped in a molecule these positions are not independent, and need to be consistent with the O-H bond length and the H-O-H angle. A molecule is characterised by a position (3-d vector), an orientation along the axes of the reference frame (3 other parameters), an angle and two bond lengths (again 9 parameters in total). So there is no more information if you describe the ice cube as a collection of atoms than as a collection of molecules, even though the choice seems arbitrary.
Take a deck of cards, say, a pre-ordered one (technically, you know what microstate it's in) - so let's say that its "disorder" is "zero", and your entropy about it is zero.
Now shuffle it face down really well, now both its "disorder" and your entropy about it is pretty high (it has a specific microstate that you don't know, and the ensemble of all potential microstates form a macrostate).
Now look at this shuffled deck face up again - it's "disorder" is still high, but now your entropy about it is zero again, because you know what microstate it's in.
In what details are they different ?
http://www.av8n.com/physics/thermo/entropy.html
EDIT : Perhaps more relevant:
http://www.av8n.com/physics/thermo/s-relevance.html#ch-s-rel...
EDIT2 : A specific example where both the Thermodynamic entropy and the Shannon entropy can be experimentally seen to be equivalent :
http://www.av8n.com/physics/thermo/expt-basis.html#sec-demag
EDIT3 : Ah, found the chapter discussing this specific point :
http://www.av8n.com/physics/thermo/entropy-more.html#sec-s-i...
The state of each card. If you define a macrostate in such a way as it can have only one microstate, then yes, entropy is 0. It is also completely artificial.
> EDIT : Perhaps more relevant: > http://www.av8n.com/physics/thermo/s-relevance.html#ch-s-rel...
I am not impressed with that website in general, but in this instance I don't see anything wrong with that section. Note in particular:
> Very roughly speaking, the items higher on the list can be assigned to the “information theory” camp, while the items lower on the list can be assigned to the “thermodynamics” camp. However, there is tremendous overlap between the two camps.
There is indeed some overlap (I have personally worked for a couple of years on applying information theory to calculate entropy in glass-forming materials), but not enough that you can just apply random concepts from one field to the other. Basically, your interpretation is that "we know a lot about the system, therefore entropy is low", whilst in a physical system it's the other way around: "entropy is low, therefore we know a lot about it". Knowing something does not change the state of the system you are observing.
> EDIT2 : A specific example where both the Thermodynamic entropy and the Shannon entropy can be experimentally seen to be equivalent : > http://www.av8n.com/physics/thermo/expt-basis.html#sec-demag
Entropy goes to zero when spins align, but it does not mean that entropy is non-zero until we check that the spins are aligned. Entropy itself is whatever it is even before we bother calculating it, and we can estimate it different ways. Sure, we can use Shannon's formula in some cases, which is really just Boltzmann's formula with different units.
Entropy is a thermodynamical property of a bit of stuff, regardless of what we know about it. The conservation of Gibbs free energy does not suddenly break down because we stop (or start) looking.
Obviously, a deck of cards can be in a lot of different microstates, I'm not sure what do you mean ? Consider that "macrostate" is another name for "distribution" ?
> There is indeed some overlap (I have personally worked for a couple of years on applying information theory to calculate entropy in glass-forming materials), but not enough that you can just apply random concepts from one field to the other. Basically, your interpretation is that "we know a lot about the system, therefore entropy is low", whilst in a physical system it's the other way around: "entropy is low, therefore we know a lot about it". Knowing something does not change the state of the system you are observing.
This is why having two different terms "entropy" and "lack of information" that correspond to the same underlying physical concept is problematic : it causes this kind of confusion.
Knowing a lot about a system is equivalent to having low entropy about it.
> Entropy itself is whatever it is even before we bother calculating it, and we can estimate it different ways. [...] Entropy is a thermodynamical property of a bit of stuff, regardless of what we know about it. The conservation of Gibbs free energy does not suddenly break down because we stop (or start) looking.
"Looking" (aka "measurement" or "observation") is not a "free" operation. To go back to the example of the deck of cards, the deck would have needed to be prepared beforehand to be "ordered", and the action of "looking" at it and to check in what order each card is in is not "free" either. In the same way, neither constructing an aligned spin system nor checking its alignment are "free".
As another example, consider the Szilard engine, which allows us to "extract" energy "from" information :
https://www.pnas.org/content/111/38/13786
(Semi-)Classical entropy is defined in terms of probability, it's a functional that depends on a specific probability distribution (aka macrostate) : it's the expected value (aka weighted average) over the surprisals (aka information contents) of all the possible outcomes (aka microstates).
(There's also a generalization of it for the situations where we have entangled microstates and quantum mechanics really come into play.)
As far as we know, this model works for all the situations where the two nuclear forces and/or relativistic effects can be neglected.
http://www.av8n.com/physics/thermo/entropy.html#sec-s-not-kn...
(Yes, it is indeed context-dependent.)
Life is just one big chemical reaction that's been going on for a billion years. It's structured only so-so - not perfectly. In sexually reproducing organisms, genes of two parents mix up randomly(ish) to create offspring, which would suggest a tree structure - except when it doesn't. Sometimes genes mix wrong. Gametes can and do accumulate random mutation. Viruses occasionally inject genes into places where they can get carried to future generations. Incest happens. Not all life forms reproduce sexually. Cells can pick up free-floating genetic information from the environment. At the level of single-cellular organisms, this is arguably the bulk of what's happening. Bacteria exchange genes like people exchange cooking recipes.
The way you take this messy reality and arrive at a "tree of life" (and it's always a tree of life, not the tree of life) is by looking at how some set of genes seem to have spread across life forms. It's always conditioned on what particular genetic marker you're looking at, and is equivalent to selecting an interesting spanning tree in a highly interconnected graph. Pick a different genetic marker, you'll get a different tree.
Sure, once you get to studying trees and dogs and humans, gene transfer becomes more tree-ish - but it's a difference of degree, not of a kind.
No? Tree structure is a simplified model of asexual reproduction, where each organism has one parent, not two.
Unidirectional acyclic graphs also allow for Neanderthals reproducing with humans, for random mutations, for bacteria exchanging genes asexually, and for genes inherited from virus infections. But "tree of life" is just so much more sexy than "unidirectional acyclic graph of life"
The biological classification matches intuition in overwhelming majority of situations.
All of these systems of categorization are necessarily arbitrary in a way, since all of life is a big messy tangle of related organisms, and there is nothing to clearly tell you where to draw lines to separate them. That's the source of your confusion right there. Turns out, groupings that seem obvious to someone who hasn't looked closely can be really difficult to delineate clearly.
So, biologists try to define rules by which to do that, which they can apply unambiguously. One of the possible rules to apply is that groups should be paraphyletic, i.e. only contain (some of the) organisms with a shared common ancestor, or monophyletic, i.e. contain all of the organisms with a shared common ancestor.
Other groupings do not fulfill those criteria, those are called polyphyletic. Grouping organisms that way has somewhat gone out of fashion, now that evolution is well understood. What this article is saying is that trees form a polyphyletic group. In addition to that, even just defining a group (for example, based on structural or functional properties of the plant) that neatly maps to what people usually consider to be a "tree" is harder than it sounds. Since all of that might be surprising, you see it here on HN.
This example seems reasonable in that way because there isn't some parallel definition of "tree".
A layman, on hearing that (according to evolutionary biologists) "birds are dinosaurs" might reasonably assume that evolutionary biologists will also say that dolphins are fish. Alas, no -- "dinosuar" has a parallel phylogenetic definition that differs from the lay one, but "fish" doesn't.
Botany is a source of this sort of confusion a lot. Raspberries and strawberries and blackberries are culinary berries, but not botanical berries. (A tomato is a botanical berry, though. -EDIT, said culinary originally.)
I'm of two minds about it. If you need a word, maybe it's best to use an existing one when there's a large overlap. But then again, the closeness of many legal terms ("murder", say) to their lay definitions arguably causes more confusion when those definitions differ. With biologists "just assume their meaning is totally different to yours" is a good heuristic, and with lawyers (or mathematicians talking about "knots" and "sets") the similarity causes perhaps more difficulty.
What’s surprising is that you can exclude sharks and rays from your definition of ‘fish’ and this statement will still be true - you are more closely related to a salmon than a salmon is to a shark.
We know that traits are heritable, so when you have a bunch of different organisms that exhibit the same characteristic, if you can trace back and determine they are all specialized descendants of some ancestor which first developed that characteristic, that’s the complete story right there.
But when we see the same behavior appear in different organisms without them sharing a common root for that characteristic that’s interesting precisely because we need another means to explain it.
I mean, if grizzlies and polar bears could interbreed even though their nearest common ancestor was, say, some kind of small Cretaceous rodent, then weld have some explaining to do, right?
[1] https://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2010/09/09/one-could-say-...
I'm not confused about the categorical parts of biology. I don't understand it all, but that's OK, I don't need to. What's irritating is the pedantry that comes from articles like this.
If I wrote an article like, "There's no such thing as a strawberry, cryptographically," I imagine it would be entirely uninteresting.
If I write a tree categorization algorithm that categories what I call a "tree" as something else, my algorithm would be buggy.
But, in all seriousness, I didn't think the article was like that at all. The title is meant to grab your attention and then tell you lots of (to me, at least) interesting things about the evolution of trees.
If you were able to write insightfully about strawberries from a cryptography perspective, that title you suggested might be completely fine.
That said, I, too, remember people telling me things about how X wasn't actually Y because ...
IMO, these types of arguments come across as pedantic when they're framed as basically being just about using words the right way, without also telling you something deeper about why something looks like an X but in many non-obvious ways is closer to a Y.
My favorite example of that is the statement "Black is not a color". I heard that a lot as a child, and I would agree that that is unnecessarily pedantic. Learning about how color perception works, and how black is unlike other colors, is still super interesting.
It’s why we have scientific names in Latin, military beds are called a rack, and whose life matters.
A "monophyletic" set of organisms is defined to be a set for which there exists a common ancestor, which ancestor has no descendents outside the set. (Try to ignore sexual reproduction when thinking about that; think about "lineages" of "species" first.)
This concept is the basis of modern biological taxonomy.
A "tree" is a plant with very pronounced woody structures.
There is nothing about the botanical concept of a "tree" that immediately suggests they should be monophyletic. At least to someone with general biological knowledge, it would seem entirely possible that this woody morphological form could have arisen multiple times independently, and indeed that is what one would suspect, given knowledge of the prevalence of convergent evolution elsewhere.
The theory goes on about how mountains are actually the stumps of trees of the past, which, in turn, were thousands of miles high.
The theory came from the flat earth direction.
The title reminded me of this and I found the idea hilarious back when I read it.
Depending what the final goal of the worldbuilding is, the difficulty might be making it into something useful / relevant.
Thanks!
Because as we know... birds aren't real, either.
But I really wished they would have picked something else. There are tons of posters and "legitimate"-sounding text positing this theory, which very likely has led to people harming birds to "expose" the truth of mechanization
Please don't.
Their posters typically just say "Birds aren't real" with a link to the website - https://birdsarentreal.com/
A cash grab no doubt (the merch is front-and-centre after all), but their claims are presented with the closest thing to a "straight face" one can muster online.
https://i.imgur.com/91lnAGL.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_(tree)
Forget Gödel's wall (incompleteness theorems) and keep digging searching for imperfect answers to build our existencial puzzle. Thank you for the post.
It’s only really a little bit about fish, the founding president of Stanford (who was an obsessive ichthyologist), and his eugenics agenda. It’s also part memoir. I found it very touching and quite good 4 the ole empathy.
[1] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Why-Fish-Dont-Exist/L...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Such_Thing_as_a_Fish
This document from the Minnesota DNR expresses just how hard it is to kill it: https://files.dnr.state.mn.us/natural_resources/invasives/te...
Specifically it suggests cutting it to the ground and then, if you don't want to use herbicide, to cover it with a black plastic for one to two years. And it says the seeds it drops remain viable for five.
Native here. Is the host of two nice butterflies and a terrific an totally unexpected substitute for conifers. Many people would mistoke it by a small Cypress.
Great for making forts in as a kid.
Tall, hard woods. Great smells of the dank forest floor and the tannins of the redwoods. Birds twittering, squirrels barking.
Dust, duff.
Your imagination running buckwild about ancient castles or being an ewok. Mom calls at dusk for dinner, red spaghetti and bugjuice.
Coolness creeps in and the scrubjays squawk at another.
Just dark enough for flashlight tag.
And running through church columns in twilight and you never get tired and you never get old.
And everything is perfect.
https://www.google.com/search?q=redwood+fairy+ring&source=ln...
https://robertogreco.tumblr.com/post/10973003737/idrawninten...
There's also quite a few trees that can be a pain if you want them gone. You can cut them down to stumps and they'll just send suckers up and try to grow again. My dad has been having it out with a lilac bush since I was a kid. He gets pissed off at it - I don't know why as it's a lovely bush - and lops it down to the ground. It's usually back within the year. I know sumac in particular is incredibly stubborn. When you're trying to remove them in prairie management, the general practice is to lop them off a couple inches above the ground and then apply herbicide to the cut. Otherwise and sometimes even in spite of this, they just grow right back.
Historically, the prairies would burn every couple years. Native prairie grasses and flowers are adapted for this and regrew, but shrubs and less-established trees didn't fare as well. When humans figured out how to prevent the wildfires, those shrubs and young trees started to move into the grassland. Sumac tends to be one of the first infiltrators. Once a sumac stand is established, they shade out the grass. Larger trees follow and what was once grassland becomes a forested area.
A testament to how important agroforestry was to the English people, I suppose.
Fun story!!! Seagrasses are like whales, in that their ancestors lived on land, and now they live completely submerged.
Seagrasses are nowhere closely related to grasses. Quote: 'They just… both did that.' They're at least three, maybe four distinct 'back to the sea' events in the seagrasses, with distinct lineages that went back separately, but show convergent loss of genes.
Most seagrasses look a lot like grasses, bringing me back to OP's 'grass strategy' - under water it's a very successful strategy!
But I haven’t encountered enough scientific spoken American to have developed an instinct for whether or not Americans actually pronounce the ‘h’ in ‘herb-‘ words like ‘herbivore’ or ‘herbaceous’; so in this text I was a bit thrown by encountering both “a herbaceous plant”, and “an herbaceous plant”. Wondering whether this is situational pronunciation? A variation on the hyper correct ‘an precedes words that start with H if the first syllable is unstressed’ rule that gives you “an hotel” and “an historic event”? Just error?
Can anyone enlighten me?
ˈ(h)ər-bə-ˌvȯr
As for "an" and "a", I was taught to follow the rule you stated in school. To my eye, using "a" is informal and mimicking speech, whereas "an" is "correct".
> Usage Note: In writing, the form a is used before a word beginning with a consonant sound, regardless of its spelling (a frog, a university, a euphemism). The form an is used before a word beginning with a vowel sound (an orange, an hour). · An was once a common variant before words beginning with h in which the first syllable was unstressed; thus 18th-century authors wrote either a historical or an historical but a history, not an history. This usage made sense in that people often did not pronounce the initial h in words such as historical and heroic, but by the late 19th century educated speakers usually gave their initial h's a huff, and the practice of writing an before such words began to die out. Nowadays it survives primarily before the word historical. One may also come across it in the phrases an hysterectomy or an hereditary trait. These usages are acceptable in formal writing.
According to the Usage Notes, both "an" and "a" are correct in written form (since both pronunciations are correct). If you're reading it out loud, "an herbacious" should be pronounced with a silent "h", and "a herbaceous" should be pronounced with an aspirated "h".
As someone who grew up in the US and has never left the country, "an herb" really bothers me because I've always pronounced the "h".
Words that are not commonly used in spoken English may often be mispronounced. Common words are subject to drift.
Then there are regional variations in the US. But then also people move from one region to another. And of course different dialects may coexist.
I am expecting responses to the tune of "eyes are not that complicated" and "wood is actually incredibly complex."
Do all creatures with a brain share a common ancestor? Even more fundamentally, do all creatures share a common ancestor? The answer appears to be "maybe," which I find to be fascinating [1].
1.https://www.researchgate.net/publication/44593277_A_formal_t...
I'm very curious about why this comment got downvoted.
1.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod_eye
2.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_evolution > Parallel evolution is the similar development of a trait in distinct species that are not closely related, but share a similar original trait in response to similar evolutionary pressure.
3. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution > Convergent evolution is the independent evolution of similar features in species of different periods or epochs in time.
OK, OK, I'll go check on that debate... But given the quotes of the definitions you posted here, it sure seems pseudo-.
I don't even know where to start.
In re: TFA, most annuals that we use for crops have perennial versions. I just planted a "thicket bean" (Phaseolus polystachios) which should grow for years! There are perennial kales that grow into small tree-like "canes". There's a thing called a "strawberry tree" that is exactly what it sounds like: a tree that grows strawberry-like fruit. It goes on and on.
One take-away is that agriculture as it has been practiced is about the dumbest way to grow food. :( Check out Gabe Brown's videos on regenerative agriculture to see how we can grow food and increase fertility and volume of soil by incorporating more species and doing less work. See also the "food forest" concept: imagine a park or botanical garden where every species is edible. It takes a while to set up but then it is self-sustaining with low labor, you mostly just harvest.
Another take-away is that we mostly already have all the technology we need to make a really fun and enjoyable civilization. We have all these species that can develop food, medicine, clothing, fiber, wood, etc. such that the vast majority of our needs can be fulfilled in a garden.
> imagine a park or botanical garden where every species is edible.
Make it happen! If the way we’ve been doing things is dumb then there is a massive market opportunity. Save the world, become the first trillionaire.
It does seem like folks are catching on though. Business can be slow to adapt, especially in agriculture, but farmers are pragmatic. Brown's talks seem well-attended.
e.g. An idea to plant a garden with entirely toxic plants is just as valid, but not as valuable.
Useful models are still models after all.
Money does represent value of some kind, right? Whether that's time, labor, or [fill-in-the-blank]. It's a tool to represent generic value.
I'm interested to hear what you think a better unit of measurement might be for determining whether or not an idea is 'valid' or worth doing. Can you elaborate?
It turns out that when we understand what the plants and animals are doing in detail (through science) we can arrange them in time and space in ways that are vastly more efficient than what we've been doing these last ~12k years.
Think about it, if it wasn't so that would mean that our ancestors discovered optimal farming in antiquity, eh?
Just think: we used to burn chaff rather than composting it. It turns out that that is not a good idea. It's that sort of thing that I'm thinking of when I call ag "the dumbest way" to grow food.
Farming has undergone several fundamental changes throughout history after that though, notably in medieval times and then everything industrialization brought
Can you name some that can't be reduced to "but on a [insert new machine]"? The only one I can think of is artificial fertilizer, which isn't a sustainable practice in the long run either.
Compared to that every other revolution in farming was insignificant.
It may take years for new practices to be widespread and accepted, but I assure you, if you can make that chart continue to go up, ~every grain farmer in the US will happily be on board.
There is a certain world-view and a romanticizing to farming, but at the end of the day, farmers are businessmen who just want to grow as much food as possible, as cheaply as possible. They may grumble as much as a software developer when forced to learn new tools, and they won't drop everything for an unproven promise, but they'll happily abandon their old ways in favor of new ones once they're proven.
This assumes both systems are optimizing for the same thing.
We know that evolution is optimizing for continuation or duration (technically "evolution" isn't a thing, it's a non-volitional chemical tautology with no purpose or intrinsic meaning so "it" cannot optimize, however, in practice, life is optimizing for more and continued life, overcoming radiation, impacts, and it's own consequences (like the advent of oxygen and aerobic metabolism)) so what is the other system optimizing for?
(As an aside, is "life is optimizing for more and continued life" a definition for "life"?)
In large farms, seeds are mass produced, engineered, and go through a QA and testing process to prevent certain diseases. There are many good reasons, BTW, why farms don't grow perennials and engage in mono-cropping, or use herbicides and genetically engineered crops instead of no-till. The trade-off in abandoning these practices almost always involves sacrificing yields and the mechanization of labor.
Or how about vineyards?
> There are many good reasons, BTW, why farms don't grow perennials and engage in mono-cropping, or use herbicides and genetically engineered crops instead of no-till.
But sometimes the pests and disease are caused by these same practices, right? Like, I'm aware the Cavendish banana we all eat is very susceptible to a fungal disease that is slowly spreading around the world. Because we produce so much of a single variety, where all plants are clones, a single disease can be highly disruptive. If production was evenly distributed over many varieties, and if plantations had banana plants separated by other useful crops, the whole system might be more resilient.
> The trade-off in abandoning these practices almost always involves sacrificing yields and the mechanization of labor.
The problem (that cannot be escaped) is longevity. Any system of agriculture that does not increase over time soil fertility and volume/mass is doomed.
Systems of agriculture that deplete [various measures of biological health] over time are akin to mining. Once the underlying resources are exhausted the story ends (the resources in question could be water, or biodiversity, or climate stability, etc...)
Even if we compensate with technology, we are substituting our managed system for a automatic system that has been (meta-)stable for billions of years. We should proceed carefully. The billions of people who owe their lives to the Haber-Bosch process (and other innovations) may come to rue it if we crash due to environmental destruction. By some scientific estimates this is the decade when our biomass and the biomass of our agriculture outweighs naturally occurring biomass. For better or worse the world has become our farm.
That's why Gabe Brown (et. al.) seems so important to me: he is integrating modern practices with new (scientifically-validated) regenerative practices and his farm is both profitable and healthier year after year.
How old is it? How is the taste? Is the cane woody or is it more like bamboo or something else? Does it flower?
Cool reference that I hadn't heard of before, so I just looked this up. The fruits of this tree look absolutely nothing like strawberries (more like lychees, IMHO), so I don't think this is a good example for what you're describing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potentilla_indica
Incidentally: from a botanical perspective, strawberries are not berries. Nor do they even taste like straw!
Today I learned that papaya is closely related to cabbage.
cran-, elder-, lingon-, among others.
(Also, the fruit of the strawberry tree, unlike either strawberries or mock strawberries.)
[1] https://i0.wp.com/oaeblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Ger...
No plant nursery will sell you a Raspberry Jam Tree, but you can buy seeds on Etsy: "Acacia acuminata".
They are interesting also because the leaves (which aren't leaves, but "phyllodes") and bark have a high concentration of interesting tryptamine alkaloids.
There are many other fascinating details about A. acuminata. Millions of fenceposts in Australia more than a century old (and more every year!) are made of its wood.
It still loses in profit per investment to modern industrialized farming, so (almost) nobody cares. If you want people to care - tax soil degradation.
Turns out with artificial fertilizers and modern technology neither work nor soil degradation is as important as quick adaptation to market forces and economies of scale.
I just want to point out that the way modern agriculture came to be is not dumb at all, the thing is that its focused on maximizing yield above other things. 7 billion people eat something (almost) everyday, I find it quite impressive that the infrastructure to support that, exists.
I hope the world could be stopped (as it happened, more or less, with COVID) in order to fix some of these problems, but in the case of food, it's going to be hard to ask people to stop eating for a while.
> One take-away is that agriculture as it has been practiced is about the dumbest way to grow food. [...]
One very useful technique in modern agriculture is crop rotation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_rotation
You grow each year a different crops, because they have different fertilizer requirements (and some even fix Nitrogen) and also helps to reduce some plagues. It's also possible to plant different crops in succession, so you get multiple harvests in the same year.
For these, a perennial version is bad.
But if you like those, you should try the berries of haw and ash. They're similar in texture, lack of flavor, and seediness, but their mouthfeel is significantly improved by the lack of scales.
However the honey from them is absolutely special and delicious. The honey is bitter. I fell in love with the honey from the strawberry trees in Corsica.
It takes volunteers real work to keep it tame enough for a city, but they’ve done it for as long as I’ve lived here and it’s a really beautiful spot.
One perk of this style of gardening is that, for various reasons, pest moderation seems to happen automatically. No pesticides are required, the garden is watered by humans only a handful of times in summer, and no fertilizers besides city compost are used. Everything is lush and happy. Insects are everywhere, and perhaps birds are eating those instead of berries. It's hard to say exactly how each biome functions, but this one is very productive and animals aren't a problem for it.
Sometimes annuals are just handy to use the land in a more efficient way. You can obtain three crops in two years in the same land with annual species
I'm definitely no expert, but as kids in the nineties, banana plants were always cited as the example of how large plants are not always trees. Did they get recategorized?
Pineapples do not, by anybody's definition, grow on trees.
Is this (joke) because it's a living fossil with a long lifespan, or something more?
On another level, should we obtain knowledge of a distant, life-filled world orbiting a distant star, we could expect it to be forested by woody plants, and filled with crabs.
To me "tree" simply has to do with being big and tall. Just like the term "whale" excludes porpoises and dolphins, purely based on size, with toothed whales and baleen whales being the actual biological subdivisions of cetacean. (and of course with the oddity that dolphins and porpoises are not whales per se, but they are members of toothed whales i.e. odontocetes)
> When we say a bird is a dinosaur
Lol no, you're not getting away with that. As long as you bastards are going to keep harassing the populace with the "fun fact" that birds are dinosaurs, then fish are monophyletic, dinosaurs are fish, birds are fish, and so are whales. Eat what you ordered.