One of our bioinformatics has a sign at his desk that says "taxonomy is a social construct".
this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2025
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Conservatives hate this one trick!
(The trick: literally everything in all aspects of reality, from the larges to smallest scales to every branch of life and consciousness is a motherfucking SPECTRUM. No hard lines. Nothing is solid. Not even the matter you're standing or sitting on.)
"Yah but nuance is so hard! It's so much easier to just hate everything I don't understand"
A paper I quite enjoy is "Queer Theory for Lichens" which argued that queer theory is genuinely a useful framework for studying lichens; Lichens resist categorisation in a manner that feels like they're actively mocking our taxonomic efforts.
“taxonomy is a social construct”
i mean for bacteria it actually is because bacteria can exchange genes across "species" so it's not really a species... at least not in the sense of eukaryotes (where species are defined such that different species cannot exchange genes with each other)
Even for anything else, it actually is. Taxonomy is our construct that we came up with as a society to classify life. We cannot ever be "right" about it, it can just be more or less useful for us to understand life.
in that case we cannot ever be "right" about anything, as any thought we have is just a model that helps us get through life?
Yes and it is very important to constantly remind ourselves that all our abstractions and classifications are just that. Helpful tools for us to view and understand the world. People tend to forget that and over time see their categorization as essential and natural. For example, sex and gender are both socially constructed but people forget that and then create a whole set of rules around it to reinforce that categorization including social stigmatization and infant mutilation.
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BEHOLD! THE MAMMAL! IT GIVES MILK AND HAS HAIR!
(And has venomous claws, lays eggs, has electroreceptors, glows under UV, has 10 sex chromosomes, genetically it’s a mix of reptiles and mammals…)
It's one of twoish (one species of platypus, three of echidnas) mammals on its order (the other order which has all the more normal mammals — placental mammals) it's so different to the other mammals that really all monotremes have in common with placentals is hair and milk
sounds like average republican
Proof that God is fucking with us
I tell you it’s just an Echidna that made love to a Lizard and that’s how we got the Platypus.
Was the duck an innocent bystander or willing participant?
Videographer that accidentally mixed his genetic juice with the copulating couple
Ok, but chickens produce milk too, just like coconuts:
wiki/Crop_milk
Also dis:
Some spiders also produce milk.
So they are coconuts.
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