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…)
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
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…)
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
One of our bioinformatics has a sign at his desk that says "taxonomy is a social construct".
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.
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"
“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.
Ok, but chickens produce milk too, just like coconuts:
wiki/Crop_milk
Also dis:
Some spiders also produce milk.
So they are coconuts.
I wonder how many people think that this;
is what a coconut actually looks like.
EDIT:
Coconut as it looks on the palm tree
That coconut is clearly not on a palm tree, mate. /s
To be honest, I've noticed that with lots of foods. I know what the thing looks like in stores, but I have no idea what it's like in nature.
Cashews were another recent one, where I never would have guessed what they look like:
ya
I just ate wholemeal rice and still would not have guessed rice. 🥴
If that's not a coconut, what the fuck have I been eating?
Edit: Ok. The edit makes it make sense lol.
I got to travel Southeast Asia for a time, it's atrocious how much we're missing out on in the USA.
Even the really fresh coconuts here just don't compare to the ones you get fresh off a tree. It's unreal. Don't get me started on my Mango Rant.
I lived in the US Virgin Islands as a kid. Our back yard had a seemingly endless supply of mangoes, bananas, avocado, lime, oranges (the real stuff, not the engineered shit we eat in the mainland), grapefruit, bread fruit, acerola, plantains, and pigeon peas. It wasn't even that big a yard. Shit just grows.
Hmm... I am a quack, therefore I duck?