In a break from the long tradition of grouping all fish into a single class (Pisces), modern phylogenetics views fish as a paraphyletic group that includes all vertebrates except tetrapods.
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2026
23 points (81.1% liked)
Showerthoughts
41231 readers
379 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Intelligence is knowing whales are fish. Wisdom is not putting a whale in a fish salad.
I had a whole deleted other paragraph in the OP about how everyday language isn't beholden to strict scientific nomenclature, in which I mention tomatoes specifically. A chef probably doesn't care about the exact botanical definition of "fruit", and is more concerned that tomatoes pair well with savory foods like other vegetables do, so forcing the distinction in this case would only confuse things.
I know I'm also undercutting my own joke, but calling whales (and humans) "fish" in the cladistic sense, while true, is also not very helpful.
As far as I'm concerned, culinary terminology will never override scientific definitions. The full phrase should be "tomatoes are used like a vegetable because of their relatively lower sugar content" rather than "tomatoes are vegetables". To me it's like someone living out of their car and calling it a house. Sure you live there and you do things in there that you would in a house, but that's still a car at the end of the day.
Experience is knowing Muktuk is delicious and works on a salad if cut small enough.
Monke is fish.
Fish is not a real classification.
Your Honor, I wanna present evidence in defense of OP:
Exhibit A: In Dutch language the creature is called "walvis", in which the syllable "vis" translates directly to "fish" in English.
Exhibit B: The scientist Stephen Jay Gould concluded, after a lifetime studying marine life, that "fish" do not form a single genus, nor are they all closely related to one another, and that there is no single evolutionary ancestor exclusive to all species traditionally called fish. This implies that the term "fish" is not a scientifically coherent category, and therefore any aquatic creature could, in principle, be labeled a "fish".
I rest my case.
Your mom is a whale.
You Honor I wanna present evidence in defense of OP:
Exhibit A: In Chinese Language it's 鲸鱼
Literally has the character "鱼" in the word, the 鲸 character also has the 鱼 radical built into the character.
I rest my case.
So it's a double fish!
That's pretty fishy.
By that logic all life is just self replicating organic chemicals.
If whales are fish, then so are coelacanths.