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Eels are fish

(eocampaign1.com)
178 points speckx | 1 comments | 03 Sep 25 14:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.232s | source
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boesboes ◴[03 Sep 25 14:37 UTC] No.45116372[source]▶
Apparently we are all fish. Or fish don't exist.

To explain: if you want to define a taxonomy in which all things that look like fish and swim are 'fish' then we are too. We are more closely related to most 'fish' than sharks are. I.e the last common ancestor of herring AND sharks is older than our & herring's LCA.

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nixpulvis ◴[03 Sep 25 14:58 UTC] No.45116591[source]▶
I could be way off base here, and I don't honestly know much about biology... but just because two species don't have recent common ancestors, doesn't mean they couldn't have co-evolved and ended up very similarly, right? Wouldn't this be grounds for relating their classification?
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philwelch ◴[03 Sep 25 15:06 UTC] No.45116675[source]▶
Convergent evolution happens all the time but taxonomy is nonetheless based on ancestry.
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1. SAI_Peregrinus ◴[03 Sep 25 15:34 UTC] No.45117003[source]▶
Also "horizontal gene transfer" happens in bacteria, and even happens in multicellular sexually-reproducing organisms after viral infection in some cases. Taxonomy should be a directed acyclic graph, not a tree.