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CronoDAS comments on The Featherless Biped - Less Wrong
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Taxonomists have a pretty ugly job, having to fit messy real-world objects into categories and having those categories be sharply defined.
For example, do you want to put mushrooms and other fungi into the category "plant"? It seems like a plant, has a cell wall like a plant, is mostly immobile like a plant, but it doesn't perform photosynthesis!
I only said "taxonomically" instead of "phylogenically" because I couldn't think of the latter word. I would imagine a phylogenist's job to be a bit easier: fungi are more closely related to animals than to green plants; therefore, unless animals are plants, fungi are not plants. I'd say it's pretty darn convenient for the phylogenist that, at least in eukaryotes, everything can be organized into neat, sharply defined categories.