“There’s no such thing as a fish because you can’t define it phylogenetically without also including things that aren’t fish”
Man I have bad news for you about lizards. And reptiles in general. And wasps, but I guess that depends on your opinion on wasps. And I don’t think you’re ready for trees.
I’m defineiely not prepared for trees but if you want an excuse to make tumblr suffer i will be the sacrifice
Trees aren’t a phylum or an order or anything like that, being a tree is just a thing some plants do
It’s been described as a biological strategy – you want light, an efficient way to do that is put all the bits of you that want light (that is, leaves) high up so they’re not in the shadow of other things, spread out both to cover a wide area and so they’re not in their own shade, because that would be a waste of leaf
So the same shape of doing this has evolved independently dozens of times – crabs have nothing on trees. But this also leads to disagreement as to what a tree even is
For example, is a palm a tree? They don’t have branches, but they do have a canopy – what about how a lot of conifers don’t have a canopy? Just a cone of green that comes down to the ground! If that’s a tree, what’s the difference between a tree and a bush?
But we can agree they’re centred around a single woody trunk right, so there’s a starting point – except no, in comes the quaking aspen, which is one huge organism below the surface that shoots up trunks wherever the hell it feels like it, each of which is by any casual observer’s reckoning obviously a tree.
The last thing we want to do is answer any of these questions, because that’s how we end up with the whole berry situation, where a tomato is a berry but a strawberry is a “fleshy receptacle”
The most common definition i’ve seen is something like “large perennial plant with a woody stem, which expands outward over time by growing a new layer of vascular tissue every year.”
This is a pretty good strict definition of a tree, though it excludes tree ferns and palm trees. The problem is woody vines. Grape vines and poison ivy are trees now. It also includes a lot of plants usually considered bushes or shrubs. No one agrees on the difference between a tree and a shrub. It’s a mess.
Usually I see “true trees” described as being those with a vascular cambium, since that’s the part that creates rings and expands the diameter of the trunk every year. All monocots (like bamboo and palm trees) are out because they have vascular bundles suspended randomly in parenchyma tissue. Lianas and woody vines you could exclude neatly by saying a tree needs to be self-erect, not climbing. Meanwhile the distinction between a woody shrub and tree seems to be mostly bigness relative to a human, and how far the branches are from the root collar. This is made funnier by the fact many popular landscaping “trees” actually desperately want to be shrubs and you have to keep pruning suckers off the root collar to keep them a neat lollipop shape. Crape myrtles come to mind.
Truly a rebel against restrictive linguistic categories
sometimes when you see light in the darkness..its a glowing one..and sometimes they might just make your day brighter…
Yeah so like what actually happened to them?
After they landed on the dark side of the moon, they kicked out the nazis and now theres no stopping them from painting the moon pink and drawing lenins face on it.
Everyone knows that things aren’t working anymore, it’s just that if you have a scientific materialist understanding of the world you can actually know *why* it’s not working, whereas if you have a demon-haunted view of the world, your impulse is going to be to try to sacrifice someone to appease the gods.
