• DroneRights [it/its]
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    1 year ago

    Birds are dinosaurs because taxonomy as a field is fundamentally based on garbage pseudoscience

    • HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      But even with more modern methods like cladistics and genetic analysis, birds are still found to be directly descended from contemporary dinosaurs.

      • DroneRights [it/its]
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        1 year ago

        And the taxonomic rule that any animal is also all of its ancestors is garbage science.

        • HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          That’s not “science,” that’s just an arbitrary convention that can help simplify communication of complex toppics. The genetic data that the convention is derived from is the science, in the form of a lineage of genetic relations between organisms and nothing else, because biology has exactly zero built-in categories or labels, and those are all human-made.

          • DroneRights [it/its]
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            1 year ago

            Exactly, it’s not science. And it’s not helpful either. It doesn’t simplify communication. The representative conventions of taxonomy are not derived from evidence, they’re derived from the irrelevant feelings of taxonomists hundreds of years ago who didn’t understand how the world works. It’s pseudoscience. Pointless tradition masquerading as a legitimate exploratory endeavour.