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Comment Threads

• Greg Tingey commented on Taxonomy of story, or, why murder?
  s-s Yes, we do get BANANAS paws @ 509 In England, specifically ( Scotland is different ) being anti-golf defines you (almost ) as anti-fascist. There are some really deeply unpleasant racist ant-semitic crawlers areound on Brit golf-courses. And you are in Scotland are you not? IIRC the Royal & Ancient is open to all for walking on Sundays - that sort of thing is NOT allowed in England, might let brown people / Jews / the riff-raff in, you know. Pigeon @ 513 No, you weren't - you were mycologising....
• Heteromeles commented on Taxonomy of story, or, why murder?
  Mycologizing? Um, yeah. Since botany is the science that (in Victorian English terms) was everything fit for females to learn, e.g. it was the study of stuff that didn't pee on you in fear and which wasn't hunted by sporting chaps to show off their machismo. Since mushrooms don't pee in fear when handled, they got shoveled in as a botanical subject, as did seaweeds. It turns out that neither fungi nor seaweeds are any closer to plants than animals are, but the idea of plantish things being womens' work has been an epiphyte on anglophone botany ever since (handle...
• Geoff Hart commented on Taxonomy of story, or, why murder?
  Heteromeles noted: "Since botany is the science that (in Victorian English terms) was everything fit for females to learn, e.g. it was the study of stuff that didn't pee on you in fear and which wasn't hunted by sporting chaps to show off their machismo. Since mushrooms don't pee in fear when handled, they got shoveled in as a botanical subject, as did seaweeds..." I suspect Jeff vanderMeer might beg to differ about the behavior of macrofungi. G Hetermeles: "It turns out that neither fungi nor seaweeds are any closer to plants than animals are" Yes and no. Fungi and...
• Heteromeles commented on Taxonomy of story, or, why murder?
  As far as the Eukaryotic Tree of Life goes, fungi are far closer to animals than they are to plants. Algae are a polyglot group, including green algae (Chlorophytes, sister to plants), red algae (next out), stramenopiles (far from both), and weirder stuff. When you look at that tree, the thing to realize is that zoology deals only with phylum animalia, while botany kinda got stuck with the rest of that eukaryotic tree. That is, of course, why zoology is a higher status science than botany is....
• Geoff Hart commented on Taxonomy of story, or, why murder?
  Heteromeles: "As far as the Eukaryotic Tree of Life goes, fungi are far closer to animals than they are to plants." My bad: I was referring to the original context (why women could only do botany, thus long ago) and didn't make that explicit. Pre-genetics, things like the presence of a cell wall would be enough to classify fungi and algae as being, essentially, plants. Adding 100 years of research plus accounting for the exceptions would obviously change the resulting conclusion. But this raises the important point that classification systems depend crucially on the purpose of the classification. Traditional Linnaean...