This is one of my favourite articles! But as someone who has recently become interested in botany, what I find really crazy about this is that there are so many different ways for plants to become trees. A listing (surely incomplete):

• Normal trees, like what you see every day, with bark and wood and so on

• Monocots like yucca and aloe and Draecena, which have no bark and become woody through ‘abnormal secondary growth’ (which I don’t properly understand but has something to do with wood development being scattered throughout the plant instead of in a ring around the edge), and tend to avoid branching except when the growing tip is disturbed

• Other monocots like palm trees and Strelitzias, where the ‘wood’ is actually the bases of dead leaves wrapped very very tightly together, firmly enough to keep the plant standing up

• Fern trees, which… I’m not at all sure about, but seem to work on the same principle where leaf bases sorta get fused together. But the Dicksonia in my front yard seems to extrude some sort of thin fiber — does that perhaps help to hold the trunk together in some way?

• And then there’s things like papaya and banana and giant horsetails, which become trees without any wood at all, and have presumably innovated other ways of holding themselves up

It’s interesting to walk around my neighbourhood and realise that many of the trees I see have evolved almost completely different methods to get to the same result!

Well, I thought this was a fascinating and well-written article.

p.s. I learnt not long ago that there's no such 'thing' as an antelope:

"The term antelope is used to refer to many species of even-toed ruminant that are indigenous to various regions in Africa and Eurasia. Antelope comprise a wastebasket taxon (miscellaneous group) within the family Bovidae, encompassing all Old World ruminants that are not bovines, caprines, deer, or giraffes."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antelope

I’ve become increasingly interested in what I think would be called “computational botany” if it were to be fleshed out. In looking at this and articles like it, and speaking with both trained and amateur botanists, a common thread is that the appearance of a plant has become increasingly detached from its scientific classification. A frequent refrain in nature hikes I’ve been a part of goes along the lines of: “this plant used to be family X, but then dna testing showed it was actually family Z” - “what? You’re kidding, that’s family Z? It has all the characteristics of an X!” - “Yep, Z. I don’t much understand it myself but apparently that’s what the dna says.”

I think this is a bit silly. It’s akin to categorizing programs by the libraries they use or the programming language they’re written in rather than the problems they solve. What’s more useful to the layperson: “VSCode, IntelliJ, and Vim are Text Editor family; Slack, Talk2Me, and mIrc are Chat family” or “VSCode and Slack are Electron family; IntelliJ and Talk2Me are Java family; and Vim and mIrc are C family”?

The idea with my proposed “Computational Botany” is that the only information used to classify a plant is that same information that would be used to generate a computer model of the plant. So if a specimen has all the markers of an X appearance wise, such that implementing its clone would take the least changes when starting from an existing X, it’s an X.

Of course, the actual implementation of these models may end up requiring an unattainable God-level intelligence, but I leave that as an exercise to future me (or you!)

Shape seems to be a very superficial trait. One need only consider an elephant's trunk. In terms of shape and size, it has more in common with my leg, but ask anyone, "What is an elephant's trunk?" and they will immediately tell you "A nose!"

When it comes to examining various lifeforms and fossil remains to determine ancestory, it seems to be more a matter of homology - the relationships between parts. Whether it's the same part over long periods of time (ex. comparing differences in the thumb) or different parts within the same individual (ex. comparing the big toe and thumb) or interspecies similarities (ex. the similarities of hands, feet, paws and flippers), evolution is a story of relationships, not size or shape.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2097084

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homology_(biology)

Fascinating article, but I think it could benefit from some more examples. Since it mentions "a tree evolving into a dandelion (or vice-versa)" and then a paper about wood evolving independently at least 38 times in the Canary Islands, the perfect example is Sonchus Canariensis (https://www.smgrowers.com/products/plants/plantdisplay.asp?p..., better picture: https://garden.org/pics/2014-03-30/Kelli/5ef4db.jpg). I saw this plant during a hike on Tenerife a few years ago and found it so fascinating that it has stuck in my mind ever since. It's basically a colony of dandelions (ok, they're a bit larger, but still clearly dandelion-like) growing on long woody stalks. Not quite a tree yet, but definitely a shrub. I guess its peculiarity of only having leaves at the tip of its "branches" limits its growth, because the water circulation in a "tree" is made possible by the negative pressure produced by water evaporation on the leaves, so a "branch" can only get so long with leaves only at its tip?

And, since it later also mentions theoretical "insect birds"... well, there are some insects who are regularly mistaken for hummingbirds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hummingbird_hawk-moth. In photos you can quite clearly see that it's an insect, but if you see it in real life it hovers around flowers just like a miniature hummingbird, and it's a bit large and bulky for a flying insect, so the confusion is understandable. BTW this is also an example of convergent evolution, and it's interesting that these moths don't exist on the American continent, where the actual hummingbirds have occupied this ecological niche.

This is also a thing with mushrooms.

The Common Earthball [1] f.x. is more related to a Porcino [2] than to a Meadow Puffball [3] which itself is related to the Field Mushroom [4].

Seems like genes are more like a toolbox where evolution takes from what it needs. After all we share a significant amount of common genes with totally different animals like flies.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scleroderma_citrinum

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boletus_edulis

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycoperdon_pratense

4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agaricus_campestris

I don't get the premise of the article. A tree is just a growth shape of a plant (plants are quite flexible regarding growth shapes, and often adapt to the environment), and a category that our minds place a plant species into. And its clearly an ancient ability common to all vascular plants to develop woody tissues. So why would we expect the tendency of a plant to become a tree to depend on its position in the phylogenetic tree? (the authors had me there for a moment. I thought they wanted to show that the phylogenetic tree is not really a tree!)

> Why don’t more plants evolve towards the “grass” strategy?

Grasses have a trick: Grass blades grow at the base of the blade and not from elongated stem tips. This low growth point evolved in response to grazing animals and allows grasses to be grazed or mown regularly without severe damage to the plant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaceae#Description

When you think about it, it would actually be crazier if our common words matched exactly with biological evolution.

> Imagine if actually there were amphibian birds and mammal birds and insect birds flying all around

Bats (mammal)

Mosquitoes (amphibian)

Any number of flying insects. My least favourite is a two inch long flying cockroach that I encountered on a visit to Tāmaki Makaurau

"Tree is not a distinct clade" is the version of the title that isn't clickbait horseshit.

Can we say the same about moths? I’m an avid participant on iNaturalist. I record lots of moth sightings because there really are many beautiful moths in Hong Kong.

There’s a “Hong Kong Moths” project on iNaturalist, but adding observations to that project can be very frustrating because the observation must be in one of the defined (sub)families.

But to an amateur like me, a moth is a moth is a moth. Sometimes even the machine identification is way off and I know it’s a moth because of the general body features.

And I wouldn’t want to put it in a random (sub)family just to get the observation included in the project. I’d have to @mention some moth expert (e.g. @hkmoths, Dr. Roger Kendrick) to help me ID the observation first.

This reminded me of the fascinating obversation of convergent evolution, the "independent evolution of similar features in species of different periods or epochs in time" [1].

For example, the concept of flight has evolved independently numerous of times (insects, birds, pterosaurs, and bats), so it would not be unreasonable to assume that it would evolve again, were life to start over from scratch.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution

I'm surprised he describes the pineapple as a tree?

This just means that our notion of a tree does not map cleanly to a genetic lineage. That does not mean the concept is useless, even in scientific fields.

Perhaps not, yet I have never seen anything so lovely.

Previous discussion from half a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27094382

Following a link in that article lead me to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welwitschia, where I found what will be probably be the best sentence that I've read today:

Plants in Angola are better protected than those in Namibia, because of the relatively high concentration of land mines in Angola, which keep collectors away.

Don't scientists use phenotypical similarity to deduce ancestry when it comes to fossil remains?

If phenotypical similarit is so unreliable, what are the implications?

I'm not a botanist, but I understood that trees and herbs are genetically close when I visited Madeira and saw the Dandelion tree [1] - a tree which leaves and flowers are regular dandelions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonchus_fruticosus

PS. Ok, it's technically a shrub.

In many parts of the US, there's poison ivy, a noxious weed that can cause severe itching, rashes, ect on contact with skin. It's common where I live, so I've become very good at identifying it.

Sometimes it's just groundcover. Sometimes it's a shrub. Sometimes it's a vine. It's surprising how its stem can take many different forms.

When I started my studies, we had a tour of the hortus of our university. A retired taxonomist gave us the tour, and was lamenting how genetic research had changed quite a bit of the taxonomy of his gardens, and that the old art of careful observation and encyclopedic knowledge of the appearance of plants was lost on his successors.

The world is whatever it is.

The classification we overlay on what we perceive might (or might not) relate to physical reality. One is objectively real, one is theoretical.

We can have all sorts of theories about how things have come to be, but again these might (or might not) relate to reality.

We do not and cannot achieve a theory of everything, even if we kid ourselves that we can be papering over the cracks. Physical reality just isn't that sort of thing that we can know as well as all that.

And this doesn't even mention how our data perception in only on a narrow range. Nor the fact that our theories drive the observations, rather than observations driving the theories.

We can certainly hack bits, and get them to do things, understand nature's tricks and re-implement them in a different context. But really understanding it? Not so much.

PS very interesting that the author mentions 'neoteny'. This is where a 'species' stays in a prolonged juvenile state.

I've long thought that this sounds like modern life, where people do not want to take personal responsibility for their lives, but instead look to various authorities (government, corporations, their mum) to do it for them.

This is why relying on inheritance for OOP should be kept to a minimum... because even in real life, there's no such thing as as tree.

I thought the premise was that “phylogenetic trees” don’t exist. Interesting phraseology.

Anyone know where bamboo(s?) would fit on this chart?

A fern is not a tree. Hmm... What about a Tree Fern?

This is why I don't respect rationalism as a philosophy.