Actually, There's No Such

Thing as a Fish, Say Cladists

Fish. They seem so innocent and harmless. But secretly,

they're subverting scientific law and order.

That's according to a group of scientists nicknamed

cladists for their support of a scientific classification
system of species based on clades.

A clade is a fancy term for all of and only the modern

species descended via evolution from a specific common
ancestor.

To make that a little easier to understand, picture your

own family tree: your maternal grandmother, your mom
and all of her siblings, and you, all of your siblings, and all
of your mom's siblings' children - they're a kind of clade.

Take away your siblings or add your father, though, and

it's no longer a clade.

This is where fish get into trouble. A lot of trouble. Trouble

the size of an elephant, a whale, and an emperor penguin
all put together.

That's because all life evolved out of the water. Reptiles,

mammals, birds - even dinosaurs - all came from
something that we would say looked pretty much like a
fish. And there's so much more diversity among what we
call "fish" in every day conversation that they spread far
around the outskirts of these subgroups.

Here's a simplified depiction of the problem at hand:

Petter Bøckman/Wikimedia Commons/Tech Insider

As you can see, there's no way to draw a clade that will

encompass everything we call a fish without snagging a
mouse or a manatee along the way.

So for the cladists, either there is no such thing as fish - or

we're fish too.

Of course, the cladists' approach to species is useful for

asking certain questions. When evolution has literally built
everything you are thinking about, classifying all those
things based on how evolution works makes a lot of
sense.

But it's hard not to find the proclaimed death of the idea
of a fish a little absurd.

This article was originally published by Tech Insider.