Monophyletic Taxa Are Fake Too

FIRSTLY: Matt Wedel has written a fairly eye-opening account of his recent experience with having his words distorted by the production company Dangerous Ltd. for their recent show Clash of the Dinosaurs, followed up heah and neah. These provide some valuable insight as to why so many shows on the Discovery Channel suck balls, as well as some suggestions on how to improve the situation. Moving on...

The following story is a work of fiction, though inspired by true events.

Once upon a time, there lived a population of drab and uninteresting terrestrial carnivorous reptiles that ate mice. “This is bullshit,” they thought, “to be so drab and uninteresting.” However, since adaptations are driven by random mutation and natural selection, they could do nothing about it. One day, one of them committed suicide by drowning herself in a river. She was buried and fossilized. Her name was Cecilia.

One day, three million years later, a subset of the population was isolated on a distant island, and random mutation and natural selection resulted in the development of a row of low spines running down their back, along with a larger and more robust body, allowing them to tackle larger prey animals which lived on the islands. “HELL yeah!” They said. “This is more like it!” They threw a massive kegger, and one named Ralph drank too much and died of alcohol poisoning. His friends overreacted and buried him in the floodplain, swearing to never speak of it again. He was also fossilized.

After another million years, some members of Ralph’s species decided to found a nudist colony on another island inhabited by the same prey species. Random mutation and natural selection resulted in the development of a distinctive coloration and mating display which caused their parent species to regard them as perverts. This display involved a prominent frill which grew over the pelvis, and a short horn on the nose. Other than that, their body plan and lifestyle didn’t change. One day, one of them got swept out to sea and drowned. He was buried and fossilized in marine mudstones. His name was Terence.
Four million years later, some members of Terence’s species just decided they wanted to live on a new island. They evolved into specialized marine predators with a long slender snout, flippers and a long, fin-like tail. They reduced the pelvic fin and nasal horn, but did not lose them entirely. They developed not only a different body plan and lifestyle, but genetic differences from Terence’s species far more extreme than those between Terence and Ralph’s species. One day one of them just died, in her sleep. It was very peaceful. Her name was Selma. She was buried and fossilized on the mainland, because she had always wanted to go there. It was really beautiful.
Seventy million years passed, and one day a species of primate took an interest in paleontology. Through perseverance and luck, they found the fossilized skeletons of Cecilia, Ralph, Terence and Selma. They correctly deduced, in broad terms, their evolutionary history, including the fact that Terence and Selma, despite their extremely different anatomical specializations, had a more recent common ancestor than Terence and Ralph due to the fact that they uniquely shared a pelvic fin and a nasal horn lacking in Ralph and Cecilia. They drew a picture with Cecelia, Ralph, Terence, and Selma on it. It may sound strange to turn a series of events into an abstract concept like a diagram, but this primate species found it helpful in order to grasp things conceptually.
Now comes the odd part. This primate species had a hard time drawing a distinction between real history and they abstract concepts that they used to describe and communicate about this real history. For example, they decided that Terence and Selma, simply due to the fact that they had a common ancestor, were the same…thing. Specifically, they were a thing shaped like a “V.” They lived on separate islands in separate times and had totally different lifestyles, but they were the same…thing. A thing shaped like a fucking “V.”

Then they realized, that Selma, Terence, and Ralph have a common ancestor too, and decided that also made them a single…thing. It was also shaped like a ‘V’. And Selma, Terence, and Ralph shared a common ancestor with Cecilia too, and that also made them the same…thing. Shaped like a “V.” These “V”s all fit nicely inside of each other, appealing to the primates sense of symmetry and order.

Then they decided that these “V”s were not just abstractions to help our visual primate brains grasp common descent. The “V”s were, well….real.

It gets weirder though.

Other primates noted that there were other interesting things to look at with Cecelia, Ralph, Terence, and Selma besides common descent. They noted for instance that Ralph and Terence shared a bunch of morphological adaptations related to their predatory lifestyle, which they inherited from a common ancestor, and set them apart from Cecelia and Selma. They decided to describe Ralph and Terence as being the same…thing. They didn’t mean for Selma’s fossilized bones to feel bad by being left out, but she didn’t strike them as being the same…thing.

“We mean no harm”, they said. “We just think there are other things to talk about besides common descent. Like common descent and morphology, or common descent and lifestyle. We just want a word to encompass these patterns of variation. CAN WE JUST HAVE A WORD?”

Then they went on to say: “Common descent between two organisms may be a reality. It may be a historical fact that two organisms have a more recent common ancestor than a third. However, if you start talking about organisms separated by millions of years of time and thousands of years of time as a single “thing”, than you are talking about an abstraction. A clade does not exist anywhere except in our imaginations. And this is OK! This is perfectly all right! We need abstractions to communicate. However, when you start saying that another type of abstraction should not be used because it is less ‘real’, things are getting silly."

Then they went on to say: “Why are we so obsessed with the idea that a classification system has to be ‘real?’ Why can’t we just admit that classification systems are inherently fake, because ‘natural groups’ with tidy, un-arbitrarily defined boundaries do not exist in nature? Why can’t we just acknowledge that we need abstractions to communicate about concepts and history, and that a concept can be both abstract and imaginary and still be useful?”

They were punished for heresy. God, it was fucking horrible. They used the CHIMP CANON.
LNJ