this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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This comic is so old, that both should be rather easy now
She did get her research team after all :)
Now try to identify if it's a fish
Oof
Fish? You mean a water bird?
🐬
There's no such thing called fish.
- Stephen Jay Gould (Biologist)
Or there's fish and we are one, or there's fish but hagfish, dogfish and lungfish are something else.
I guess we could return to medieval and say it's based on shape not taxonomy, too, so whales would be fish.
It's why taxonomy uses latin for this... the definition of english words are based on common usage which isn't going to line up to any kind of scientific categorization. English is always changing and scientific categorization is also always changing when there's more empirical data. These changes are independent of each other so it was wisely decided long ago to not even try to make english words consistent with scientific taxonomy.
So in common usage, yeah it's based around the general shape but it isn't a whale (big mammal) a dolphin (a relatively smaller mammal). A shark might be called a fish but more likely someone will just call it a shark instead of just using just "fish". This is fine for communication among laypeople, if marine biologists are having a conversation about those same animals, they break out the latin and there's no confusion.
Also my understanding is that in medieval times, the word whale actually refereed to a specific species of whale... what we know call the Right Whale, which is nearly extinct. So a word for a species became a word for a group of species and then it was awkward how to refer to that original species. What kind of whale is that? "It's a whale whale... you know the original whale... the proper whale... the right whale." There's actually a paragraph in Moby Dick about this.
English is weird and changes in weird ways. Just use latin if you want to be scientifically precise.
I mean, some of the taxanomic divisions do have common names as well - jawed fish and ray-finned fish might come up in that conversation. And don't forget some of the formal names and roots are Greek as well.
Was that the weird chapter that was just a biology lesson, but was also completely wrong?
Searching for "jawed fish" takes me here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnathostomata
But that's jawed vertebrates. So I'm not sure which taxonomic group you're referring to when you're saying "jawed fish". The wiki page indicates salamaders are in the Gnathostomata group. Are salamanders considered to be jawed fish?
I think this just goes to further prove that using english words for taxonomy just causes a lot of confusion. My search results for "jawed fish" also returns a lot of results from national park sites and yeah, that kind of terminology for a national park conversing with a layperson is fine. Close enough for a layperson, but for a biologist they probably should use Gnathostomata when that's what they're talking about.
Probably, but it's been awhile since I read it. But it would be insane to read Moby Dick expecting it to be a good biology text book. You have to read it as people's understanding of biology and terminology in the past, which is why I referenced it in the context of the evolution of linguistics about ocean animals.
Sorry, "jawed fish" is used a lot in when talking about the epochs where tetrapods hadn't evolved yet - growing the first jaws was a pretty big landmark. That's my bad. Ray-finned is pretty clear, though, and doesn't include anything I can think of that's unexpected.
They absolutely do use casual terms as well as the technical names when talking to each other - I've been a fly on that wall. They tend not to get confused about their own subject. However, when they have to get into more specifics than "that's a squat lobster" yeah, they have to go back to the jargon.
Oh, yeah, the specific example listed was solved within roughly a month of the comic being posted. But the idea still applies, as seen with the twitter post above.
Well, sure, with an image classifier, the bird identification is doable. I'm sure I could implement that if I went looking for some open source thingamabob that does that. But it's still not something I could actually understand. That part definitely hasn't changed over the years.
Having taken an ML class, with some of my college notes I could do this and "understand" it... but the weights would still be a black box. AI training is black (box) magic.
Ebird/ Merlin bird id does this wonderfully.
only because people never stopped asking it to be able to id birds.
It took almost exactly 5 years from publication for that to be commonplace.
Can't wait for the Disney live action movie remake of XKDC comics!
Plot twist: it will be written and created by AI:-(.
It will feature all sorts of jokes about using qwerty and windows
And Linux, if the Fediverse had any say about the matter! (Or xkcd either:-D)
TBF it had been a long standing problem for roughly a half century before this. Specifically birds were the thing researchers tried to identify in images first, which is probably the reference here.