this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2025
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No. Insects have 6 legs, spiders have 8.
Are they in some separate category?
They're separate biological classes.
So they're about as far apart as you are from a reptile, bird or fish.
Not exactly. Humans, birds, and reptiles are all within the phylum chordata, while arachnids and insects are both within the phylum arthropoda.
Fish, interestingly, aren't a real thing in terms of formal classification. The term is similar to bug in that we apply it to whichever creatures we feel fit the description.
Yeah I simplified it a bit cause I didn't want to open a can of dinosaurs.
I don't know if you saw Johandea's reply to me, but it made me realize I was mistaken about what you meant.
I love opening cans of dinosaurs. :D
It's the chicken of the past (literally)
But all fish, no matter which classification you use, are also part of the phylum chordata, just like reptiles, birds and mammals. @mech@feddit.orgs statement still holds true.
It took me a bit to understand what you mean, but I get it now! I was looking at it from the perspective of them being quite similar, but they are as different, aren't they?
This is misleading. Formal classification existed for a long time before phylogenetic classification became the standard.
Pluto used to be considered a planet, but I'm not going to tell people it is one today. Pisces as a class was abandoned due to the realization that we were mistaken about how similar/related they are to each other. Whales used to be included in pisces.
Pluto lost its planethood with great fanfare, to the extent that most people at least vaguely know that happened. As such, there's not much confusion when someone refers to Pluto as a dwarf planet or the eight planets or whatever.
The planets are also something which people essentially only encounter as science. You don't go to the supermarket and buy a planet, you can't go and spot some in your local river or whatever. The nearest would be being able to point out Mars or Venus in the night sky.
This is unlike fish, reptiles, fruits and berries, etc. And it's different from my personal least favourite example of this kind of pedantry: poison. Unlike venom, which is basically just a scientific term, poison and poisonous is an everyday term.
Science needs precise terms in order to do science properly. But that doesn't mean that scientists - or more often those interested in science - need to enforce those precise terms on everybody else.
Sounds like something a fish would say
Glub glub