this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] FishFace@piefed.social 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Fish, interestingly, aren’t a real thing in terms of formal classification

This is misleading. Formal classification existed for a long time before phylogenetic classification became the standard.

[–] stray@pawb.social 3 points 2 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] FishFace@piefed.social 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] MrShankles@reddthat.com 1 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Sounds like something a fish would say