this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2025
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One of our bioinformatics has a sign at his desk that says "taxonomy is a social construct".
Conservatives hate this one trick!
(The trick: literally everything in all aspects of reality, from the larges to smallest scales to every branch of life and consciousness is a motherfucking SPECTRUM. No hard lines. Nothing is solid. Not even the matter you're standing or sitting on.)
"Yah but nuance is so hard! It's so much easier to just hate everything I don't understand"
i mean for bacteria it actually is because bacteria can exchange genes across "species" so it's not really a species... at least not in the sense of eukaryotes (where species are defined such that different species cannot exchange genes with each other)
Even for anything else, it actually is. Taxonomy is our construct that we came up with as a society to classify life. We cannot ever be "right" about it, it can just be more or less useful for us to understand life.
in that case we cannot ever be "right" about anything, as any thought we have is just a model that helps us get through life?
Yes and it is very important to constantly remind ourselves that all our abstractions and classifications are just that. Helpful tools for us to view and understand the world. People tend to forget that and over time see their categorization as essential and natural. For example, sex and gender are both socially constructed but people forget that and then create a whole set of rules around it to reinforce that categorization including social stigmatization and infant mutilation.
ok then two comments:
if nothing is strictly true, then that implies that the statement that "nothing is strictly true" is also not strictly true, i.e. there are exceptions which are strictly true ...
jokes aside, your comment reminds me of a funny story i once read where a biologist does research on clover (you might know this one). he investigates all clover he can find and finds that they all have 3 leaves. so he calls it a law of nature that clover has three leaves.
one faithful morning, he walks out of door and finds a 4-leaved clover in the garden (which is symbol of good luck in some cultures). however, he rebukes at that and tries to sue the clover for violating the law of nature ...
kinda the same spirit as what you said above. people make observations, then make these observations into laws, and if somebody breaks them, that's their fault. instead, the model was conceived inappropriately .
A paper I quite enjoy is "Queer Theory for Lichens" which argued that queer theory is genuinely a useful framework for studying lichens; Lichens resist categorisation in a manner that feels like they're actively mocking our taxonomic efforts.