this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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This comic is so old, that both should be rather easy now
TBF it had been a long standing problem for roughly a half century before this. Specifically birds were the thing researchers tried to identify first, which is probably the reference here.
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 and a hagfish, dogfish or lungfish isn't one.
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?
🐬
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.
Ebird/ Merlin bird id does this wonderfully.
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.
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)