There’s No Such Thing as a Tree



In developing language, regular people use words for things that we can recognize and agree on, like what a “tree” is. Then scientists got involved and tried to identify and categorize every species of tree. And once genes began to be studied, scientists realized that trees are not all related to each other at any level, and maybe even our definition of what a tree is cannot be trusted.  

“Trees” are not a coherent phylogenetic category. On the evolutionary tree of plants, trees are regularly interspersed with things that are absolutely, 100% not trees. This means that, for instance, either:

The common ancestor of a maple and a mulberry tree was not a tree.
The common ancestor of a stinging nettle and a strawberry plant was a tree.
And this is true for most trees or non-trees that you can think of.

I thought I had a pretty good guess at this, but the situation is far worse than I could have imagined.

So, what is a tree? You might say it’s a plant made of wood, but our definition of wood is pretty muddy, too. It turns out that an awful lot of non-woody plants have genes to make wood, and could be trees if conditions are right. And it gets weirder from there. Read how nature keeps making trees out of other plants, and vice versa, at Eukaryote Writes Blog. -via Metafilter


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The false dichotomy (or perhaps begging the question) crowd does it again. Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? Can a single strawberry be considered alive? If a tree falls in a forest when no one is around, does it make a sound? Now we know that the answer is, "No," since there is no such thing as a tree.
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Engaged to Unidentified is a sweet and funny story about a high school girl who suddenly finds she is engaged to a boy from somewhere out in the mountains.

Description from Crunchyroll.com:

Yonomori Kobeni is a high school student who leads a pretty normal life... and then the day of her 16th birthday arrives. Despite having very little presence, her fiance, Mitsumine Hakuya shows up suddenly along with her sister-in-law, a little girl named Mitsumine Mashiro. Without any prior explanation, they begin their peculiar life together. Kobeni's older sister, Yonomori Benio, who has has a sister complex and is a bit of a pervert is thrown into the mix and things get even weirder. Kobeni's life is no longer normal.
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Since you didn't mention these, I'll just throw them out. Mostly from the the recently-ended 2014 Fall season. Lately I seem to be more focused on slice-of-life with cute girls, so keep that in mind with regards to a few of these...

Parayste. By far this is at the #1 spot for me. Everything works well: the art, the music, the story. It's a long series, continuing into the Winter season. Definitely not a cutesy series.

World Trigger. Another long series, and one that seems to have people divided. I'm liking it a lot. Some are complaining that the animation is minimal, but for someone who grew up with Hanna-Barbara cartoons, I never really noticed it until pointed out.

I have to mention Celestial Method, because I liked that one too, and it's getting blasted. Some of the complaints are valid, but overall, if I were liable to import something, this would be it. The only reason I'm not is that I'm 75% into importing something from the summer, and it's just too expensive.

Kokkuri-san walked that fine line between humor and seriousness.

I've picked up KanColle, but the first episode had me underwhelmed. I guess I was hoping for something more akin to Arpeggio. I'll give it a few more episodes, but I'm a bit disappointed because this was my most anticipated.

I've also heard that "Working!" (Wagnaria) is getting a third season "soon", so I caught up on the first two, and I liked it enough to look forward to another season.

There are others, but way too much to talk about in one sitting!
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