The animal? The duck-billed, beaver-tailed mammal that lays eggs?

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Anonymous OP 13w

Wdym they are classified as monotremes. There’s quite a lot of them actually lol

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Anonymous OP 13w

Every source I’m seeing classifies them as a mammal

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Anonymous OP 13w

Yes they are a type of mammal called a monotreme for their unique egg laying

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Anonymous #4 13w

Sooooo a mammal….

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Anonymous #4 13w

A group of mammal. There’s lots of subsections of these larger groups. These are scientific categories, not social

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Anonymous #4 13w

Yes, I’m still not seeing where I’m wrong? They’re mammals

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Anonymous #4 13w

It’s funny to me that you think just bc it’s a scientific category means it doesn’t still show that nature doesn’t like neat little boxes. Like the fact that we have to keep making new sub categories to sort animals that have mixed characteristics of previous categories can be proof, but nature is very complex. By trying to put everything into its own little corner, we’ve simplified it to the point of misinformation

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Anonymous OP 13w

Enough mammals with that characteristic prompted a category. If nature was as wild as you say it is it would never have been possible to create those classifications without constantly creating new classes. Everything in the physical universe has some kind of structure, down to the atoms and quarks.

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Anonymous #4 13w

Structure yes, but that doesn’t mean that humans are capable of accurately describing it. Nature is constantly changing, meaning our descriptions have to change. It’s fluid, most things in life are. Keeping these strict categories, as I said before, simplifies these ideas, which is fine for teaching basics, but people then think the basics is all they need to know without looking into the complexities that these things actually have. These people become stuck in that thinking, leading to misinfo

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Anonymous OP 13w

What do you mean when you say nature is constantly changing?

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Anonymous #4 13w

Evolution, environmental degradation, species dying off, species moving out of their homes, etc etc. Everything in nature is connected.

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Anonymous OP 13w

Exactly. The laws of nature do not change, but the way in which those laws take effect can over time create change. Nature isn’t changing, it’s just that in nature there will be change. To my point, scientists and humans need some way to interpret the natural systems at the current time. Evolution can take millions of years before any significant changes announce themselves. And at that time the species we have today will still be in their categories, just as a part of the biological history.

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Anonymous #4 13w

Macro evolution takes that long, micro evolution can take place over generations. And tbh, nature changing/nature having change is the same in my mind. But this isn’t even the main point of this post.

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Anonymous OP 13w

I would say we’ve sorted the natural system in the best way we can. There will be changes in the future, but for our understanding and decision-making in the present, I do think we need some way to describe organisms. The fact that we can define in great detail most things on this planet with that organization gives merit to its accuracy and consistency.

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Anonymous #4 13w

I say most in lieu of current new discovers as well as future ones

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Anonymous #4 13w

That’s a valid point. I just think that our urge to organize everything leads to more people having wrong or incomplete information, which isn’t a total gripe for the scientific community because people should be doing their own research, but they often don’t. The sex/gender conversation is an example of that.

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