this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
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usually, in biology we use monophyletic groupings, like all descendants of rodents will always be rodents.
however, those terms "lizard/fish" are not monophyletic, because otherwise all vertebrates would be fish. those are paraphyletic (group includes some descendants of a common ancestors).
there are already polyphyletic, where we have descendants of multiple sources, ie, Herbivores would be polyphyletic.
The fundamental problem is that cladistic terms will kind of inevitably become general descriptors of any lifeform that looks/behaves similarly, which is immediately clear when you look at any scifi/fantasy stuff.
If an alien animal fills the same niche as salmon do on earth, then we're gonna call it a salmon, and poof suddenly it's no longer monophyletic.
it would be a Venusian salmon. same way we have birds and animals with the same name across continents. An Indian porcupine is not related to an American porcupine, but "Indian porcupine" is still monophyletic, and just saying "porcupine" is more informal, though technically paraphyletic.
We actually do informal cladistics. " fox " isn't a species but a genus "common fox" is Vulpez vulpez which is a species, while fox refers to all the genus.