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Anonymous09/05/26, 13:41No.5158354Is it normal for people to be unable to read phylogenetic trees?
I was thinking about this, and I showed my girlfriend a phylogenetic tree telling her that this blows my mind, but she was like "uhhhh... which one is the frogmouth?". It wasn't interesting at all that they both have the exact same colouration and share behavioural characteristics (such as pretending to be a treestump when approached). Carcinisation does not impress her. She does not seem able to be impressed in the slightest by Pangolins, Aardvarks, Anteaters and Echidnas. She honest to God thought that frogs were "reptiles". When I told her that humans were closer to reptiles than either was to frogs, it meant nothing to her. The concept of paraphyly doesn't register to her either. It doesn't blow her mind that Whales are ungulates, or that butterflies are moths. She is not fazed by things being basal to a prominent lineage. When I showed her a Coelacanth, she just went "wow - it's such a big fish." She has no concept of deep time. She sent me an impression of cannabis leaves on instagram and was like "wow, is this real?", and I realised that if I told her "it says it's from the miocene, that's not surprising, that's not that long ago" it wouldn't mean fucking anything. Flowers are not an abominable mystery to her.
It seems most people are like this. Do I just have severe autism? I spent all day reading Wikipedia pages of phylogenetic trees when I was 8 years old btw.
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Anon09/05/26, 14:31No.5158365
Would you please stop trying to impress your girlfriend with your surface level knowledge of biology? You're giving her the ick.
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Anon09/05/26, 14:33No.5158366
>reading Wikipedia pagesLmao I wonder how many troll edits you've imbibed as "knowledge"
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Anon09/05/26, 14:57No.5158377
tldr
>i am very smart
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Anon09/05/26, 15:17No.5158381
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Anon09/05/26, 15:19No.5158384
If someone was blasting me with amazing train facts i would be just as clueless and disinterested as your gf.
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Anon09/05/26, 15:32No.5158390
My mom literally asked me once if sharks were mammals, normies are just braindead retarded. I've seen an embarrassing number of people that think arthropods aren't animals.
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Anon09/07/26, 12:58No.5158840
They all look the same.
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Anon09/08/26, 10:18No.5159109
This is really not that weird. The group is almost certainly ancestrally nocturnal and the potoo/frogmouth camouflage method just makes sense when you're a nocturnal animal that wants to hide during the day so it's not surprising they converged on this. If anything the weird ones are the Apodiformes for diverging away from the group's ancestral nocturnality.
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Anon09/08/26, 10:29No.5159112
are you having a spergout over the fact your gf did not waste any of her time going in depth about counter intuitive scientifical know:edge that nobody fucking gives a shit about ? And then come all the way over here to complain about it like the little bitch you are ?
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Anon09/08/26, 15:11No.5159149
these are overly complicated and taxonomists are douches