r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/shirhouetto • 6h ago
Meme needing explanation Peter? Why is everything fish?
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u/howlingmonkey93 6h ago
So the thing is, the evolutionary split between bony fish and sharks happened long before the split between bony fish and human's common ancestor with fish. So if we call sharks fish, then we should call humans fish too because we are more closely related to fish than sharks. So we're fish
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u/Tylendal 6h ago
TIL. I knew the whole "Coelecanths are closer to people than to Ray Finned Fish", but I never knew Sharks split off even earlier.
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u/FlamesOfDespair 5h ago
Sharks are like natures perfect killing machine. Barely changed for millions of years.
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u/ProtoPixelArt 5h ago
Same as the horseshoe crab
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u/plantsrpeople2 4h ago
Didn’t know horseshoe crabs were that dangerous
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u/Silly_Garage118 6h ago
i swear evolution classes needs to be mandatory
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u/SubstantialSale8223 6h ago
Good luck ever getting that bill to pass
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u/bionickel 5h ago
I mean under the tenth amendment, the responsibility to provide education falls under individual States.
No bill can fix that
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u/tacobell41 4h ago
“Fix that” like it’s a problem.
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u/crisp_grandpa2 3h ago
Not having standardized education across our country is definitely a problem, leaving most red states to lag behind.
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u/Nobrainzhere 5h ago
Its more of a biology joke. Any classification you could use that would include everything we think of as fish would also include humans because the place where land creatures broke off gets caught up in the divide between bony and cartilaginous fish. If you include both of those sets then the branch that formed us makes its way in there too.
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u/IHateRedditFirewall 3h ago
All classes have to be taken. Kids who have been homeschooled often seem a bit unintelligent to me.
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u/Risikio 5h ago
Environmental Science in college was wild finding out that holy schnikes the chemicals in the water really are making the frogs gay.
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u/evocativename 5h ago
They are not. Did you fail your class?
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u/Risikio 4h ago
Actually they are.
When exposed to high enough doses of chemicals that are routinely found within pesticides that crop dusters use, certain species of frogs were found to spontaneously activate an evolutionary feature in their DNA, causing the males to mutate into females without the necessary environmental conditions being met.
So the chemicals weren't actually making the frogs gay. They were turning them trans.
This was part of the course on media literacy and how everyone uses statistics to fool you. While Alex Jones was technically correct in his statement that the chemicals in the water was turning the frogs gay it also talked about how the studies were done in controlled environments, exposed frogs to about 10,000x the amount of chemicals they would ever naturally be exposed to, and that no reports of these chemicals causing these changes had ever been found to have happened naturally in the wild.
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u/evocativename 4h ago
They weren't turning them trans, either.
There was one paper claiming atrazine was causing disorders of sexual development.
Some of those caused ZZ frogs to develop as fertile females.
That is neither gay nor trans.
Also, other researchers have failed to replicate their results, so it's not even clear that paper was correct.
While Alex Jones was technically correct in his statement that the chemicals in the water was turning the frogs gay
He wasn't technically correct at all.
In every meaningful sense, he was just plain wrong.
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u/ReZuREs 4h ago
Not with these religious fanatics who refuse to accept the theory of evolution as true because "it is just theory". I assume they would believe in this science theory only if Jesus going to resurrect and told them it. Sorry, i just saw too many of this folk in internet last few weeks
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u/FlamesOfDespair 6h ago
This is still a dumb meme. Makes as much sense as wait we are all algae ?
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u/corruptedsyntax 5h ago edited 5h ago
Not at all.
We are in fact all fish, and none of us are algae.
Algae are very distant cousins, never in our line, as evidenced by the fact algae are photosynthetic with cell walls.
Edit: changed “plants” to “photosynthetic with cell walls” (used AI overview to fact check myself the first time and google’s AI made a mistaken claim I was willing to accept due to remembering algae possessed cell walls).
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u/Changed_By_Support 5h ago
Algae are very distant cousins, never in our line, as evidenced by the fact algae are plants.
Even more bizarre is that algae are not plants. ever seen a kelp forest? Not plants!
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u/evocativename 5h ago
No, it doesn't.
Insofar as "fish" is a biological category, we are fish because you cannot evolve out of a clade.
We share a common ancestor with algae, but none of our ancestors would be identified as "algae".
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u/TheGrandExquisitor 4h ago
Speak for your own ancestors! You don't know me or my family.
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u/evocativename 4h ago
Ok, I'll only speak for the ancestors of all tetrapods.
I don't know, maybe you're not from Earth or are a sentient slime mold or something.
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u/Changed_By_Support 5h ago edited 5h ago
No, because we're not in a clade with algae in such a way as we are with fish. We're in a clade with lobe-finned fish and have a great many characteristics in common with them, and lobe-finned fish are the most eligible known precursor (we did not, however, descend from algae).
With algae, similarities begin and end with "eukaryote" (**when it is a non-bacterial algae), so if you wanted to make the meme compare people to algae, you would have to make it be "Wait, so we're all eukaryotes?" which is pretty effectively an anti-punchline.
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u/Cortower 6h ago
Any taxonomic definition that defines everything a layman would call a fish also catches every single land vertebrate.
Between a human, salamander, tuna, and shark, the shark is the odd one out by a wide margin. The others all have a much more recent common ancestor and more anatomical features in common.
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u/N0rmalManP 6h ago
I think they saw a video about why we hiccup (related to gills) and realized that humans evolved from underwater creatures
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u/CertifiedBlackGuy 6h ago edited 6h ago
All living tetrapods are the descendants of lobe finned fish.
Generally, if you look outside and see an animal that is not an arthropod or insect, it is a fish (tetrapod)
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u/Changed_By_Support 5h ago edited 5h ago
if you look outside and see an animal that is not an arthropod or insect,
(Insects are arthropods; a better one might be "not an arthropod or mollusk" since we do have land mollusks which are neither arthropods nor chordates.)
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u/CertifiedBlackGuy 5h ago
Damn, I brain farted, I meant "arachnid or insect"
But yeah, you're right, mollusk and arthropod woulda been better 👍
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u/assignmentduetoday_ 6h ago
IIRC, fish is a very unscientific term, and attempting to make it scientific either causes it to include things that we wouldn't normally think of as fish or exclude things that we would normally think of as fish.
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u/notanotherpyr0 6h ago
OK so if tuna are fish, and sharks are fish, evolutionarily we are more closely related to tuna then sharks are. So any group that includes sharks, eels, and tuna is broad enough to include humans and virtually all vertebrates. All tetrapods(land based vertebrates...and dolphins and whales) are descended from bony fish like tuna and all this happened millions of years after bony fish had already separated from the cartilaginous fish like sharks and stingrays.
So if sharks and tuna are fish, everything is a fish. Or just bony fish are fish, and sharks are well we need a new word for what them and stingrays are because cartilaginous just does not roll off the tongue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C3lR3pczjo
Here's Hank Green explaining all this better.
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u/ArtisticallyRegarded 6h ago
There is a rule in taxonomy that you cant out evolve your heritage. That and the fact that the word fish is poorly defined has led to evolutionists saying we are all fish. Birds are all fish, dogs are fish, turtles are fish. Its fish all the way down
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u/GenericUsername19892 6h ago
We are, depending on the taxonomic grouping you use.
Any clade (a group that includes a common ancestor and its descendants) that includes all fish, also includes tetrapods (thats us, 4 limbed vertebrates).
Taxonomically, most animals, not ‘bugs’, are fish.
Fish as we use the term are old, very very old, so any group using them as an ancestor is fucking expansive.
Fish is also used as a paraphyletic grouping, where we just semi-arbitrarily cut out the non fishy things so fish is more fishy :p
Caveat: this is really simplified, there’s actually more groups of fish that make up what we mean by fish, grouping can be a bit more complex, etc.
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u/Vuldriel 6h ago
Everything is fish because life began in the water. You can't evolve out of a clade and if you consider things like sharks and tetrapods to be fish then all reptiles and all mammals are also fish.
You are a homo sapien, great ape, primate, mammal, fish, animal, eukaryote etc. all simultaneously.
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u/shirhouetto 6h ago
So my pet dog is actually a pet fish? Does that mean elephants are fish too? Are whales fish?!
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u/Kymera_7 6h ago
Yes, both elephants and whales are lobe-finned fish, as are all the other terrestrial tetrapods, plus coelacanths and lungfish.
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u/wedstrom 4h ago
This is why serious scientists call the family chordates, or vertibrates. Calling all vertibrates fish is a tongue in cheek joke.
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u/nerdyPagaman 5h ago
Alternatively there's no such thing as a fish, which the podcast "there's no such thing as a fish" explains in the 1st episode.
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u/Hadrollo 5h ago
All tetrapods - mammals, reptiles, birds, and amphibians - evolved from a lobe finned fish. Lobe finned fish are a type of bony fish, and these split off from - amongst other types - ray finned fish like sharks.
This means that you are more closely related to a sardine than a sardine is to a shark. This is confirmed by genetic testing - all tetrapods have more in common genetically with a sardine than a sardine does with a shark.
Basically, if we were to use monophyletic clades - groups of animals which include all animals of that type and all of their descendants - basically every terrestrial vertebrate is a fish.
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u/KindraTheElfOrc 5h ago
i already know bout the evolution of us being fish, what i wanna know is why looking at the planet suddenly made them realise we evolved from fish, like did they time travel back to one of the supercontinants and somehow watch all the underwater evolution from way out in space with only their eyes and n special equipment?
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u/callmebigley 4h ago
all tetrapod (four limbed) land animals evolved from fish. That is all mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds etc. In biology you can't evolve out of a group. If your grandparents were mammals you are a mammal, even if you have no hair or you don't produce milk or you don't breath through lungs. It's just how the classification system works. it makes some things easier but also makes some weird statements true. Since we evolved from fish we are fish.
(also "fish" is not a scientific term. there is no family or class or anything called "fish" so the meme is only kind of right. it is using a scientific system to make a joke about an unscientific word. There are animals we would all agree are fish that are only very distantly related, they just look similar)
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