I wonder if there exists people who aggressively believe mushrooms are plants, similar to people who defend Pluto as a planet.
It was only in 1969 (nice) that fungi officially became its own separate kingdom.
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I mean both classifications are arbitrary and made up, so defense of either side is equally valid (even if only because they're also equally invalid).
We don't even have a solid definition of what constitutes "life", or "consciousness", because we can't agree on what should be included, or how various aspects are defined.
In the end, words are just symbols or sounds that we try to - as consistently as possible - associate with ideas, but it's all made up.
That sounds scientifically incorrect. Mushrooms are closer to animals than they are to plants. They fundamentally do not resemble plants in any sense of the word, except maybe that they both grow in the ground.
Mushrooms are closer to animals than they are to plants
How? At first blush, this seems absurd.
Disclaimer, it's been a while since middle school biology class where we might have talked about this subject.
The things that we call mushrooms aren't the actual organism. That's just fruiting body of the organism, analogous to a flower in a plant. Picking the mushroom doesn't kill the organism, since the mushroom itself is really only a very small fraction of the entire organism. The actual organism is actually underground. The organism is large network Berg-like microorganisms that fused together into a complex system of "roots" called hyphae.
Hyphae do not photosynthesize like plants do, they eat things in the soil for their energy. They do not have a cellulose cell wall like plants do, their cell wall is made of chitin (the stuff that bugs use for their exoskeleton). Genetically, they are (very slightly) closer to animals than they are to plants. Morphologically, they resemble protists than anything else. Chronologically, they evolved significantly after plants evolved, and they evolved from a proto-animal lineage. In some species, the microorganisms that make up the hyphae can decide to unfuse and start living on their own (at that point, we call them yeasts). How and when they decide to fuse/unfuse is unknown and it's a fairly large area of research, especially since that transition is often associated with their ability to cause diseases (yeast infections).
Mushrooms are the closest things we have to aliens, and the fact that we just eat them and think nothing more of it is genuinely amusing to me
Interesting! So the part we pick is and eat is like a strawberry more than, say, lettuce.
Naively, it's easy to think: it grows in the ground, therefore, it's a plant. There's a lot more than meets the eye, though.
Mushrooms are the closest things we have to aliens
Star Trek: Let's figure out how to hook up the translator to Data so we can talk to them. Real life: Let's see whether they're tasty.
I'm not sure you meant to respond to my post. This response doesn't seem to address what I said.