this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
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Until you start to use evolution. What a species is, begins to blur as soon as you try to establish evolutionary lines. When is a whale not a whale but just a water enthusiast mammal? somewhere between 50 and 35 million years ago. Exactly when, it's anyone's guess. Taxonomy is indeed part of biology, though.
Taxonomically speaking, the first whale was the last common ancestor of all (modern) whales, whether this was a land dweller or already aquatic isn't important from a taxonomic point of view
Except you're still at odds with what a "species" even is because you'll have a bunch of fossils that exist over several million years as one "species" that definitely looks different at the beginning than it did at the end because evolution is such a gradual process that there never really is a clean break between species.
You are aware that whale isn't a single species, are you? I'm not commenting on how blurry the species definition is, I'm aware of that. I'm commenting on the question about the first whale
It doesn't really matter, whether it's the category whale, fish, or specifically the Orcinus orca. Everything in nature is a spectrum, almost nothing in nature is binary. Gender, species, taxonomy, ink on paper? gradients, computer bits? yeah, they exist on a wide array of voltages, electrons? they are probabilistic. Even light itself, you can think of it as photons on and off. But sometimes light will act as a wave, because physics doesn't give a damn about human sensibilities and categories. The closer you look at anything in the physical world, the less binary it gets.
Well, the comment above me was like:
And I pointed out that that's not how taxonomy works. It's all about the last common ancestor and it's obviously not possible to pinpoint this to a single individual. All I said was, from a taxonomic point of view, being a whale isn't about being aquatic but about sharing a common ancestor with all whales.
I know, I wrote the comment. My point is that even that same definition is flawed and doesn't work on an evolutionary scale. Because most of human categories exist out of convenience and not strict material objectivity. I chose whales, not at random, but very intentionally. At one point we have something we call a whale, that turned into a hippo. We don't call hippos whales, but it came from a whale, and our modern whales look nothing like that whale, and it doesn't matter, because it's ok to use whatever works for the purposes at hand in the moment. We just need to accept that binary thinking and hard classifications are made up human constructs and nature doesn't care.