Exobiology Classification

[whswhs]

I'm not sure what you're aiming at with this. Are the extraterrestrial species supposed to be genetically modified organisms of terrestrial ancestry? Or are they supposed to have evolved on alien planets?

If the latter, I don't see any particular reason to believe that they'll parallel terrestrial lifeforms closely enough to be called something like "bear" or "oak" or "mushroom." It might be like trying to pick out a particular insect or fish or oceanic life form that you were going to call a "bear."

And suppose there were close parallels? There are five independently evolved groups of anteating mammals—anteaters in South America, aardvarks in South Africa, pangolins in Madagascar, and echidnas and numbats in Australia—but we don't say "Americamyrmecophagus" and "Africamyrmecophagus" and so on: each genus has its own distinctive name. Trying to assimilate them would tend to confuse functional similarity with descent—but descent is the gold standard of biology.

True, there are purely functional terms, like "herbivore" and "parasite." But words like "bird" and "insect" and "rodent" are not functional; they're descent-based. The two vocabularies are not interchangeable—not even when a word can be used as both, like "carnivore" as an animal that eats other animals and "carnivore" as a member of the mammalian order Carnivora. (Maybe we should have stuck with Linnaeus's name for them, Ferae.)

Bill Stoddard