Why aren't moths given their own ID?

Nature Talk
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https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/240790

TL;DR:

While I agree this change [splitting dicots] would be an improvement, ancestry changes effect every observation in the clade and they’re not becoming feasible for nodes at the base of our two biggest clades (plants and insects) without some infrastructure changes.
[…]
its definitely a problem we’re going to have to solve in the next year or two as the site continues to grow
—@loarie, over 3 years ago

not until we find a way to make these taxonomy changes more efficient.
—@loarie, over 1 year ago

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Fish. We all know whales are not fish, but in common parlance they can be. And technically, you and I are fish in the broadest sense, because one of our ancestors was one of them.

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Technically, using “dicots” in a broad sense, meaning “not monocots” is wrong, but I’m so glad iNaturalist does this.

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This discussion reminds me of one of my favourite posts:

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I don’t know if I’ll ever get fully used to birds being reptiles. But, well, there they are in the family tree.

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I personally don’t. In my opinion, falcons (including caracaras) have a parrot-like look to them. And they lack the raptor-like look of owls and Accipitriformes. New World vultures also lack the raptor-like look. But they also don’t have a parrot-like look, but rather their own unique look.

I’m serious. Falcons don’t look quite like raptors to me. They really do look like dull-coloured parrots with talons and anisodactyl feet. Like parrots in raptor clothing if you will. To the extent to which they resemble raptors, so do parrots. The most obvious thing that screams “non-raptor” about a parrot is the colours.

Maybe it’s confirmation bias though. By the way, I also think there’s a distinct difference between the appearance of psittacids and psittaculids. And no, it’s not just about psittaculids being parakeets. Conures and other psittacid parakeets look like the psittacids they are. And non-parakeet psittaculids, like eclectuses and lovebirds, look like psittaculids. At the same time, maybe this is confirmation bias, as Bolborhychus does look kind of like a psittaculid, and lovebirds look a bit like psittacids.

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The paraphyly of reptiles does not astound me. Largely because of amphibians, especially salamanders. The lizard-salamander look is probably ancestral to Tetrapoda. It seems easy to accept the paraphyly of herps given how much we mammals and birds share with reptiles but not amphibians.

Then there’s fish, to a lesser extent. They’re also scaly and ectothermic, and like herps, their paraphyly is obvious.

And then there’s the four-chambered hearts of crocodilians. And how much time birds had to evolve from reptiles. And non-neornithine avemetatarsalians. I mean, I never understood why people insist on excluding birds from the category of reptiles, but including deinonychosaurs, who resembled birds so much, and could even fly. Likewise with pterosaurs. Like, birds aren’t reptiles because they are covered in feathers rather than scales. Ornithodirans aren’t reptiles then!

There is something that astounds me though. Which is the monophyly of Archelosauria. I do not know what turtles have in common with archosaurs, that they don’t with lepidosaurs. Honestly, a sister grouping of turtles and lepidosaurs would make sense (united by three-chambered heart), as would a sister grouping of lepidosaurs and archosaurs (united by diapsid skull). What is this situation in which the apparently-correct grouping between three clades is the one that makes the least sense?

Fun fact, I would actually be astounded by the monophyly of Reptilia (a taxon with lepidosaurs, turtles and crocodilians, but not birds; extinct animals are irrelevant here). Because how could mammals, birds AND crocodilians ALL evolve four-chambered hearts independently? And by the way, the fact mammals and birds have it show that it’s about endothermy/mesothermy. And crocodilians actually came from mesothermic ancestors, so no wonder they have four-chambered hearts and are sister to birds.

By the way, it seems that mesothermy comes before the four-chambered heart, as leatherback sea turtles are mesotherms with three-chambered hearts. So it’s likely that crocodilians came from mesotherms, and their ancestors were mesothermic for longer than those of leatherback sea turtles, and then they reverted to ectothermy, keeping the four-chambered heart.

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Nice summary, Paul! As you know, I have a strong affinity to moths, and I’m just not that crazy about butterflies. They my be scientifically similar, but my experience of them is AS IF they are different groups. Perhaps a harmless delusion…LOL.

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That IS a fascinating discussion. Thank you for sharing this!
I personally feel that this is what happens when an unproven theory is used as a basis for organizing all living things. Over time, as knowledge increases, there are so many mis-fits, it reaches a level of obsurdity. To insist that living things are not just similar, because they were made of the same parts by the same designer (like the Model T and the Mustang), but that they actually evolved from one another (and yet somehow millions of still distinct species remain), lacks objectivity.
It reminds me of the medical community’s materialistic bias. As more information comes out about the energetic aspect of the human body, it is either mostly ignored (although the Cleveland Clinic tells male fertility patients not to put cell phones in their pants pocket) or exploited for profit in spite of known harm (overuse of MRIs). But very few in the medical community step back and say, “Wait, do we really understand how the body works?”
What got me musing on this topic: I am reading a book about how modern science has confirmed many aspects of “shamanistic” health traditions. Yet we in the West look at TCM (acupuncture & herbs), Native Herbalism, Homeopathy and other empirical knowledge bases with jaundiced eyes.
Even those who specialize in these “unscientific” medical systems quibble among themselves about this. For example, in Homeopathy, plant theory uses current plant taxonomy to categorize plants into treatment categories. Yet, doctors have observed that some of the plants just don’t fit their assigned slots, because they don’t have similar therapeutic effects to other supposedly related plants.
So do we just ignore experience-based knowledge when it conflicts with science? To be absolutely clear, I am not here to stir up controversy, and I am NOT trying to pit religion (including traditional belief systems) against science. But Dr. Larry Malerba’s books and videos examining the concept of science itself have really stimulated my thinking. And since I LOVE moths, I naturally began to contrast my experience of moths & butterflies with the scientific taxa laid upon them.
Sometimes, stepping back to think about how we experience the world and whether that differs from the science can broaden our concept of knowledge itself.
Just my two cents.

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Oh boy…
I do not think this is a fascinating discussion because there is nothing to discuss. “Intelligent design” is nonsense, and I am quite shocked, to be honest, to see it earnestly proposed on the iNat forum. Evolution is, unlike your claim, the most objective conclusion humanity has reached to explain biodiversity (and a lot of other stuff) and has been supported by every single observation, study, finding, etc. humans have ever made.

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As someone who thoroughly enjoys birds, snakes, and lizards, but only a passing interesting in amphibians, I grit my teeth everytime I use the term ‘herp’. The actual real relationship of those animals much more closely aligns with my interests!
Herps seems to be a catch-all ‘non-fluffy mostly terrestrial animal’ term, that hoepfully one day will find itsel fin the bin.

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Wasps, particularly Chalcids, and the proposed relationships between them are in an almost permanent state of flux; papers are published weekly shuffling them all about.
If you would like to refer to ‘moths’ specifically, you could say ‘non-butterfly moths’, just as we say ‘non-human primates’, ‘non-avian dinosaurs’ etc. You must just accept that it’s a bit of a mouthful.

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Oh, I am in no position to argue against you, nor would I want to.

It’s just that all my birdbooks since childhood had them lumped together as ‘raptors’, and also because in my neck of the woods parrots just do not exist – they are normally captive pets in someone’s home (except those that escaped and found a niche that works for them, not here though). Parrots to me are as exotic as hummingbirds, but we do have falcons!

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The evidence for common ancestry is abundant and we know why real patterns of variation aren’t continuous. I’d be glad to spend all day hashing it out. However, the problems with applying evolutionary relationships to taxonomy aren’t that those relationships aren’t real. We use phylogenetic relationships because they’re to be more informative at some deep levels and because they are, yes, more objective (though we don’t yet know everything we hope to know about them). Trouble is, we humans want simple categories based on obvious similarities but evolution doesn’t care about our wants. Fitting humans into fish, or fitting together birds, diverse dinosaurs, and the creatures we usually call reptiles points out that our simple hierarchical system doesn’t really have enough categories for the relationships. We compress a lot of evolution into a few distinctions, e.g. amphibians, reptiles, birds. Our simplified taxonomy isn’t fully true (and we know about how it isn’t, as discussed here) but it’s a compromise between mapping real relationships and the practicalities of human memory and thought.

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Similarly to the “mariposa nocturna,” our diurnality biases our concept so that (in some languages) we perceive moths as nocturnal versions of the one diurnal subgroup. Láadan does this, too: the word for butterfly is áalaá, and the word for moth, óoloó, puns off the word for moon, óol – so, “moon-butterfly.”

I suppose that if language developed in keeping with cladistics, the butterflies would be called terms that mean “diurnal moths.”

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We see things, not as they are, but as we are

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Yes, I am aware that I can reply to several people in one post. I am intentionally doing otherwise here because this merits its own.

It seems that people skipped right over these valid issues in their headlong rush to defend evolution. Yet if we are honest with ourselves, don’t even the scientists among us use experience-based knowledge in aspects of life outside their scientific endeavors? In a sense, don’t many hypotheses begin in experience-based knowledge before having the scientific method applied to them?

@cyanfox 's explanation of what is or is not astounding is based on advanced knowledge of internal anatomy – diapsid skulls and four-chambered hearts – that are not accessible to most people. And it should be pointed out that these same ideas of structural evolution have, in fact, been used to justify pseudoscience. So, for example, you can find Atlantis theorists making much of the fact that pyramid-like structures have been built by unrelated civilizations in disparate parts of the world; they try to claim that this shows descent from a single, now-lost source civilization. “Because how could they ALL evolve pyramid structures independently?”

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Hopefully, to simplify what others have described about the taxonomy of Lepidoptera:

Leps did not first divide up into moths and butterflies. Butterflies are an offshoot of a later division of the Lepidoptera.

And butterflies are not a “type of moth”. They are a proper monophyletic group (a superfamily) within the Lepidoptera called Papilionoidea; all the other groups (superfamilies) are “moths”, collectively, and there are many other such groups.

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It’s true that you won’t see skulls and hearts in animals unless you look at their internal anatomy. But this is also true of endothermy and ectothermy. And yet everyone “knows” that mammals and birds are “warm-blooded” and other vertebrates are “cold-blooded”. Go figure.

And like I’ve said, four-chambered hearts are because of endothermy/mesothermy. So it seems ironic to me that people know about endothermy but not four-chambered hearts.

And in general, theories of common descent are likelier than ones of convergent evolution. There’s a reason non-monophyletic taxa are generally paraphyletic rather than polyphyletic. This is ironically why it’s likely that ratites are polyphyletic, because if they’re paraphyletic, then tinamous somehow re-evolved flight. Independent loss of flight is one thing, but independent acquisition of flight is far less likely.

By the way, I think flight evolved four times in animals; Pterygota, Pterosauria, Paraves and Chiroptera. I used to think that microraptorians represented a separate evolution of flight from avialans, and I think this was largely because they had four wings and avialans have two. But flies also have two wings, yet evolved from four-winged insects.

It appears that flying animals always use four appendages for it at first. The reason pterosaurs and bats get to have two wings from the start is because each wing consists of both the front and hind limbs on each side.

And photosynthetic organisms are polyphyletic, but this isn’t really due to independent evolution of photosynthesis, but due to plants (Archaeplastida) acquiring cyanobacterial plastids, then stramenopiles acquired red algal plastids.

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I don’t really understand your argument here. Of course all humans (including scientists) rely in many cases on experience-based knowledge and their own observations… But there is a difference between that and outright claiming one of the most well founded and well supported theories we have ever made „lacks objectivity“. (Or supporting homeopathy, for that matter, which is proven to not be effective beyond the placebo-effect)
The beauty of science is that it adapts to new information so that all current theories are not in any opposition with any of the observations we have made thus far.
Science conflicts with „experience-based knowledge“ only when the experience-based knowledge is a wrong conclusion drawn from the observations/experiences. Science never conflicts with an observation made thus far…

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