John Carlos Baez on Nostr: I enjoy following SF writers here because they're always on the lookout for cool ...

I enjoy following SF writers here because they're always on the lookout for cool ideas. Greg Egan ([@gregeganSF](https://mathstodon.xyz/@gregeganSF )), Bruce Sterling ([@bruces](https://mastodon.social/@bruces )), Charlie Stross ([@cstross](https://wandering.shop/@cstross )) and Cory Doctorow (Cory Doctorow (npub1fdr…lvhs)) are my faves.

For example, Sterling just pointed out the idea of a 'wastebasket taxon'. When biologists are trying to classify forms of life, this is a group they invent just to put organisms that don't fit anywhere else.

Pretty pathetic, eh? It's like how I have a desk drawer where I stick all the shit that I can't figure out where it goes.

There may still be a few wastebasket taxa in use, like the one containing miscellaneous long-necked dinosaurs. But luckily most of them listed on Wikipedia are no longer in use.

For example:

"Vermes is an obsolete taxon of worm-like animals. It was a catch-all term used by Carl Linnaeus and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck for non-arthropod invertebrate animals."

Or this:

"The order Insectivora has traditionally been used as a dumping ground for placental insectivorous mammals (and similar forms such as colugos). While the core components (moles, shrews, hedgehogs and their close relations) do in fact form a consistent clade, Eulipotyphla, other mammals historically placed in the order have been found to belong to other branches of the placental tree: tree shrews and colugos are euarchontans related to primates and sometimes grouped in Sundatheria, while tenrecs, golden moles and elephant shrews are all afrotheres."

I love stuff like this - now I get to learn about colugos! Ever seen one? If you're sick of doomscrolling, I recommend checking out Wikipedia pages about biology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wastebasket_taxon