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Normally, cladists are those who try to classify organisms in such a way that related species are placed in the same family, not in a family with other species that look the same. This is quite the opposite to Ponder’s cladism. This method of classification is called “dichotomous key classification”: unfortunately Ponder has left out the conventional first step in this kind of identification, which is something along the lines of “can it move unassisted?” — if so, go to animal, if not, go to plants.

In our world, there is also some classificational confusion concerning bananas, since the so-called banana tree is technically a banana plant (its stem does not contain actual wood tissue), which would make the banana (so the argument goes) a herb instead of a fruit. This is one of those arguments that never really gets resolved, because the ‘answer’ can simply go either way depending on what definitions you use in which contexts.

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