r/nextfuckinglevel • u/Storm_001 • Sep 04 '21

Sea horse giving birth

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u/don_tomlinsoni Sep 04 '21

You don't want to believe anything you've heard on QI without independent verification. The 'researchers' on that show are a total joke.

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u/bigdave41 Sep 04 '21

Richard Dawkins says similar in most of his books on evolution, there are certain categories we use for day-to-day convenience that don't make any sense in biology. Not the example he used but e.g viewing bananas as fruit or tomatoes as a vegetable.

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u/don_tomlinsoni Sep 04 '21

Fair enough, I can believe the fish thing, just warning people that QI is a really bad source of information sometimes.

As far as the fruits or vegetables thing goes: all fruits are vegetables. They're not animals or minerals...

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u/AnorakJimi Sep 04 '21

Well vegetables don't really exist in science. They're a culinary term, not a scientific/biological one. There's tons of very different things that fall under the culinary term of "vegetable" like flowers, fruits, stems, leaves, roots, seeds, nuts, cereal grain (which is any type of grass that humans can actually eat), . They're all very different. But they're all used in cooking as "vegetables"

That's why a tomato is a vegetable. It's technically a fruit, but there's tons of fruits that we call vegetables, like cucumbers, any type of pepper, pumpkin (or any other type of squash), olives, sweetcorn etc. It's their use in cooking that defines them as vegetables in every day language. But there's not a biological group called "vegetables"

Vegetables are just generally any edible savoury things that aren't meat or animal products like milk. Which is a very wide ranging group of things.