QI | No Such Thing As A Fish

Did you know there's no such thing as a fish?
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This clip is from QI Series H, Episode 3, 'Hoaxes' with Stephen Fry, Alan Davies, Danny Baker, Sean Lock and David Mitchell.

[@squam0]

"How can something not be something? Something can't be not be not something, can it? If you've created a something, then something has to be that something, otherwise you haven't created a something." -Sean Locke, philosopher

[@BitterMonday]

Really annoying to hear him confussing people and missing the point entirely

[@mellowfellow14]

The ontological argument for fish

[@Jivvi]

"I think, therefore I fish."

[@18grape]

By any chance related to John Locke the Philosopher?

[@nathankuhn9769]

Fadil Riyanto Nah, that's just him riffing. I don't think anyone was confused

[@GalacticAstroparticles]

So what the dolphins in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy were *really* saying is *"goodbye and thanks for nothing"*

[@TheTonybudd]

~interesting point!! also if you multiply the number of letters in that new phrase by 2 and the number of words by 2 then subtract those two numbers you get 42 !! crazy !! . . .

[@thombruce]

I would so love for that to have been Douglas Adams' point. Of course I expect it wasn't, but next time I am reading the Hitchhiker's Guide I will bear that meaning in mind.

[@nathanadler8316]

@@TheTonybudd Aaaand you just *had* to trigger my OCD... 26 letters x2 = 52. 5 words x2 = 10. 52 - 10 ... oooh you bastard! Of course, it would've been simpler to say "add up the number of letters and subtract the number of words, *then* multiply by 2..." :P

[@ednewton4455]

Haha! Splendid! 😂

[@michaeltalley51]

Nah, it's still a collective noun. There's just no Kingdom, Phloem, Class, Order, Family, Genus, or Species named "fish".

[@observethemfdynamic]

Hearing “they can feel no love” while the camera wasn’t on David made me laugh so hard that my dog got annoyed and left the room

[@Jojozilla426]

@SpruceMoose stfu

[@vikj1255]

priceless

[@rhyanbennett2629]

And as such, an excellent podcast was born.

[@tangyspy]

I love this podcast

[@radioaydin5875]

what podcast? is there a podcast? :)

[@MyPancakeMan]

It's called No such thing as a fish, hosted by the QI researchers.

[@radioaydin5875]

@@MyPancakeMan thank you so much! It's odd that I had zero ideal! I will check it out.

[@TheSmart-CasualGamer]

I am your thousandth like. Nothing else to say, carry on.

[@carlmoore2555]

If you think this is crazy, you should hear what they say of the acropolis where the Parthenon is!

[@DrDespicable]

What do they saaaaaaaaayyyyy...?

[@Szaam]

This better be good

[@craiga2002]

Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!Fight! Fight!Fight! Fight!

[@jojotheswede8444]

Ooooooooooh!!!!

[@Armuotas]

What do they say?! What do they say?!

[@RS14988]

So basically this guy spent his life devoted to red herrings

[@3Dusers]

lmao aw man thats just.... fuck you

[@Travisbig7]

You are a legend.

[@GeekTalkwithMerg]

#underratedcomment

[@AslanW]

Noice

[@puppetsock]

And yet, at 1:06, Stephen awards him the Nobel Prize. Which is odd, because Stephen is not ordinarily authorized to do that.

[@B1G_Dave]

"She left me! I'm all alone!" "Don't worry mate, plenty more fish in the sea." 😐

[@deanmoncaster]

No there's not apparently..... Haha

[@alephnull4044]

Ouch

[@duaneappo4150]

Tsunami season is best for catching a wife in the sea. Wasting your time otherwise...

[@daddyleon]

Well, tinder does make dating look more like picking from a menu, so, I guess, if we go by Mitchel's suggestion. There is plenty of fish in the sea! Even crayfish!

[@johns9652]

@@daddyleon I hear the catfish are plentiful on those sites.l

[@JacksonBockus]

Sean Lock here making the ontological argument for the existence of fish.

[@vampyricon7026]

Premise 1: There exists a maximally great group of organisms P2: We can imagine this maximally great group of organisms exists in some possible worlds P3: If it is maximally great, then it exists in all possible worlds C: There exists a maximally great group of organisms, which we call fish.

[@ezekiel0606]

Vampyricon perfect

[@Gooberpatrol66]

@@vampyricon7026 I want to print out this comment and frame it.

[@DoubtX]

@@vampyricon7026 this comment is like reading a Douglas Adams book. "The people of Detrivon X are well known for their love of philosophy, and were in fact the first race ever to make an ontological argument which proved, once and for all, the unequivocal existence of fish."

[@jonnypayne598]

Sean Lock; as happy as he is French

[@williamwallace3119]

He was speaking about monophyletic clades in cladistics. Any group that contains what we colloquially call fish will either leave out some fish or include obvious non fish. Therefore the term fish as we generally use it is a paraphyletic artifact and is inconsistent in taxonomy, so the term is ultimately arbitrary with no place in cladistics or phylogenetics.

[@sheepketchup9059]

@jqbtube how is saying "there's no such thing as 'fish' in biology because the word 'fish' is a purely culinary term" be misleading?

[@casperes0912]

@jqbtube This is QI. It’s not a biological dissertation. Everyone watching has their expectations tuned accordingly

[@BenvolioZF]

@jqbtube Me: "Wow what an interesting little factoid... Maybe I should look up what this researcher was talking about to learn more specifically what he means" You: "You anti-intellectual moron."

[@OWnIshiiTrolling]

@@BenvolioZF Taxonomy is actually really interesting, so do read up on it if you like. You will find some other nice things, such as that dinosaurs are not extinct. Birds are descendants of dinosaurs, and therefore, by definition, dinosaurs themselves. Which means that we, being the alpha chads we are, literally eat dinosaurs.

[@stephenderry9488]

Cladistics is fun. Fish like salmon and herring are more closely related to humans than fish like sharks. You could technically describe humans (all tetrapods in fact) as fish whose ancestors evolved lungs and legs and adapted to live on land. We are essentially just a sub-class of fish. So we don't exist.

[@bioLarzen]

The really priceless thing was that one of the next questions in this episode was "how many fish can you see in this picture?" - and the "right" answer wasn't zero...

[@jessicalee333]

Since commenting on this video 5 years ago, I have learned that there is also no such thing as a tree. For example a horse chestnut tree is more closely related to broccoli than it is to a normal chestnut tree. The "family tree" of trees is like a series of branching dotted lines containing mostly flowers and vegetables with trees interspersed at random, and many trees are hardly genetically related to each other at all.

[@bazza945]

Oh. I thought a 'horse' Chestnut tree was a Chestnut tree with a cold.

[@Envy_May]

trees must just be like an ideal evolved form

[@ellie8272]

​@@Envy_MayYou're exactly right. The term is "convergent evolution" where non biologically related things evolve similar traits because they're just so damn effective in that environment. Fish, trees, crabs, all of these are prime examples

[@hunterwilk]

Do you mind coming back every five or so years until there's no such thing as anything a'tall?

[@thaDjMauz]

@@ellie8272 another fun example of this is that the shrew is more closely related to the blue whale than to the mouse, even though they look almost identical.

[@biscuitsalive]

After a lifetime of study of chocolate, I’ve discovered there’s no such thing as my feet. (At least I can’t see them anymore.)

[@realspacemodels]

But of course there is such thing as No Such Thing As A Fish podcast.

[@pamcandas]

If there were no podcast "No Such Thing as a Fish" I would consider the Internet to be a failed experiment which should be turned off and recycled into toasters and hair-dryers which was the original idea anyway.

[@kisbie]

I was very pleased to see that Sean Lock's "how can something be not something?" bit is used as a slogan for NSTAAF on the QI website.

[@bengski68]

+PamCandas I don't know if that's a quote or just a comment off the top of your head but either way it's delightful and sounds like something out of the Hitchhiker's Guide

[@joss5150]

420 likes, just saying

[@trigsbeans1215]

Which is 4 writers of QI

[@AgentOracle]

An excellent podcast to boot. Love those guys

[@streglof]

"ooo, haven't got any legs"

[@heather19515]

By the smiths

[@JoeBleasdaleReal]

I’ve been born without any leeeeeeegs

[@interestedbystander196]

Ceolacanth: hold my trainers...

[@zyaicob]

@@JoeBleasdaleReal I haven't got any leeeegs

[@EdoKwin]

"It often comes in the same bit and separate from puddings". XD

[@Septimus_ii]

The biological study of puddings is one of the great holes in scientific research

[@221b-Maker-Street]

@@Septimus_ii There's a piece of research we can all get behind, and volunteer for permanent rolling clinical trials...

[@Blissful_Simp]

Alan's face after Sean ranted about there not being fish😂😂 his brain just dies

[@Ciphonn]

David Mitchell and Sean Lock are the best on any panel show

[@Chris-yi9gc]

No, seriously, it's in The Oxford Dictionary of Underwater Life. It says it right there in the first paragraph: there's no such thing as a fish.

[@romainsavioz5466]

well only in English

[@procron]

+Chris Lowe What they mean by this is there is no discernible definition (biologically) for a Fish. As in "fish" simply describes anything that lives underwater, rather than a evolutionary branch or characteristic.

[@romainsavioz5466]

Msuhail9 to the difference of French where poisson means exactly poisson as birds describe birds

[@emilykelly6314]

Nicely done ;)

[@gormster]

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

[@BambooAcrobatVerte]

I’ve smoked Camels my wholesale life and they taste nothing like salmon.

[@boooster101]

They don't even swim and jump upstream to lay their eggs

[@Lightning_Lance]

What do they taste like?

[@JoakimKanon]

Yeah, but they taste even more nothing like a hagfish.

[@pronkb000]

Of course. Camels have legs.

[@Vistresian1941]

@@Lightning_Lance I'd like to second that question. I'm curious about the taste as well.

[@Lightning_Lance]

When you study something so hard you conclude it doesn't exist, that's how you know you've gone too deep. :D

[@kilroy987]

Is that like writing a word so many times it stops looking like a word? Right. Right right right right right right right.

[@hiroshikari]

This might be my favorite video on the internet. Makes me laugh every time.

[@vivek_02512]

From trash taste charity live stream

[@SarumanTheStinky]

Connor even used the same example

[@rrrbub]

This reminds me of an anecdote about Diogenes of Sinope (you know, the famous Living-in-a-barrel one) related, if I remember correctly, by Diogenes Laertius: one day in Plato's academy, there was a fervent discussion on what physiologically constitutes a human being. In the end, the disputants agreed that, physiologically, a human being is a furless animal that walks on two legs, much to the amusement of Diogenes. So, on the next day, he brought a plucked chicken to the academy and said, "Hey, this lad here would like to join your academy!"

[@pauldwaite]

“This reminds me of an anecdote about Diogenes of Sinope” - I am so tired of KZbin comments starting with that phrase.

[@andrasszabo1570]

Diogenes must have been brilliant. Obnoxious, insufferable, but brilliant. (Like the story with him and Alexander the Great). He was the first punk in Europe!

[@SuddenReal]

Definition of a mammal: Has an hard internal skeleton, is hairy and gives milk. Example: a coconut

[@mandolinic]

As I was saying to Descartes just yesterday, I really hate it when people name drop philosophers into the conversation.

[@SMgrimbldoo]

SuddenReal Coconut has a hard external shell.

[@BornAgainCynic0086]

So, my wife is right, when I say I am going fishing, she says it's an excuse to do nothing. So next time I catch a nothing with my nothing rod I will regard myself as a successful nothing-er-man.

[@dfghj241]

from nothingham.

[@rtozier2011]

More like from Nothingguard in Pembrokeshire.

[@DrJun187]

If fish is nothing, shouldn't fishing but nothinging?

[@beardedemperor]

If fish are nothing, and fishing is an excuse to do nothing, are you saying fishing is an excuse to do fish?

[@511dydy]

Do you go fishing with a male friend of yours wearing cowboy outfits?

[@Statsy10]

A somewhat related and equally mind-blowing fact I learned a while back is that what you think makes a snake a snake (its lack of legs), is not what defines a snake at all. There are legless lizards for example. What makes a snake a snake is actually its flexible, detachable jaw.

[@bazza945]

That sounds unhinged.

[@peterclarke7240]

I personally think it sounds rather susp-hisssssious.

[@Potidaon]

So what you're saying is that legless lizards can only aspire to be a snake.

[@georgecaplin9075]

The relentless, angry logic of David Mitchell. Love it.

[@paulthoresen8241]

Nothing and chips Fillet O'Nothing Jellynothing There's something a bit absent going on here

[@imadchowdhury2995]

Paul Thoresen something smells nothingy

[@egogeo851]

there is alot of nothing in the ocean.

[@DK_Son]

Nothing fingers. Vagina smells like nothing.

[@paulthoresen8241]

One nothing, two nothing, red nothing, blue nothing

[@stevenbierman3259]

Luca Brasi sleeps with the nothing. There's plenty of nothing in the sea. Jesus fed the 5,000 with five loaves of bread and two nothing.

[@DrDespicable]

I can just imagine Jupitus going off on this one... LOL

[@ZeHoSmusician]

_It's not there!_ XD

[@jmalmsten]

I actually found myself buying the book Encyclopedia of Underwater Life just to find out if this was the case. And yes. Right there. Under the Heading "What is a fish" and the sub-heading "Basic parameters" it indeed states the following: "Incredible as it may sound, 'There's no such thing as a fish'..." And my brain was promptly exploded.

[@snickle1980]

😐His head exploded...Well, in a situation like this, the responsible thing is to alert someone nearby so as to ensure that your body is taken care of, before it begins to decompose... Ah, second player! It's good to have you on board. I guarantee you can't do any worse than the person who came before you.

[@bazza945]

The Elves' Reference Library has that book, with that quote highlighted.

[@KCatch22]

And with that, a QI podcast was born.

[@JoFu_]

Stephen: "Starfish are not really fish, are they? (you silly man)." Less than a minute later: "There is no such thing as a fish."

[@herrbonk3635]

Ever heard of different abstraction levels?

[@stannismcnuff]

If there is no such thing as a fish, a starfish isn't a fish either

[@jadencm4862]

*holds fish* “This fish doesn’t exist” *fish disappears* *nobel*

[@braydenpotter93]

People keep telling me to just be patient, there are plenty of fish in the sea... Apparently there aren’t. 😭

[@austinfernando8406]

There's a medieval book that introduces bees as "the smallest of the birds", peoples' classification did use to be roughly; things that fly, things that swim and things that walk on land'

[@nathanthom8176]

And geese were fish, although I think that was an attempt to broaden meal choices on a Friday (likely being Christian at the time).

[@Andymandyrocks]

Nobody: Fish Biologist: I am gonna end my own career 😂

[@chintoki]

It's probably called marine biologist, though.

[@EebstertheGreat]

An approximate definition of a "fish" which works pretty well is the paraphyletic group consisting of all vertebrates except tetrapods. You can be a bit more precise about exactly where you draw the line (e.g. stem tetrapods might still be considered fish, as might lancelets). This would mean that, for instance, jellyfish and starfish are not fish, but lampreys and rays are.

[@bazza945]

Look, let's not muck about, it's a fish if it goes with chips and mushies peas.

[@bramvanduijn8086]

That's like saying to your girlfriend "I hate women, but you're the exception". It isn't cute, and it isn't healthy.

[@luisat431]

Connor was right

[@satvikkhandagale6781]

Who would have thought the cdoggy knew about animals

[@luisat431]

@@satvikkhandagale6781 he's a true monke

[@darthmarticusLFC]

Really interesting stuff. Love learning things like this

[@alephbunchofnumbers]

"They can feel no love." It's true

[@Leon_der_Luftige]

Have you checked?

[@ulrikschackmeyer848]

How do you know for a fact that a goldfish cannot be infatuated with it's owner. Perhaps the love is just unrequated (donno spelling, sorry)

[@Pfisiar22]

To me, the term fish refers to gill-breathing creatures that use fins for locomotion. I don't consider crustaceans or mollusks fish. I don't consider Jellyfish fish. The term fish has at least some general meaning for the public in that regard. It's the name of those creatures that breathe through gills, have prominent fins, and are not eels/hagfish. I mean, yeah, this is right. but the assumption that anyone would think that things like Jellyfish or Crabs are related to Trout/Salmon/ et al irritates me.

[@dfghj241]

the point is that fishy things (described by you) are as unrelated to each other generally than a crocodile is related to you. yet we name them all fish.

[@ibbi30]

I am a year late but... alternatively you can say we are a land-dwelling species of fish. We are just an evolutionary line of fish (in the vertebrate-gill meaning you speak of) that went on land but many of our close and distant fish ancestors remained in the sea. We could also redefine sharks, hag-fishes, lungfishes and other such lines to not be fish any more, until we are left with only the telosts. Then we will have a proper group we can call fishes. The telosts make up the vast majority of "fishes" anyway. This has been done before, botanists used to call fungi and lichens plants f.e.

[@sirdeadlock]

This brings whole new meaning to "so long and thanks for all the fish."

[@Xezlec]

@@dfghj241 And yet, we do call both crocodiles and humans "vertebrates". Does that mean vertebrates don't exist? This whole argument is ludicrous. You can make any categories you want and give them names. Arguments over the meaning of words are absurd.

[@mrboost4186]

Vertebrates are a group consisting of one hypothetical last common ancestor, ALL of its descendents, and nothing else. This makes them a clade, and an accepted group under modern taxonomy schemes. However some fish are more closely related to human beings than they are to other fish. For example, a salmon shares a more recent common ancestor with us (and indeed all amphibians, mammals, reptiles and birds) than it does with a shark. Therefore 'fish' is not a clade, but rather an unnatural, 'paraphyletic' grouping, meaning that one group of descendents is arbitrarily excluded from the group. Therefore taxonomists don't use the term 'fish'.

[@2charliep]

No such thing as fish?! Just as well Phil wasn't there.

[@bgphantom3]

No. Not fish. Mirage.

[@andrew7taylor]

IT'S NOT THERE!

[@sammycopley1]

"i hate this show"

[@catfish552]

He does always have such trouble with ideas like this.

[@RB747domme]

"NOOO!! ...Not there. No such thing. Fish are not real.. Noooope."

[@skykincaid5644]

I watched Sean Lock's "how can something not be something" commentary a dozen times or so before it started to make sense.

[@Fonzleberry]

David Mitchell cracks me up.

[@Catawampus105]

If there's no such thing as a fish then what did he spend a life time studying

[@cheekybum1513]

Red Floyd r/whoosh

[@bombtwenty3867]

I don't think he knew if he truly believed some fish were more related to a camel than another fish

[@lulairenoroub3869]

Fish

[@lulairenoroub3869]

Bomb Twenty I mean, they are. Camels have fish ancestors. Those fish also have fish ancestors. Those fish have branching decendents. The line that didn't lead to camels lead to another kind of modern fish. The line that did lead to camels also lead to other modern fish. Those fish are more closely related to camels than the other modern fish. It's like this. A billion years ago you've got fish 1AF. A while later that fish population splits into two species, 2AF and 2BF. Jump to the present, and 2AF has both fish and camel decendents, call them mAC and mAF. However, none of 2B's descendants ever left the water, so there's an mBF, but no mBC, because the B line never produced a camel. So mAF is more closely related to mAC than mBF. The only reason we refer to both mAF and and mBF is because they happen to have hung onto a fish like shape, but their evolutionary history is so wildly different that their genetic code has drifted further than the codes between mAF and mAC.

[@brokenwave6125]

Various types of animals that live in the sea.

[@jojo.carterxo]

R.I.P Sean Lock

[@tricesimo]

After having had the halibut and chips at my local shop, I can state with absolute certainty that there is such a thing as a fish.

[@bart2019]

So it's a similar to the situation with crabs, as currently is popular as a meme, "why is everything evolving into a crab?": there are several groups of crab species that are totally unrelated to each other.

[@markhackett2302]

Dark is not a thing, yet we still have the name dark naming "something", but that "thing" is a privative: the lack of light.

[@tylersullivan9122]

How's this for the definition of a fish? Fish: A vertebrate organism that belongs to none of the Mammal, Bird, Reptile, or Amphibian kingdoms.

[@markhackett2302]

@@tylersullivan9122 That would make it multiply polyphylogenetic, depending on the characters making bird, reptile, amphibian

[@jessicalee333]

A fish, a fish, fish, fishy _ohhh_... That went wherever _I_ did goooo...

[@ArngrimTV]

Yeeees! :D Never thought i'd see that in a lifetime.

[@MarxistKnight]

Is it in the cupboooard?

[@Tyronejizz]

Jessica Lee i know that quote from family guy.

[@ThEfextors]

ahaha lol

[@ThEfextors]

Behind the sofa!

[@okydokey]

I literally said out loud "thaaats interesssting" after this video. I feel bamboozled.

[@Doivid_]

1:39 Fry's reaction 😂😂😂

[@JoeBleasdaleReal]

“Something can’t be not be not something, can it?” - Sean Lock 2k??

[@MindinViolet]

I can imagine that garden gnomes are having a rock concert in my flower bed.This is a something.Something can't be not-something.Therefore garden gnomes are having a rock concert in my flower bed.

[@MySerpentine]

IKR? Dragons must be real, we have a word for them!

[@Staceyatkinson4496]

Love to see you go to a chip shop and ask for "that thing that ain't a fish and chips please"

[@charleslee8313]

Does that mean that the John Cleese comedy should be called "There's No Such Thing Named Wanda"?

[@the-chillian]

Or, as the always-pedantic Wikipedia tells us, fish are a paraphyletic collection of taxa. Which is about as useful as Johnson's definition of a network. ("Any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.")

[@GBart]

+Lytrigian Paraphyletic means coming from different branches. Taxa (plural of taxon) = distinct evolutionary branches, so they're collections of branches that mix-and-match different branches, instead of representing all the smaller branches that came from one earlier branch. For example: Monkeys, rodents, and cats are all mammals, so they all come from the same earlier branch (at some point, there was only one species of mammal), but "monkey" is a paraphyletic clade because it includes New World Monkeys (new world as in the Americas) and Old World Monkeys (which are more closely related to Apes), but it doesn't include apes, even though apes lie between OWM and NWM, genetically. "Primate" is a true clade, because it includes monkeys AND apes (as well as lemurs and tarsiers), and doesn't leave anybody out that isn't extinct.

[@the-chillian]

AndroidDoctorr I know what it means, you pedant. "Meaningful" is not the same as "useful".

[@GBart]

Lytrigian I thought you meant useful towards understanding the meaning of the phrase, since that's what definitions are for.

[@the-chillian]

AndroidDoctorr I gave you an example of a definition that, while true and meaningful, obfuscates more than it illuminates. Illumination is useful, obfuscation is not. Anyone capable of understanding Johnson's definition doesn't need to be told what a "network" is in the first place, and anyone who understands the phrase "paraphyletic collection of taxa" doesn't need to be told that fish are that. Neither, therefore, is useful.

[@alistairk8]

It is possible to understand the concept of paraphyly without knowing that fish are paraphyletic.

[@CorsetGrace]

I was hoping there was no such thing as Phish but alas, I wasn't that lucky.

[@turbogeek.421]

No Such Thing As A Fish - A fantastic podcast!

[@josephgehring919]

After a lifetime studying fish, he concluded there was no such thing as fish... WHAT WAS HE STUDYING THEN?!

[@CakeRocketProduction]

A bunch of different species whose categorization makes no actual sense and has been constructed according to our notions of what a fish should be like, instead of vice versa, and as such gives no actual value to science.

[@HarduntheRanger]

Got to love at 1:00 when Sean Lock just butts in because he hasn't had enough attention yet

[@martincattell6820]

Hardûn lol they do edit the footage

[@django3422]

It's almost as if he's a guest on a show where people are encouraged to talk and discuss...

[@Levi_Skardsen]

I'm gonna go up to my local fishery and tell them their business is based on a web of lies.

[@ifatreefalse]

what would the net result of that be?

[@ulrikschackmeyer848]

@@ifatreefalse Priceless! ABSOLUTELY Priceless!

[@BKPrice]

"There's no such thing as a fish." "So what should we call things we used to call fish but that aren't anything else either? If only we had a word available to use to describe at least some of them."

[@andrewzmorris]

Well, what do we call all the animals that fly? We don't really have a name for that.

[@Wolfington]

The perfect panel for QI

[@Namfooodle]

It's been too long since Sean Lock has been on the show.

[@kisbie]

+Namfooodle I heard a rumour that he and Stephen Fry fell out, but his stated reason is that he earns enough money from the repeat fees that he's not bothered anymore. He's been quite honest about only doing panel shows because they pay well.

[@lhawes92]

I heard he was once asked on the street "Are you Dave?" in reference to the TV channel, and realised enough was enough.

[@shinycoop]

I wish I'd had the foresight to finish college. Maybe then I, too, could have gotten paid to spend a lifetime studying something that never existed.

[@RoderickGMacLeod]

So long and thanks for all of them.

[@EntropysSmile]

And at that very moment one of the greatest Podcast sparked into life. =)

[@alexandriaoccasional-corte1346]

I knew it! Salmon tastes more like camel. But they called me crazy...

[@Roronoa2zoro]

Seems odd that the English language that's normally so efficient has such a massive oversight in terms of what should be a simple biological classification issue. As they say crayfish, cuttlefish, jellyfish and starfish all have fish in the name, but in Norwegian these all have distinct names while the word we use to translate "fish" is only used for things like trout, cod, pike, salmon and herring. I mean it does sound like English could theoretically have labelled the otter a fish.

[@JamieClark]

Capybara (sort of like an otter?) was decided to be a fish ;) Look it up.

[@blindio466]

this is the bit where i point out that the catholics beat us to that, anything that swims is a fish so's the pope has a nice dinner friday evening essentially :)

[@JamieClark]

+blind io BUT THEY HAVE LEGS!

[@ninjafruitchilled]

It seems that in Old English "fish" did indeed just mean "any animal that lives exclusives in the water". So nope, otters aren't fish, they live on land a reasonable amount of the time :).

[@JamieClark]

ninjafruitchilled You failed to follow instructions, friend; look it up :-D (I certainly didn't say otters are fish, I said Capybara!)

[@darrylkelly7958]

Is that a picture of Sebastien Vettel holding the fish in the picture in the background?

[@yourrightimsooosorry884]

Thanks Stephen, got chucked out my local chippy and got told to never to come back!!!🖖😁

[@18deadmonkeys]

The Catholic Church declared beavers to be a fish. You could even eat them on Friday during Lent. And that's why we stopped letting churches dictate what's taught in public schools.

[@CST4R1]

I'm sure they thought the same of baby rabbits

[@TRBLarsen]

Then we would have to stop teaching the Big Bang or Mendelian generics as both were discovered by the Catholic Church.

[@jameshill80]

They said the same of duck and geese as well.

[@BennySalto]

Felines are also fish.

[@cogidubnus1953]

especially in Ohio

[@jamesflames6987]

It doesn't mean there's not such thing as a fish, it just means the definition doesn't map to a single discrete evolutionary family.

[@paulm3952]

It's basically "non-tetrapod vertebrates." It's paraphyletic, though.

[@Leto_0]

Ok I was hung up on this for a bit, but the statement that a salmon is more closely related to a camel than a hagfish is kind of misleading. Genetically it makes perfect sense, but as the comedians pointed out, we need everyday terms to use or we'd just needlessly confuse ourselves. The point he's making is that fish in general is a massive example of convergent evolution. That doesn't mean they aren't all very much the same though. They have different chemical compositions but they mostly take the same shape and pretty much all use fins and gill. You could say the same about land animals, but we don't live in a medium that forces everybody to grow such similar physical characteristics. The fact that they live in water means they have to be fish. It's semantics of course. btw I'm only talking about the things we generally think of as fish. It doesn't make any sense that jellyfish, starfish, crayfish, etc have the word fish in the name, at least nowadays with our modern terms.

[@drhibas]

I miss Stephen 😢

[@cookiemonster59263]

God, imagine spending your entire life studying fish and the only conclusion you were able to draw was that your entire field doesn't even exist at all. Back to square one, I guess...

[@Monkeypole]

OneAndOnly I don't see what chess has to do with this

[@tertzi8194]

@@Monkeypole I don't see what square one has to do with chess

[@urmama54]

yeah, to know that life is but an illusion... yikes

[@IkisDragonFist]

And yet people still smugly correct people who call a dolphin a fish. "Uhhh, TECHNICALLY it's not a Fish, it's a mamm-" "TECHNICALLY there's no such THING as a fish, which means that the only criteria for being a fish is if people call it that. And I call a dolphin a fish." "But that's no-" "Also spiders are bugs now." "Wh-?!" "AND TOMATOES ARE VEGETABLES." "GAAH"

[@pallydan893]

Actually there is the Mahi-mahi which is also known as a dolphin, so yes there are dolphin fish and cetaceans. Also in colloquial terms, bug refers to any land dwelling arthropod, therefore spiders are bugs.

[@ModKijko]

+Ikis DragonFist Tomatoes are vegetables - this is a culinary term. Tomatoes are fruits - this is a botanical term. Tomatoes are fruits and they are vegetables. Also Spiders can also be bugs.if by bug you mean 'terrestrial arthropod'. And dolphins are fish, if fish is a biological term since dolphins descended from fish. So are humans of course.

[@RenaissanceEarCandy]

Knowledge is knowing that the tomato is a fruit - Wisdom is knowing that they don't belong in fruit salads.

[@CallumW25]

mod prime and by that reasoning all life on earth is fish, since life started in the oceans. It really does support the fact that there's no such thing as a fish, since everything is/was fish

[@drdiscostu]

Pally Dan mahi mahi are known as "dolphin fish" not "dolphin"

[@michaelegan6092]

I think that this shows the real value of a noble award.

[@illyrian9976]

1:35 Plato would be proud

[@Cruxador]

This applies to reptiles as well. An alligator is far more closely related to a chicken than to a lizard.

[@stephenderry9488]

The closest living relative of the hippo is every single whale and dolphin. An elephant shrew is more closely related to an elephant than to a shrew. Humans and rabbits are more closely related to each other than to dogs and cats and pigs and cows. And we all evolved from sponges.

[@Stethacanthus]

Dr. Gould was describing how the way that we have historically categorized fish does not actually correspond to a biological pattern. By widening the net to include all things we call fish, we have to include things that definitely are not fish. If we close the net to anything we don’t consider a fish, we will exclude things that we would call fish. This doesn’t mean that the animals that we call fish do not exist. It only shows that category of fish is logically invalid. *Note I erred in this portion of my comment in a few ways* Just as bad is species. Right now we have no definition of species that works for all living things at the same time.

[@Lexivor]

The category of "fish" is not logically invalid, it's just not monophyletic.

[@wunnell]

It's almost like human beings like making things up in order to make our lives easier. At least religion is real.

[@Stethacanthus]

@@Lexivor sorry I didn't reply earlier. You are absolutely correct. Thanks for responding to me.

[@scrubby2]

I finally understand what's the meaning of "there is no spoon" in the Matrix. Took me 20 years and a video.

[@thomasarthurmaj]

The word “fish” originally meant what we today call “aquatic animal.” That definition included dolphins, beavers, shellfish etc. Then over time, scientists narrowed the definition down to “aquatic craniates with gills and no limbs with digits” ie pisces. That left jellyfish, crayfish, starfish etc out of the originally broader term.

[@Name-ps9fx]

This is a perfect example of someone who is too smart for their own good.

[@laudenos8483]

I'm a simple person, I see David Mitchell, I click

[@decodolly1535]

That's not simplicity, that's good taste.

[@rynieryarom4277]

It's like a game I ask my friends "When do you stop being a cannibal?"

[@verballyrebellious]

I swear I seem to remember the phrase "well then what did he study?" from this clip, but can't seem to find it now.

[@Sirenhound]

and thereby rendering his life's work meaningless? I mean, what was he really studying all that time?

[@MellonVegan]

Well, they could have been more precise in saying that "fish are not a natural taxonomic grouping", same as worms for example.

[@ulrikschackmeyer848]

He wasn't studying 'anything' but 'manything'!

[@wasupgaming]

How can he study fish, if there's no such thing as a fish. Somethings fishy about this...

[@TheTonybudd]

~very true, they should have withdrawn his funding and asked him for a refund because he's just told them that there is no such thing as the thing they have been paying him to study for the last several years . . .

[@ulrikschackmeyer848]

@@TheTonybudd Well the conundrum seems to be that although there is NO such (single) thing as a fish, there does seem to be a lot of them?

[@magnusengeseth5060]

Counterpoint: "fish" has existed as a concept a lot longer than "biologist" :v

[@codyrhodes8180]

Can I just say Sean Lock, David Mitchell and Lee Mack are the greatest comedians that Britain's got to offer in todays era...!!

[@chazk7530]

Shaun Lock using the ontological arguement to prove the existence of fish. Classic.

[@denisvermeirre1024]

Gould never won a Nobel prize.

[@benparker5124]

the title is so good. should make a podcast with that title.

[@donnierussellii4659]

That Monty Python sketch now makes a lot more sense.

[@ulrikschackmeyer848]

Which one? The are several I believe?

[@yasterwelkin]

So is there such thing as a bird

[@simgenx5167]

Daniel Rhodes yes

[@yasterwelkin]

Explain.

[@yasterwelkin]

Just trying to prove the point to my sister.

[@barneylaurance1865]

+Daniel Rhodes Any two birds are more closely related to each other than either one is to anything that isn't a bird. They are both in the class 'Aves'.

[@crunch9876]

It's all subjective classification but it seems the term bird is more objective then fish

[@stensoft]

So, he won a Nobel price for nothing?

[@rossd1929]

+Jan Sten Adámek Actually, Stephen flubbed. Gould never won a Nobel.

[@kisbie]

Pretty big mistake given that Gould wasn't a physicist and was only a child when Purcell won his Nobel.

[@YvonTripper]

If there is a Nobel Prize for Nothing, I would like to nominate myself.

[@alexandercanella4479]

@@YvonTripper I nominate nobody. #EdgeLord

[@Ngamotu83]

Not all things that fly are birds, but by the logic that says there's no such thing as a fish, birds have to be dinosaurs.

[@Lexivor]

Using the logic in this clip one would conclude that there are no such things as dinosaurs.

[@thecuriousgorilla6005]

A paraphyletic group consisting of all chordates excluding tetrapods

[@swsennel]

I was taught "all vertebrates except tetrapods." The only difference that makes is: a few random marine animals (sea squirts and lancelets) don't count as fish the way I was taught. But I like the idea that "if it looks like a fish and has gills, it's a fish."