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No clear reason? It’s because the thing can successfully make more of itself before dying. That’s literally it.
See also: ticks
No animal has reason to exist.
*nothing has
As an animal myself, I’d like to object.
Okay, we’re listening. First establish some framework of “reasons to exist” so we understand what that even means, and then tell us yours. Centuries of philosophy haven’t gotten past the first step and you probably won’t either, but I won’t stop you from trying. Okay, go.
Sending memes in the group chat
Maybe i dont wanna share mt reasons ;((((
Okay but you could still do step 1 without revealing anything personal. Tell us: what even is a “reason to exist?”
One could be to be there to bring the trash cans back in after gc
Damnit! Who let Socrates in here again? /gets broom and starts pushing
Shoo! Begone philosopher! Nobody likes your kind!
Because not existing is …
…where we all come from and where we’re all going!
Yeah man but does God have a Divine plan for him? Or does he just like have to make his own way? Or is his entire life just like a cosmic accident and it makes no difference if he lives or dies?
exists for no clear reason
Sounds like Humans
Sounds like everything, if you’re leaning nihilist.
Nihilists! Fuck me! I mean, say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism Dude, at least it’s an ethos!
Nine year olds, man!
It also only has one hole, which, if you ask some topologists, is what humans have.
Return to donut.
If you really think about it, humans are just donuts without the frosting or the sprikles.
We’re the rejects in the donut display.
Our frosting is on the inside.
Removed by mod
I also find that to be a weird question to consider, as though something must have a purpose to be worthy of existence
In that vein, what is the point of humans? To bring on the 6th mass extinction?
We’re really trying, aren’t we?
I think try is the wrong world, pretty sure we’ve succeeded, the question now is “Does anything survive?”
a fanciful answer i heard was that “humans are how the universe perceives itself,” and a person could be forgiven for thinking that the point of humans is to do science. closer to the ground, the point of humans seems to be to alter our surroundings to suit our society: kind of like ants. we build, we live, we reproduce, we spread. it’s not a good thing or a bad thing, it just is what it is.
What does “point” even mean in this context??
<3
utility has several virtues, but i agree that it’s not the end-all/be-all. strictly speaking the “point” of any living thing is to pass it’s genes by reproduction, but in a complex and evolving world there are lots of animals that have a “point” in existing. oysters filter water, worms enrich soil, birds spread seeds, bees pollinate flowers, there are primary decomposers and secondary decomposers and tertiary decomposers and some birds build nests in trees and squirrels hide nuts and, you get the picture?
then there are other animals that we have changed for their utility. cows, pigs, chickens, and sheep are delicious and they would not make up such a share of modern biomass if we didn’t industrialize their slaughter. in some cases the point of an animal is that we’re gonna eat it.
if you’re an emotion-forward person you might think “oh, no, that’s terrible!” and you’re allowed to feel that way but usually things are the way they are for a bunch of reasons. feelings are great but food security is better. utility also has a role to play in conservation: we’re having a great time with industry but if the earth suffers catastrophic ecological collapse, the whole party stops.
Has no organs
Looks inside…
…organs.
is there a poop hole?
No but also yes
yeah, the mid-ventral butt opening
The sign on the outside says “Entry ^” and the sign on the inside says “Exit ^”
There’s a hole
Topologically speaking, no. This is clearly a sphere.
I am not speaking topoligically I am talking about the poop hole
As the old saying goes anyway
Hang on, is a sphere just a torus that poops out it’s mouth?
It truly has one hole, in that it eats, has a digestive sack, and then vomits the poop
vomits the poop
have had norovirus, know that feel
If the hole doesn’t go through, it is only a pocket, typographically identical to a plate.
*topologically
(Typography is text font stuff)
maybe they meant
O
As in “topographically”, which specifically refers to land surfaces?
Edit: For the record, each of the following refers to a completely different thing:
- Typography: fonts & stuff
- Topography: land surfaces
- Typology: classification
- Topology: mathematics of objects and their geometric and morphological properties
I know. I was joking. It’s a visual pun on how a feeding tube of the creature, a dinner plate and the capital O would look similar- hence typographical.
Nice
Meh. I’ll own my mistake. Silly autocorrect
Well we’re just doughnuts.
Kinda like a 2 stroke engine. The fuel and the exhaust all just mix.
It’s gross, but I can’t see any reason this disqualifies it from being on the tree of life.
Why is the digestive sack not an organ?
Organs are a distinct structure made of multiple tissues. So if this thing is just a few layers of tissue, then you can make the argument that the whole creature is essentially a single-organ organism.
Truth be told, I suspect there is a certain amount of hyperbole in the infographic.
Exist for no reason? All life has a purpose, and that is to poop. The excrement speaks for itself.
It sounds like it doesn’t have a poop hole
Edit: oh, nevermind. “For food to enter and exit”
Poop is subsistence, Sex is persistence
Time to wake up and go to work in the shit factory!
“existing for no clear reason”
So like every other life form we know of?
I don’t think any natural thing exists for a reason. That’s reserved for things made or at least caused by sentient beings.
It’s the roomba of the sea
So from the wiki
The monophyly of Xenacoelomorpha soon became established, but its position as either a basal bilaterian clade or a deuterostome remained unresolved until 2016, when two new studies, with increased gene and taxon sampling, again placed Xenoturbella as the sister group of Acoelomorpha within Xenacoelomorpha, and placed Xenacoelomorpha as sister to Nephrozoa (Protostomia plus Deuterostomia), and therefore the basalmost bilaterian phylum<
Seems like “where on the tree of life” is “the first bilaterals” which makes sense. They seem very worm-like in bodyplan. Shit from the Pre-Cambrian can look pretty alien and have shaky relationships to more derived species.
Would.
Scientists do love to talk about worms
This has some details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenacoelomorpha?wprov=sfti1#Phylogenetics
Bit of clarification: Xenacoelomorpha is the phylum that the genus Xenoturbella is under.
Someone left a tag at the top of the Xenacoelomorpha article advocating a rewrite, which I could probably quickly investigate (or even just check WoRMS) if I weren’t currently a lazy lump of dead weight. Without assessing the tag’s merits, I’d at least advise treading lightly as a heuristic.
is that a living fleshlight?
This is a place for science! Not (your deepest) fantasy!
c’mon! just the tip!
I promise I’ll stop after that!
If it has at least one hole, then it exists for a reason. ;)
It looks like they do get new openings on the surface that excrete eggs and sperm.
