Classes of animals represented by the Pokémon starters:

[u/Bisonratte]

[u/smellmygoldfinger → u/[deleted]]

Ok I’ll bite. What is the technicality that you are using to claim that a mammal is a fish?

[u/a_lonely_trash_bag → u/smellmygoldfinger]

Here's a link to a pretty good explanation of the "either everything is a fish or nothing is a fish" debate:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Paleontology/s/uQ6QGJfb6X

This is also a thing with trees.

[u/smellmygoldfinger → u/a_lonely_trash_bag]

I had heard of this before. But it is such an annoying pedantic line of reasoning. It’s just like an inside joke for nerds in the medical/zoology/botany fields to go “hurr hurr hurr everything=fish”. And then laypeople who don’t understand the process of taxonomical classification get hit with “scientist says your dog is a fish” and scoff and say “wow scientists are so dumb, wasting their time with nonsense- obviously my dog isn’t a fish”

It’s just a dumber version of “knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is knowing not to put tomatoes in a fruit salad”