Speaking of fish, are you a human are fish truther or are you a strict fish are paraphyletic truther
don't jump me but i probably belong more to the "humans are fish" category lollll. didn't realize there was a real debate over this but i mean. i don't see how humans don't count as lobe-finned fish haha. what's the difference between calling humans fish and calling humans vertebrates? (is there functionally a distinction between fish and vertebrates?? i've never actually considered this before! okay, wait, i guess that's what this question is actually asking haha) what about calling us amniotes and cynodonts? they're all clades that we're included in. one could argue that we should be saying non-terrestrial fish like we've started saying non-avian dinosaurs. the only way i can think of to genuinely argue for fish only being paraphyletic is to consider it a matter of body structure rather than phylogenetics, like worms (is that the argument people are making? cause it's a legit one, if so.)
anyway, i think it's just a matter of bias. we pick and choose what terminology we use based off of what is most comfortable, clear, and appealing to us. like, a lot of people consider Aves to be a class when birds also belong to Class Reptilia---how does that make any sense? the levels at which we assign taxonomic clades is completely subjective lol. so, in practice, i use "fish" in the paraphyletic sense because it's the easiest way to go about things, but i certainly have no issue following it up with the classic, "☝️🤓 well technically, all vertebrates are actually fish." i've actually gone by the username "your favorite lobe-finned fish" in a couple group chats before lol.
this is maybe a little off topic, but i feel like people like to forget that our taxonomic system is ultimately made for humans by humans, not by nature. i love taxonomy (shoutout linnaeus), and it's an extremely important tool for biologists, but the second you start treating the rules of any kind of human-made categorization system invented to describe a natural phenomenon (especially anything to do with biology) as if they're laws of nature, you're actually kinda succumbing to the logical fallacy of nominative determinism lol. these species didn't tell us their names like they're pokémon---they're names that various people and communities came up with for them, and are subject to bias, mistakes, and most crucially redundancy and obsoletion.
i just think it's hilarious how subjective our taxonomic levels are lol. there's a reason we fight like dogs over whether populations are a species, subspecies, or entire separate genus. when phylogenetics concerns determining how long ago two populations diverged, how much they changed, and the degree of introgression, we're seeking an objective truth that actually exists---so i have no issue with people squabbling over the arrangement and timeline of a phylogenetic tree. but when it comes to squabbling over levels at which we should group taxa, it starts to sound a little silly to me. maybe this is just cause i'm prone to monophyletic-favoring logical reasoning, but as far as i'm concerned, our current setup is no more scientifically valid or accurate than considering every single organism it's own species. the concept of any taxonomic level is completely man-made and constantly-changing (and only about 300 years old!), and as such it's just a matter of personal preference as we have no rigid, perfectly accurate definitions or perfectly understood natural laws of speciation to uphold them to. so personally, i just prefer we try to keep things as clear and understandable without overgeneralizing or splitting hairs unnecessarily haha.
(sorry, i was just giving my friend from out-of-state a personal tour of the zoology areas of the AMNH yesterday and spent like 7 hours talking about this stuff, so i'm still in a bit of a chatty mood lol.)
