Reply to comment

Karina Granadeno, Mariah Casias, Heather Lewis

We discovered eighteen different types of plants on the planet Farther, and classified them into six categories. When classifying plants, we took particular note of two factors in particular. One factor we took into consideration was plant height. We classified them into tall, medium, and short. The other factor we took into account was whether the branches grew from a central trunk, directly from the ground, or neither. One difficulty we encountered was how each category was defined. Even if we had been able to measure the height of the plants quantitatively, the classifications “tall,” “medium,” and “short” are fairly arbitrary. There is no set number that makes something “tall,” so inevitably, some plant heights were ambiguous, and were assigned differently by each of us according to no standard but opinion. Another difficulty was making classifications that fit every plant. Each plant has specific characteristics, making it hard to make general categories that apply to each plant. What we can take away from this is that categories in general are fairly arbitrary and subject to the opinion of the people who define them. Even within each category, there is a lot of variation, and we would have to make an infinite number of categories to attempt to encompass them all.