appalachian-ace:

africanaquarian:

africanaquarian:

africanaquarian:

I don’t think parents realize exactly how much their relationship dynamics affects the future relationships of their children

Now that I’m grown l can say with absolute certainty that the effects of growing up watching 2 people in a dysfunctional relationship have seeped into multiple facets of my life

And that’s the thing about growing up. You don’t even realize how traumatized you are from seeing all that until you’re an adult and then one night you dare to be a little introspective, then suddenly you’re connecting dots and unpacking all this baggage you didn’t know you were carrying on your back this whole time. And you have to unpack it. You have to. Because if you don’t, the cycle continues

Also other family dynamics.

I never understood mother-in-law jokes because I grew up in a family where every parent-in-law child-in-law relationship around me was warm and hospitable.

But I also have little to no clue how to relate to my sisters-in-law despite them being very welcoming because my dad’s sisters not really having a relationship with my mother. All the female-female family dynamics I got to significantly witness growing up were between blood relatives.

If you learn dysfunctional rules or no rules for how a kind of relationship functions, there can be Issues.

palaeofail-explained:

Of course! Stem-mammals like Dimetrodon are animals who are not mammals, but are more closely related to mammals than to any other living animals.

(Image by Nobu Tamura)

They laid eggs, many had scales, and many were cold-blooded. So, why aren’t they reptiles? 

The tree of life can be imagined as just that – a tree. Groups are defined based on their ancestry – i.e., what branch of that tree they grew from. A stick that grows off of a branch will still always be a part of that branch, even if it looks like it grew on a different branch.

Animals like Dimetrodon weren’t reptiles – they’re synapsids. Synapsids are defined as “everything more closely related to humans than to lizards”, while reptiles can be defined as “everything closer to lizards than to humans”. Dimetrodon was a closer relative to us than it was to lizards, or crocodiles, or turtles, or dinosaurs, for that matter. That makes it a synapsid.

Wait, but scales, egg-laying, and cold-bloodedness are all defining features of reptiles, right?? 

Nope! In the modern world, it can be used to identify many animals as reptiles. But it’s ultimately wrong. 

For one, many reptiles today don’t fit those. Many snakes and lizards give live birth, and some sea turtles are warm-blooded. And that’s not to mention birds! Since birds are dinosaurs, and dinosaurs are reptiles, birds themselves are reptiles, and they are warm blooded and don’t have true scales.

The thing is, egg-laying, cold-bloodedness, and scaliness aren’t useful for figuring out relationships between reptiles and mammals, because those aren’t “derived traits”. 

A derived trait is something that a group evolved that is unique to that group and is distinct from its ancestors. For example – having no external tail is a derived trait of apes when compared to other primates, but having hair is not – because the ancestor of all primates had hair, but did not lack a tail.

The ancestor or mammals and reptiles was scaly, cold-blooded, and egg-laying. So these traits don’t give us useful information for figuring out which branch an animal goes on – an animal that is scaly or cold-blooded could have just inherited it from its ancestors.

Okay, that was a lot of text. Let’s look at some pictures.

What derived traits do these early stem-mammals have in common with true mammals? The simplest one is the one that gave them their name. The word “synapsid” means “single opening”, and it refers to the holes behind the eye where the jaw muscle attaches (There are other traits besides this, but we’re just going to focus on this one).

Skull A is an “anapsid” condition, meaning it has no holes behind the eye. This is the condition is some reptiles, and was also the ancestral condition for both synapsids and reptiles.

Skull C is a “diapsid” skull, as it has two holes behind the eye. This condition is what gives the name to Diapsida, the group containing all living reptiles (probably). 

And skull B is a synapsid skull. This is the condition is the ancestors of mammals, and it’s the condition in animals like Dimetrodon.

Just having these traits doesn’t define a group – common ancestry does. But since common ancestry can’t really be observed unless we find prehistoric family trees made by studious fossils (unlikely), we have to use anatomical traits to try and chart the course of evolution. Animals that are more closely related have more recent common ancestry and, hopefully, more similar appearances. Paleontologists define these appearances in terms of possessing or lacking different individual traits, or characters:

I promise this does make sense

So, a big list of characters is compiled, and each species is coded for the state of that character, making a big matrix with as much data as possible. Ideally.

The matrix of all of these character states is then put into a program that uses algorithms I won’t go into, skip a few technical steps, and voila – you have a model as to how these species could have evolved to have the traits they did.

This tree isn’t necessarily 100% accurate – it probably isn’t, in fact – but it’s a current best-guess hypothesis for the relationships between species. This is called a cladistic analysis, and it’s one of the most useful tools in understanding how a group diversified.

africanaquarian:

africanaquarian:

africanaquarian:

I don’t think parents realize exactly how much their relationship dynamics affects the future relationships of their children

Now that I’m grown l can say with absolute certainty that the effects of growing up watching 2 people in a dysfunctional relationship have seeped into multiple facets of my life

And that’s the thing about growing up. You don’t even realize how traumatized you are from seeing all that until you’re an adult and then one night you dare to be a little introspective, then suddenly you’re connecting dots and unpacking all this baggage you didn’t know you were carrying on your back this whole time. And you have to unpack it. You have to. Because if you don’t, the cycle continues