Fungi were plants in the west too until the early 80s. Anyone old enough to be making a speech on TV in 1991 would have probably thought of them as plants regardless of their country.
Russian Wikipedia has this quote from the author of hoax: "I wrote a rebuttal to this statement [that a mammal can not be a plant] in 'Smena' newspaper. In fact, we spent the whole hour proving that fungi was a separate kingdom from plants and animals."
Think of it like old astronomers who still refer to Pluto as a planet. They know it's not officially a planet anymore, but they still call it one because that's what they like calling it and they don't give a shit.
Most older mycologists still use the scientific names from before DNA sequencing in casual conversation. It's not that they don't know the new ones, they do, but that's just what they like calling them and they're fine with the younger generation waiting for them to die or whatever.
Think of it like old astronomers who still refer to Pluto as a planet. They know it's not officially a planet anymore, but they still call it one because that's what they like calling it and they don't give a shit.
And let's be honest...."official" in that case just means, "what other people think."
I think it's just change of habits. For example, in russian "coffee" was masculine gender for long time, until significant amount of people started to erroneously call it in neutral gender. Now rules is "okay" with both.
I like to play with those sort of people by saying that the planets of the solar system are: "Mercury, Venus, Mondas, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Rupert".
While one of those entries is strictly fictional, if Pluto belongs on the list there's no reason to exclude Ceres or Eris (though in the true spirit of Discordianism, I have to stick with the initial, fictional name for the final known planet).
That's what I can't figure out. It is what it is. What a few men decide to call it, doesn't change what it is. It's mass, radius and composition are not in debate. Those are the things that matter (no pun intended).
> Fungi were plants in the west too until the early 80s.
What brought about the change? Was some difference between them discovered or was it a matter of deciding that it would be more convenient to give them separate names?
Taxonomy isn't an arbitrary classification for convenience akin to call numbers in a library, but a reflection of our best understanding of evolutionary history, and as such changes as we learn more. Already in the 19th century many biologists already doubted that fungi were plants based on the fact that they don't have chloroplasts or photosynthesize and thus need to feed off of other living things as do animals. However, with the development of sequencing methods, first for proteins in the 1950s and then for DNA in the 1970s, more quantitive support for the similarity of fungi to animals were obtained. And in the 1990s when whole genome sequencing became possible yet more information supporting the grouping was obtained.
I think it has to do with the evolution of our scientific taxonomic system. It was realized that although fungi seem like plants in many ways, they have certain differences which warrant their separation from plants, phylogenically and morphologically.
