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I learned in high school that species are distinct when group B can no longer produce viable offspring with group A. Is it more complex than that?
by hayksaakian 9y ago
I learned in high school that species are distinct when group B can no longer produce viable offspring with group A.
Is it more complex than that?
- Amorymeltzer 9y agoYes. The answer to this question[1] on biology.se gives a good rundown of the issues facing this and other definitions of species. The short version is that this definition only works for sexually reproducing species. The long version is that it doesn't work. 1: https://biology.stackexchange.com/q/39664/4101 https://biology.stackexchange.com/q/39664/4101
- sago 9y agoYes very much so. And in fact you could already tell that that was not going to be the right answer, because also in high school, you learned that some species don't reproduce sexually. In fact even within sexual species there are a whole range of reproductive incompatabilities: from anatomical incompatibility, to impossible fertilisation, developmental dead-ends, through to live but infertile offspring, and seemingly viable offspring with dramatically lower environmental fitness. Species are an organising model, very useful in a lot of biological reasoning, but they are not a biological absolute. In general, whenever you were taught something black-and-white with hard boundaries in high school science, they were probably oversimplifying.
- adrianN 9y agoYes. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species