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Besides the very interesting insight into how evolution, speciation & fauna dynamics in general work, it is always interesting seeing people's reactions to the

Besides the very interesting insight into how evolution, speciation & fauna dynamics in general work, it is always interesting seeing people's reactions to the classification problems these grey areas pose. Species, taxa, subspecies, hybrids, populations, chronospecies, trunk species, type species.... All words describing a fundamentally non discreet thing. Yet, knowing that, we (anywhere from casual readers to biology taxonomists) get stressed and obsessed when our leaky categorisations leak. It's a good reminder that we're natural categorizors. Our minds are all about instances and abstract truths. Lassie the dog, coyote the canid, Socrates the philosopher.

posterboy 9y ago
The name of a species is fixed to a specific "holotype". Oetzi is the only neanderthal; archeopterix had different names for each of the first specimen found; Carl von Linee is the holotype for Homo Sapiens Sapiens, according to some taxonomists, at least (himself, I guess) ... Exactly because this is a known problem. A single individual is as discrete as it gets. In linguistics this problem is called the single other hypothesis and rater popular. In programming and math it's the diamond square problem, e.g. for java's inheritance mechanism, which is countered with generics, traits, typeclasses and so on. Abstract Algebra and Category theory have to deal with this and the corollary from my POV is, that it's just really complicated. Before genetics, phenotype was based on appearance. Genetic genealogy is a rather young field, so it might take a while for deeper insights to trickle down. Also, it's not completely wrong to base a classification on environment, because a protein to synthesis X from Y is useless, if the environment doesn't provide Y.
- posterboy 9y ago
  "single mother", "rather" ... my keyboard is broken
- dalbasal 9y ago
  I agree, yet we're still kind of uncomfortable with species not being discreet across one or more of these taxonomical approaches.
- tropo 9y ago
  A single individual you say? I present to you the clonal colony and the synctium. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonal_colony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonal_colony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncytium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncytium

posterboy 9y ago

The name of a species is fixed to a specific "holotype". Oetzi is the only neanderthal; archeopterix had different names for each of the first specimen found; Carl von Linee is the holotype for Homo Sapiens Sapiens, according to some taxonomists, at least (himself, I guess) ... Exactly because this is a known problem. A single individual is as discrete as it gets. In linguistics this problem is called the single other hypothesis and rater popular. In programming and math it's the diamond square problem, e.g. for java's inheritance mechanism, which is countered with generics, traits, typeclasses and so on. Abstract Algebra and Category theory have to deal with this and the corollary from my POV is, that it's just really complicated. Before genetics, phenotype was based on appearance. Genetic genealogy is a rather young field, so it might take a while for deeper insights to trickle down. Also, it's not completely wrong to base a classification on environment, because a protein to synthesis X from Y is useless, if the environment doesn't provide Y.

posterboy 9y ago
"single mother", "rather" ... my keyboard is broken
dalbasal 9y ago
I agree, yet we're still kind of uncomfortable with species not being discreet across one or more of these taxonomical approaches.
tropo 9y ago
A single individual you say? I present to you the clonal colony and the synctium. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonal_colony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonal_colony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncytium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncytium