4 ms·
How would one go about making an educated guess as to how many species of human in total existed, given what we know about the probabilities of discovering evid
by wallace_f 7y ago
How would one go about making an educated guess as to how many species of human in total existed, given what we know about the probabilities of discovering evidence of one?
- frostburg 7y agoIt's similar to the tank problem, but intuitively this should have additional constraints (also tree or rather graph instead of a sequence)
- Baeocystin 7y agoYou'd have to very closely define what precisely you meant by the word 'species', and go from there. It's a surprisingly slippery thing to do. Even the commonly-accepted 'can have viable offspring together' isn't as cut-and-dried as you might think: https://www.sciencealert.com/darwin-s-finches-evolve-into-new-species-in-real-time-two-generations-galapagos https://www.sciencealert.com/darwin-s-finches-evolve-into-ne... More looking at edge-case compatibility between germlines, in this case modern human vs. neanderthal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_and_modern_humans#Neanderthals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_...
- matt_kantor 7y agoRing species (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species) also throw an interesting wrench into the "viable offspring" definition.