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There are many different ways to define what constitutes a separate species. The inability to produce viable offspring is just one.
by necolas 16y ago
There are many different ways to define what constitutes a separate species. The inability to produce viable offspring is just one.
- dkarl 16y agoThe difficulties of defining species lead to interesting edge cases, some of which show up in nature, such as ring species: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species Formally, the issue is that interfertile "able to interbreed" is not a transitive relation – if A can breed with B, and B can breed with C, it does not follow that A can breed with C – and thus does not define an equivalence relation. A ring species is a species that exhibits a counterexample to transitivity.