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The problem is that grouping individuals -> species is highly nontrivial. Even your constraint fails with bidirectional admixture. Imagine individuals from spec
by AlotOfReading 5y ago
The problem is that grouping individuals -> species is highly nontrivial. Even your constraint fails with bidirectional admixture. Imagine individuals from species A interbreed with people of species B. The admixture survives in B for a couple hundred thousand years and then back-admixture occurs, producing descendants in A who have intermediate ancestors of a different species. This is a common pattern in genus Homo, which is part of why human taxonomy is insanity. Bonus points if you can explain how to decide which species name to give to the immediate descendants of the admixture event from A->B.
There's an older paper by Holliday on this subject that you might find interesting: https://doi.org/10.1086/377663 https://doi.org/10.1086/377663
- HelloNurse 5y agoThe idea of species is quite meaningless in any case. Boundaries are arbitrary, genetic similarity can arise by chance, interbreeding is situational, reproductive isolation is rarely perfect, populations are vague; of the different definitions of species surveyed in the article, the "cohesion"-based one is the closest to admitting that taxonomy is a rough model of cohesive genealogical and evolutionary patterns.