3 ms·

I'd really, really, like to see a statistical comparison of the differences between and within (fossil) species. "And the more specimens I study, the more I re

I'd really, really, like to see a statistical comparison of the differences between and within (fossil) species. "And the more specimens I study, the more I realize that most of the species designations don’t make sense. If hominin fossils were treated the same way as nonhuman primates, specimens currently lumped into the same group would be allocated to different ones." Is this because the differences between purported groups is much greater than the differences within groups? Or because there's significant incentives to split groups in order to name more species/families/orders/etc? The "traditional", extremely simplistic, definition of "species" is a group of critters who do not (normally) (fertilely) interbreed with another group (in the wild). Where there is evidence, Neanderthals and Denisovans, H. sapiens seems to have interbred rather frequently.

Jensson 5y ago
> Or because there's significant incentives to split groups in order to name more species/families/orders/etc? You can ask yourself why such an incentive wouldn't exist for finding new human species etc. The interesting part here is that humans are treated differently, not whether one is better than the other.
- mcguire 5y ago
  According to the article, before the 1940s, it did. Judging by the list of species in the image with spell-check underlines, anyway. Something weird happened in the 1940s.
  - catlikesshrimp 5y ago
    I appreciate you mentioning it. To be more clear, the nazis happened then WWII happened then United Nations and Human Rights.
    - robbedpeter 5y ago
      To expand on this, a lot of intellectual energy was spent on expanding and properly defining what was meant by "Human" in order to preclude any perverse interpretations, such as what the nazis did, and to shut down a lot of eugenics nonsense. Reading natural sciences and eugenics books written prior to the 40s is fascinating - there's all sorts of casual racism and talk of different cultures of people as if they were completely different species. Global communications improved after the 40s, and it became progressively more difficult to pretend to be a scholar or intellectual in public if you had racist or supremacist biases. The current state of liberal acceptance and human rights in the modern world is part of a trend that was an incredibly radical departure from almost all human culture prior to wwii.
  - dTal 5y ago
    Perhaps certain world events rendered it unfashionable to disqualify people from personhood on the basis of genetic traits?

Jensson 5y ago

> Or because there's significant incentives to split groups in order to name more species/families/orders/etc? You can ask yourself why such an incentive wouldn't exist for finding new human species etc. The interesting part here is that humans are treated differently, not whether one is better than the other.

mcguire 5y ago
According to the article, before the 1940s, it did. Judging by the list of species in the image with spell-check underlines, anyway. Something weird happened in the 1940s.
- catlikesshrimp 5y ago
  I appreciate you mentioning it. To be more clear, the nazis happened then WWII happened then United Nations and Human Rights.
  - robbedpeter 5y ago
    To expand on this, a lot of intellectual energy was spent on expanding and properly defining what was meant by "Human" in order to preclude any perverse interpretations, such as what the nazis did, and to shut down a lot of eugenics nonsense. Reading natural sciences and eugenics books written prior to the 40s is fascinating - there's all sorts of casual racism and talk of different cultures of people as if they were completely different species. Global communications improved after the 40s, and it became progressively more difficult to pretend to be a scholar or intellectual in public if you had racist or supremacist biases. The current state of liberal acceptance and human rights in the modern world is part of a trend that was an incredibly radical departure from almost all human culture prior to wwii.
- dTal 5y ago
  Perhaps certain world events rendered it unfashionable to disqualify people from personhood on the basis of genetic traits?