3 ms·

There is no clear definition of "species".

• jaggederest 3y ago
  Cladistics can be thought of as k-means clustering in a Hamming space of individual organisms attributes and genetics, I think. A species is a tight cluster, and as you go up towards phyla the clustering becomes more diffuse.
  • BurningFrog 3y ago
    That's a definition. I'm not convinced it's "clear" :)
    • dekhn 3y ago
      it's not even a definition, it's a heuristic approximation. Likely the concept of species can't really be truly defined, but works best as a loose concept for organizing thinking about evolution.
  • jhbadger 3y ago
    That's more phenetics (clustering by shared similarities) than cladistics. Cladistics needs a hypothesis of shared ancestry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cladistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cladistics