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Current time: March 23, 2025, 10:47 am
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Has 'one species' idea been put to bed?
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I have to wonder... racism is still rampant these days, especially when it comes to interracial dating and the only real difference betweeen people now is mostly the melanin content of their skin.
I wonder if this issue is amplified back when two completely seporate homonid species would be theoretically screwing around.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925 Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan  RE: Has 'one species' idea been put to bed?
January 4, 2012 at 2:42 am
(This post was last modified: January 4, 2012 at 2:46 am by Anomalocaris.)
A working definition of species is a population which is not prevented from freely interbreeding and producing fertile offsprings by genetically driven factors, including genetically driven behavior.
Thus Eskimos, Europeans and African pigmies all belong to the same species because if if mixed together, nothing genetic would dominate and prevent them from freely interbreeding and producing fertile offsprings, racists be damned. Conversely, if two populations can mix together and interbreed, but not completely freely. For example, if only offspring of one particular sex is fertile and the other not, then the two population do not belong to the same species. Similarly, when two populations can produce fertile offsprings of either or both sexes if forceably mixed and made to interbred by, for example, artificial insemination, but they can never, or very seldom, interbred in nature due to genetic factors, like different breeding seasons, then despite reproductive compatibility those two population do not belong to the same species because of genetically driven behavioral incompatibility. At current, it is not clear to me whether evidence shows human and Neanderthals can truly freely interbreed, or if the interbreeding is limited by genetic factors. So it is too early to tell, despite appearent presence of neanderthal gene in humans, whether neatherthal and HSS truly belong unquestionable to the same species. |
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