On the thread entitled “Species Kinds”, commenter phoodoo asks:
What’s the definition of a species?
A simple question but hard to answer. Talking of populations of interbreeding individuals immediately creates problems when looking at asexual organisms, especially the prokaryotes: bacteria and archaea. How to delineate a species temporally is also problematic. Allan Miller links to an excellent basic resource on defining a species and the Wikipedia entry does not shy away from the difficulties.
In case phoodoo thought his question was being ignored, I thought I’d open this thread to allow discussion without derailing the thread on “kinds”.
These threads are a good review of the biology that’s been hashed out over the last 150 years or so. It’s amusing that FMM thinks he has an idea that hasn’t been discussed by biologists ad nauseam.
I think there is more to it than meets the eye.
Or less.
Revelation?
Glen Davidson
phoodoo,
Where does the ‘very microscopic’ level start? Is that below the ‘fairly microscopic’ level? Regardless, coffee cup boundaries are fuzzy long before you get to the level at which quantum mechanics has any effect.
always a possibility. I just have the sense that he is trying to set the hook, if I am wrong I will say my Mea Culpa.
newton,
1) Thou shalt not agree with any evolutionist.
2) God told Man he could name things. Discrete things. So name them he damn well will.
But there’s me bringing God into it again.
In all things
Maybe so
And yet Allan, John still makes such foolish statements as this.
I am glad to hear you agree he is nuts.
Are we confusing two different sorts of boundaries? The concept of “coffee cup” is fuzzy. But are actual, physical coffee cups fuzzy? I’d like to see an argument for that. (I have seen fuzzy coffee cups, but they’d been left in the sink way too long.)
Platonism, making the world a better place for 2500 years 😉
peace
It would not help you recreate a saber toothed tiger but it would help you recognize it as a saber tooth tiger when you did.
peace
We should call them a species unless that moniker does not fit.
This is not difficult.
Species are like marriages they are often but always characterized be reproductive compatibility.
The problem is when you want to turn a normally present characteristic into a defining one.
peace
I never said mine was a particularly new idea, just a good one.
peace
No hook this time. Just a topic that interests me.
I think it shows that philosophy matters and there are real tangible consequences for doing it badly.
peace
phoodoo: u could probably breed a sabre toothed tiger or woolly mammoth again if you really wanted.
fifth: Only if you use something similar to my definition of species. Such a thing would be impossible given the orthodox definition.
fifth: would not help you recreate a saber toothed tiger but it would help you recognize it as a saber tooth tiger when you did.
I agree, but so far you have failed to make case in this instance. In fact one might say you are demonstrating how to do it badly, no offense.
It is the philosophy you are espousing, take sex out of the parameters.Change definitions per personal philosophy
I’m not a biologist. Looking at what biologists do, I don’t actually see that as a defining characteristic. Rather, I see it as a guideline that biologists attempt to follow when it fits and makes sense.
You can’t keep the all but you can keep the important ones
I just think the decision on which ones are important should not be based on robotic devotion to an unworkable definition.
peace
None taken,
It might help if you told me what you find lacking in my approach
What would it take to convince you that some folks are using the present definition of species as a reason not to protect animals like the red wolf, and the desert elephant and from recognizing unique animals like the Quagga as species in their own right?
peace
Better “see” again
from here
FMM said : It seems to me that we are not that far apart practically. All that separates us is your desire to hold on to the unworkable notion that reproductive compatibility is the determining factor in what makes a species
John Harshman said: That’s insulting. All that separates us is everything. Where applicable, reproductive isolation is a species definition. Everything I’ve mentioned is a criterion by which we can try to recognize reproductive isolation.
FMM says: Nuff said
peace
Well, I said that John doesn’t understand quantum mechanics; but Allan suggests that he doesn’t even understand Newtonian physics.
Yes, actual, physical coffee cups are fuzzy John. If you need an argument for this, well, maybe Richard can help you out. He has some abstracts he wants you to look at, and then complain to you that you looked at an abstract.
fifthmonarchyman,
FMM is right about this, if about nothing else. Reproductive isolation (which doesn’t have to be complete, by the way) is the defining characteristic of species, at least under the “biological species concept”. All the other stuff we look at is considered useful to the degree that it’s evidence for reproductive isolation.
He sees a problem with that, which he is so far unable to articulate. I don’t think saving the red wolf is his main motivator. So far he hasn’t suggested abandoning “number of protons” as the criterion for recognizing elements, but we’ll see.
phoodoo,
Newton knew nothing about atoms. You really aren’t doing very well with this physics thing.
John Harshman,
If you look closely enough, they are not as simply bounded as they seem at the macro scale. There is shading between air and ‘cup-stuff’, and the exact boundary harder to draw. I think that was fmm’s point. That’s the trouble with analogies. One can spend pages discussing their finer points. And get no closer to understand the actual thing you were talking about.
fifthmonarchyman,
You’d rather it were based on robotic devotion to your unworkable definition?
Anyway, it isn’t. Precisely because species are recognised as not universally conforming to essentialist thinking. And – I rarely resort to capitals, but feel I must, as the point has been repeated many times but unacknowledged – BECAUSE HYBRIDISATION IS A REAL CONSERVATION PROBLEM. Reproductive isolation, or lack of it, does not merely have a definitional role. It impacts on decisions, practical ones about methodology and even feasibility.
You want to save ‘the ones that are important’. That’s fantastic. Which ones are they?
John Harshman,
Under the BSC, the entire coyote-dog-wolf continuum is a species. But they would be afforded protection under the endangered species act (if they were endangered).
Is there? Are there really any single molecules that can’t be assigned to one or the other? How would that even work?
This is a recent phenomenon. Once, wolves and coyotes were ecologically separated and did not interbreed significantly. Human-caused extinction of wolf populations brought coyotes into places they had not previously been.
phoodoo,
Another Phoodoo lie. I don’t. I’m pretty honest about the depth of reading I’ve done, unlike you. I can also understand the material, unlike you. Go back and read your early posts.
John Harshman,
I dunno – not sure why I’m even defending it! I was just going along with the apparent argument.
John Harshman,
True. But it does interestingly change what is and isn’t a species for circumstantial, not ‘essential’ reasons. As far as conservation is concerned, the determination is a practical one, informed by history.
John Harshman,
My mentioning of my conception of ‘cup’ as being informed by the real world seems to have provoked 2 descendant notions, expressed in successive posts by fmm – one about determining what is and what isn’t to be deemed a cup, and one about where a given cup stops.
How many more quotes do I need to provide of folks arguing that protection should be based solely on whether or not a particular population meets the definition of species for you to change your mind on this?
peace
It’s all about the fact that the psychical world is actually a fuzzy place and discrete boundaries are a function of the mind
peace
No need to, It is impossible to determine the number of protons that a particular atom has.
That is after all the point
peace
What is after all the point? Don’t be coy. Please try to be clear and specific. Of course it’s possible to determine the number of protons a particular atom has. Point me out an atom and I’ll tell you.
fifthmonarchyman,
WHAT definition of species? Your contentions are always hopelessly vague. People use the word ‘species’. I know. As we have seen, it can mean many different things. You argue as if they always mean the BSC. They don’t.
And how many times do I have to say that hybridisation is a practical difficulty and hence a relevant fact before you will accept it?
fifthmonarchyman,
The physical boundary of an instance of something we might wish to categorise is not usefully analogous to the factors involved in the decision to categorise that object.
fifthmonarchyman,
Because they continually interconvert with neutrons? Is it possible to determine the total of protons and neutrons?
And why, in any case, is this relevant? How does counting atomic particles help with determinations of biological taxonomic categories?
That is exactly the argument made both by the North Carolina Wildlife Resource Commission and the humans who are shooting the Red Wolves.
The Red Wolf Coalition makes the argument the wild red wolves in North Carolina are a objectively discrete population. After all, a boundary can be objectively discrete without being absolutely discrete. Ever been to Four Corners?
That isn’t even close to the point.
A researcher can take a mass of very pure gold and vaporize it, thereby letting gold coat the surfaces of an object, and be very sure of the number of protons in each and every last gold atom that attached to the object. That’s what matters. One may spit neutrons at U-235 atoms, confident that the fission fragments will contain 92 protons. Send alpha particles into beryllium and you get a few neutrons (a million alphas for 30 neutrons is the going rate). You can be confident that in each of those cases that beryllium’s four protons increased to six in that reaction, while one neutron parted ways, giving us one carbon 12 atom and and one neutron.
Anyway, in many cases it’s quite possible to determine the number of protons a particular atom has, through chemistry and the detection of single atoms that have undergone that chemistry. That’s really not the point, though. Leach copper out of ore using sulfuric acid and you’re making use of the chemistry of copper from there until an atom of copper attaches to the sheet of cathode copper, all of this depending on the fact that copper has 29 electrons (plus or minus, depending on charge) configured in very predictable ways, with all of those 29 electrons being attracted by 29 protons.
It’s not a mystery, it is very discrete, and while electron number changes with charge, the proton number doesn’t normally change at all. You end up with a sheet of copper atoms containing 29 protons, and, if properly purified, you can count on those 29 protons in order to effect exact chemistry and electrical conduction.
Glen Davidson
Now do you see why I suggested that John doesn’t understand quantum mechanics Allan??
But of course it was YOU who insisted who don’t need to go that close to already encounter the fuzziness of a cup (presumably it is some distance between Newton and quantum, but who knows what you were talking about).
Anyway, take your pick.
No the argument made by those folks is that the red wolf is not a species and therefore is not eligible for protection under the endangered species act. Nothing about species in general existing in the world of the mind as apposed to the physical.
What’s with this objective verses absolute tangent? The boundary of a state is both objective and absolute it’s just not physical
There is no natural physical boundary at all when it comes to the reproductive compatibility of red wolfs and coyotes.
However Red wolfs are indeed an objectively discrete population. But that is because we recognize that they have a different phenotype and occupy a different ecological niche than coyotes and gray wolfs.
IOW the objective boundaries are in the world of the mind just like state lines.
peace
I’m not sure but I think it’s an effort by John Harshman to demonstrate that modern biological categorization with it’s emphasis on hard discrete physical boundaries is like what goes on in the world of physics.
On this I would disagree
check it out
http://fqxi.org/data/essay-contest-files/Tong_integers.pdf
peace
Does “very pure gold” have any impurities at all?
Is it? Can he be sure that no other protons are attached to the object?
peace
Can one be confident that a single particular individual fission fragment will contain 92 protons?
Does a single atom that has undergone “the chemistry” still contain the same number of protons that it did before “the chemistry”?
If not then you really don’t know exactly how many protons that that single particular atom contain now do you?
I hope you get the point
peace
Who cares?
Can you follow a train of thought, or do you just have to interject idiocies regardless of what is written?
No, there might be hydrogen atoms as well.
It makes no difference to the point made.
Why not intelligence?
Also, peace isn’t what you’re aiming for with your endless off-the-subject objections to what you fail to comprehend properly.
Glen Davidson