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”.
I’m sorry, but there’s only room for a number in the box. Is your answer 1 or 2?
Nothing tangible is your entire argument!
When revelation becomes tangible wake me up.
OMagain has never had an “aha” moment in his life.
Yes I would agree simply because morality (like species) does not exist in the physical world.
Agree 100% on this one.
If you can be mistaken it implies that there is a correct answer.
I would argue that it’s impossible to believe that slavery (properly defined) is not immoral.
I think it would be an interesting discussion.
Too bad a discussion like that can’t occur on a site like this
peace
Excellent, Perhaps you finally get it
That is exactly how categorization is done in the real world every day.
Except When it comes to BCS
That is the point
peace
Are you saying the act of classification assumes the law of non-contradiction?
So you think minds are unique to humans. Interesting
Is artificial intelligence impossible in your opinion?
What about intelligent ET?
What about the species that replaces humans?
peace
Bingo!!!!
Except apparently when you are an evolutionary biologist
😉
peace
Well, you know, the law of identity does not hold for any species or any member of any species, especially humans!
No. I just think what humans call morality is unique to humans. Aliens may have something very similar, but unlikely to be exactly the same. And if it were exactly the same they’d be humans. So unlikely.
After all, look at the variety of ways human shaped mobile autonomous units have interacted with each other over the years.
Having said that, robots have been demonstrated to evolve altruistic behaviour. So it’s likely that if aliens are discrete beings like us they will have some sub or superset of behaviours we’d recognise. But right now, who knows.
I never said minds were unique to humans. That’s you putting yet more words in my mouth. You don’t even know you are doing it.
We’ve already had multiple discussions on this. Yes, I happen to think it is possible. It may need to evolve rather then be written per se, but perfectly possible and relatively soon (100’s of years). And we already established in previous discussions that no matter how convincing an intelligence was or how creative you would have no qualms in pulling the plug on it because only humans count or have souls or some nonsense. You would burn what you don’t understand, barbarian. Would you like a reminder of that conversation? You should be ashamed.
What about it? It’d be funny if they turn up and destroy us because their understanding of objective morality and gods wishes are more developed then ours. You’d have no choice but to accept that. But I’d ask you the same question. I don’t recall aliens being mentioned in the bible. Does ET go to heaven?
What are you talking about?
No, once again you put words in my mouth.
There are two swimming pools, connected by a drain. How many swimming pools are there?
My point is that there is no room for your equivocating answer. And there are two pools. You said:
And I’m saying regardless of that, there are two pools.
I’m putting you on ignore, you are just like the rest of them if not worse.
Actually you could be mistaken there is a correct answer, so yes the correct answer could be there is no correct answer
You could and I could point out that people even found support for slavery in the Bible, were willing to die for their belief. Intent only requires an sincerely held belief.
Fifth,
If I understand your argument, changing the definition of species would allow hybrid red wolves to be protected since red wolves are a protected species, is this correct?
The opprobrium! Is there room for more than one on your high moral horse?
fifthmonarchyman,
So you think that – for example – evaporation from one pool followed by rain into another, or someone running wet from one to the other, invalidates all attempts to call a pool discrete? Goodness. So on the one hand we have species that can be categorically separated, always. Gene pools, meantime, cannot, ever. What a decidedly odd state of affairs.
Yes, thrice now you have attempted to rile me with that sneer. Well done.
Reproductive isolation has been mentioned repeatedly. It is the basis of the BSC. You know, that thing we have been discussing. And now you pretend you have only just heard about it.
No, the correct answer is ‘nothing’. The fact that the contents of the pool change has nothing to do with whether there is a pool. A lake has an inflow and an outflow. There is still a lake, year in year out. Likewise, you eat and excrete. There is still a continuing you.
Sure it is. You, maybe not. But discrete does not mean unchanging. It means bounded.
So you think people will use their buying power to effect a change in the way scientists in other countries define things. ‘Mkay.
It is (to quote some dweeb on the internet) a feature, not a bug. Or rather it is a fact, and there is no way round it, other than to pretend one size fits all requirements, when it doesn’t.
Yes I could be mistaken that there is a correct answer but in that case if would be fallacious to say that slavery was immoral.
On the other hand if I could be mistaken in my belief that slavery is immoral then there is a correct answer to the question “is slavery immoral?”.
peace
No,
My argument is simply that whether or not red wolfs are a species should not be dependent on their reproductive compatibility with other canines.
I feel that the emphasis on reproductive compatibility introduces an unwarranted philosophical notion into the process of categorizing organisms.
I have no idea whether or not red wolfs would qualify as a species using the criteria I use in my definition.
From what I’ve read I suspect red wolfs would qualify as a species but the work would need to be done before I could say for sure.
peace
Yep if you are arguing for discreteness in the physical world then any continuum would falsify the argument.
That is why I think that it is silly to argue for discreteness in the physical world
Exactly the point. and the reason the definition is flawed
Discrete Pools and lakes and persons exist only in the world of the mind. When it comes to the physical world the boundaries are always fuzzy.
If folks are unhappy with a product they are less likely to buy it. It’s called capitalism
Ok lets just use common sense definition of species when reproductive compatibility is not important to look at.
Problem solved.
Can you list some instances when the BCS is necessary to do good science?
peace
fifthmonarchyman,
Someone more concerned with ‘winning’ an argument than looking ridiculous might regard that as relevant. “In fact, an atom of anything can end up in anything else. Therefore there is nothing discrete in the physical world, and all labels are arbitrary.”. You and a sandwich aren’t discrete because you can smell it. Just dense.
The reason the definition is flawed is the definition? I think you need to work on this.
And not the point at all. I referred to repeat mention of reproductive isolation in response to your apparent surprise that I’d been talking about … whisper … sex, all along. “Reproductive isolation relates to reproduction? How did you expect me to work that out all by myself?”
Sure. Categorisation is an act of mind. Who has denied this? The point – certainly where taxonomy is concerned – is whether real-world fuzziness justifies a separate category or not. This is true regardless of the criteria used.
I’m beginning to see that you will pursue any point beyond that area most people would classify as Stupid. You and others are going to buy fewer Widgets because scientists have a flawed conception of species. “It’s called capitalism”. HAHAHAHA!
What? “You can’t use one definition in all circumstances” “OK, let’s use one definition in all the other circumstances then”.
It’s the BSC. But: when one is looking at the process of speciation, for one.
I think that John Harshman would argue that the act of biological categorization could in theory be automated. For example we might feed various DNA sequences into a properly constructed algorithm and it would separate them into species.
Regardless, the question is not whether Categorisation is an act of mind but whether the categories exist in the physical world or not.
What?
The point is that since species boundaries don’t exist in the physical world trying to use physical markers like reproductive compatibility as the defining criteria for species is misguided.
really?
Is the only scientific reason you can come up with for using reproductive compatibility as the defining characteristic for species is in looking at the process of species arising
does that sound like circular reasoning to you ?
peace
fifthmonarchyman,
I’ll let John answer for himself, but I would be almost certain he would answer that in the negative.
Is that the question? Categories don’t exist in the physical world. The things we are categorising do. Their characteristics render them amenable to categorisation.
Oh. Is that the point? So trying to use physical markers like anything is misguided. Oh no, wait, that’s not what you mean at all. You seem to be arguing against yourself.
No.
You are on record as trivializing slavery as “temporary and local.” Are you now changing your position or are only the exact types of slavery sanctioned in the bible moral and any variants immoral?
Interesting.
Do you think the act of categorization of elements could in theory be automated? For example we might feed various atomic weights from a quantity of mater into a properly constructed algorithm and it would separate them into elements?
Do you think this is possible?
If so do why do you think that the process of categorization of species would be different?
Would you grant that since categories don’t exist in the physical world it is silly to try to explain the origin of categories (species) by appealing to physical mechanisms?
You are going to have to unpack this for me as I don’t know what you mean
peace
I’m not sure how recognizing that slavery is temporary and local equals trivializing it.
In your worldview does something have to be eternal and universal in order for it not to be trivial?
I have no idea what this sentence means.
No type of involuntary slavery is sanctioned in the Bible and no slavery at all to anyone other than Christ.
I’ve made it abundantly clear since slavery is inconsistent with the command to love your neighbor as yourself it is clearly not sanctioned in the bible. (Matthew 22:39-40).
Why is it about you that renders you unable to understand that?
peace
Then your definition has no bearing on the issue of the red wolves in North Carolina. Wonder why you say it does?
Obviously it is not dependent since red wolves mate with coyotes and both are distinct species under the present parameters ,what is actually is dependent is the status of the offspring with regards to the Endangered Species Act. The “problem of species” is political and economic. Your definition would magnify that problem.
And this feeling is based on what, your unwarranted philosophical notions? What is your real point,Fifth?
Earlier you said that pragmatically there would be no change, delisting of a population seems a change. What is your real point,fifth?
They are now for sure. Could you estimate when you will be done with the work?
Have no idea what that means, it would be incorrect to say in the realm of intentions slavery was absolutely immoral.
Actually, slavery is neither ,it is one’s intent that is moral or immoral, right?
peace
newton,
“Sex is icky”, I’m beginning to suspect.
I think about the time he gets the new version of his program working.
Maybe, then his beef is with the Creator not biologists
It may be he is more a big picture guy, nuts and bolts not so much
fifthmonarchyman,
We already have categorised the elements. Why would we want to do it again? We have mass specs, though they aren’t classifying the elements, but identifying them.
Because species are not so neatly categorisable – at least not throughout. They change, for one thing. That change is not (apparently) saltational, leading to the issue of chronospecies. They hybridise, for another. And their splitting into two is a drawn out affair.
You continually confuse categories with the things categorised. The-thing-we-call-species refers to a real thing in the world – a collection of organisms. It is not at all silly to invoke physical mechanisms to explain the source of such collections.
You said this “The point is that since species boundaries don’t exist in the physical world trying to use physical markers like reproductive compatibility as the defining criteria for species is misguided.”
You moan about the use of a physical character (reproductive isolation, in the example), while elsewhere utilising (other) physical characters. Remove ‘reproductive compatibility’ from the sentence and replace it with something of your choosing. You appear to be saying that since (so you think) taxon boundaries don’t exist in the real world, you can’t use any physical characteristics of members to classify them. Which (a) contradicts what you have said elsewhere and (b) is nonsense. Unless you just mean ‘markers like reproductive isolation but not others’, which gives no reason why it should be excluded but the others remain.
I estimate it will be about the time when he finishes his intelligent patterns detector, Mung’s weasel algo is ready, Bill Cole publishes his cancer curing research on vitamin D, Kairos masters infinite numbers and Jesus’ second coming
If only there existed some means of conveying meaning from one person to another.
Revelation!
Glen Davidson
My wife has a look which has crystal clear meaning
The Day of Jubilee
I don’t think I do that.
My definition would use mental characteristics like relative genetic similarity. These characteristics are ultimately dependent on personal choice
no, I’m saying that using concrete physical characteristics as defining boundaries are not a good idea?
Maybe it would be better if we took a look at something else besides species
First list the physical characteristics that define a cup something like this
quote:
a small, bowl-shaped container for drinking from, typically having a handle.
end quote;
now is this a cup?
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/6d/04/c6/6d04c6f3e6a11bb25d923460c4435df1.jpg
peace
Quote:
To environmentalists, the idea of letting the red wolf go extinct is simply unthinkable. But scientific research has complicated their standoff with local hunters and property owners. Since the red wolf was originally classified as an endangered species, biologists have studied it intensely—sequencing its DNA, scrutinizing its morphology, and piecing together its evolutionary history. And they’ve put forward a compelling new theory: The red wolf, an animal the U.S. government has spent decades and millions of dollars attempting to save from extinction, may not actually be a distinct species at all.
and
“Wayne and Jenks’s results on the red wolf suggest that here no species is being saved (and certainly nothing of great taxonomic distinctness),” John Gittleman and Stuart Pimm, two zoologists at the University of Knoxville, wrote in Nature in 1991. It’s a view that has taken root in North Carolina, given the recent battles between conservationists and landowners. In 2015, the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, which regulates hunting in the state, passed a resolution noting that the “purity of the red wolf genome is questionable” and asked the Fish and Wildlife Service to “declare in federal rules that the red wolf is extinct in the wild in North Carolina.”
end quote:
the whole article is interesting
https://newrepublic.com/article/124453/whats-species-anyways
From The Red Wolf Coalition:
The origin of the red wolf remains an enigma, and scientists do not universally agree on whether the red wolf is indeed a separate species, a subspecies of the gray wolf, or hybrid between gray wolves and coyotes. However, based on years of research and data supporting the uniqueness of this predator, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has legally designated the red wolf, Canis rufus, a distinct species. Petitions to delist the red wolf on grounds that it is a hybrid have been defeated, and Canis rufus remains a protected species under federal law in the United States.”
And your tweak of definition of species, you claimed ,would save this population. And biologists by not adopting your modest proposal are dooming this population.It seems your concern is unwarranted.
If fact until the work gets done you can’t be sure it would not actually be an argument for delisting. A red wolf/ coyote hybrid might be a red wolf under your tweak but might be as logically be considered a coyote.
Here’s what you wrote:
Your god couldn’t even include the simple line “Thou shalt not enslave.” despite including pages of rules about women’s menstrual cycles, and that’s just fine with you because slavery is “temporary and local.” That view trivializes real human suffering.
That statement is contradicted by the passages explicitly sanctioning slavery, as quoted in the original post of this thread. You can refuse to look at them but that doesn’t make them go away.
Hell all
quote:
Birds are traditionally thought of as a well-studied group, with more than 95 percent of their global species diversity estimated to have been described. Most checklists used by bird watchers as well as by scientists say that there are roughly between 9,000 and 10,000 species of birds. But those numbers are based on what’s known as the “biological species concept,” which defines species in terms of what animals can breed together.
“It’s really an outdated point of view, and it’s a concept that is hardly used in taxonomy outside of birds,” said lead author George Barrowclough, an associate curator in the Museum’s Department of Ornithology.
For the new work, Cracraft, Barrowclough, and their colleagues at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and the University of Washington examined a random sample of 200 bird species through the lens of morphology — the study of the physical characteristics like plumage pattern and color, which can be used to highlight birds with separate evolutionary histories. This method turned up, on average, nearly two different species for each of the 200 birds studied. This suggests that bird biodiversity is severely underestimated, and is likely closer to 18,000 species worldwide.
end quote:
from here
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/12/161212133645.htm
Check it out
Not to say I told you so—– but I told you so 😉
peace
fifthmonarchyman,
Sorry, what did you tell us? I missed it. And why is this important to you?
All this shows is that if you use a different species concept (in this case the phylogenetic species concept, under which what were once called subspecies mostly turn into full species), you get a different count of species. Did you find that shocking? I don’t.
Permit me to doubt that the so-called biological species concept is considered out of date except in ornithology.
I am busy as of late putting together something I will share soon. but I read this this morning and it reminded me of the interesting discussion we had here surrounding how the old outdated Darwinistic concept of species as genetically isolated populations was often harmful to our conservation efforts.
check this out
https://www.quantamagazine.org/interspecies-hybrids-play-a-vital-role-in-evolution-20170824/
Hate to say I told you so but again I told you so over a year ago 😉
It now appears that not only are red wolves hybrids but so are each of the five species of the Panthera genus.
As we sequence and study more genomes I predict eventually this phenomena will be found to be ubiquitous in all of life.
It’s simply useless to think of species as being a genetically isolated group of organisms and in fact very often we can thank the fuzzy edges for the adaptations we used to ascribe to RM.
peace
from the article
quote:
Most zoologists supported the biological species concept proposed in 1942 by the legendary biologist Ernst Mayr, who was one of the architects of the modern synthesis, the version of evolution theory that combined Darwin’s natural selection with the science of genetics. Mayr’s biological species concept was based on reproductive isolation: A species was defined as a population that could not or did not breed with other populations. Even when exceptions to that rule started to emerge in the 1970s, many biologists considered hybridization to be too rare to be important in animals. “We had a blinkered attitude,” said James Mallet, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University. Today, he added, saying that such hybridizations don’t affect reconstructions of evolutionary history or “that this wasn’t useful in adaptive evolution — that’s no longer tenable.”
and
Take the various species of wolves that roam North America. Gray wolves, Mexican wolves, red wolves and eastern wolves, all endangered, were once treated as distinct species. Recent genomic evidence, however, points to the likelihood that red and eastern wolves are in fact hybrids of gray wolves and coyotes. Given the murky area hybrids occupy when it comes to conservation policy, this finding called into question their protected status and complicated biologists’ understanding of their ecological role in the evolutionary history of gray wolves.
Determining the best course of action in conservation when so many factors are unknown or unclear is an exceedingly difficult task, and one that experts have yet to resolve. Nuances in the environment and genomic history of a given hybrid species, according to Shaffer, call for nuances in how to approach their conservation.
“It’s a balancing act,” Mallet said.
end quote:
nuff said
peace
Barely anything you’ve said make any sense. How can a species-concept be an issue? It’s just a concept about what defines a species. It doesn’t tell you whether any given organism before you is a different species than another, that takes actual research to establish, after which you will be able to say whether they are the same species.
How can this be a problem with anything at all?
Of course, I would never take such errors as evidence that you’re not the brilliant critic of science you make yourself out to be.
It was just a revelation.
Revelation will now take over the definition of what a species is.
Glen Davidson
I’m not sure what’s the point here (if there is a point).
Some biologists say that species are conventional (determined by human convention). I’m not a biologist, but I agree with the view that species are conventional.
Logical definitions, such as “genetically isolated” are nice. But nature isn’t logical. So my take is that species are determined by pragmatic human convention, and the idea of genetic isolation is only a guideline, not a rigid rule of logic.
What exactly is FMM’s point? The biological species concept still looks fine to me. Nothing he’s cited so far does anything to take it down. He’s garbling an article in the popular press that garbles the science it comes from.