June 05, 2008

What Is A Species?
posted by homunculus 15 years ago
  • I'd always followed Ernst Mayr's biological species model, so I want to know more about these interbreeding monkey species in the essay. What species are their offspring? Are the offspring able to reproduce themselves? This article confuses and frightens me.
  • hey quit hoggin the front page hoMONKulous ;)
  • so I want to know more about these interbreeding monkey species Okay people, who is it? There's really no point in trying to keep your relationship secret now. Besides, we're all friends here.
  • Interesting. Nature just doesn't work in nice orderly categories. I like the example of the herring gull and the lesser black-backed gull: in Britain they're completely distinct, but as you move to east and west the herrings get gradually more black-backed and the black backs get more herring (as it were); pink feet get yellower and yellow feet get pinker, until over the other side of the world, the two populations merge and it becomes clear that it's one large group.
  • It's just zis group, you know?
  • Species? Isn't that that movie with What's-her-face?
  • I lubs me some Natural Selection. “It all comes, I believe, from trying to define the indefinable.” MOTHER NATURE RULES!!
  • Species splitting or lumping determinations are like looking far-sighted or near-sighted at something. The closer one discriminates, the more differentiated it gets, even to the point of multiplicity. But what gets REALLY scary is when one can't even tell which KINGDOM a thing belongs to. Like Lovecraft's fungoid men from Yugoth, or a more pedestrian example would be the slime molds - those critters that crawl like big worms until they become static excrescences. Are they really animals, plants, fungi, or animal-fungi? Or are they really protista, all linked up with no cell membranes, as has been suggested? But if that's true, where else is there a group of single celled creatures with no cell membrane boundaries between them? Cells are supposed to have membranes, or why are they called cells? And these freaky things even seem to have super-robotic intelligence, so what's going one with that?
  • / Bows to new super-robotic non-cellular slime mold overlords.
  • Monkeyfilter:confuses and frightens me