Not easy to identify new species when most of them are either rare, very similar to their more known relatives, or misidentified as subspecies…
The real number of species is probably way too inflated ever since they dropped the “can’t reproduce with each other” rule.
A language is a dialect with an army and navy. Similarly, a species is a subspecies with a fanbase.
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That’s what makes a species a species. Subspecies can reproduce with eachother without creating infertile hybrids.
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So how many species do you think exist then?
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All the number of subspecies is 5 million, plus or minus 3 million.*. So the number of species is, I don’t know… 500 thousand? 50 thousand? Recently they discovered that the giraffe species which is for all intents and purposes a single species, is actually 4 species because they have 4 tribes that don’t reproduce with each other*. So based on this one data point, you should divide it by at least 4.
1,25 million species that would look like different species to everyday people.
video from the deleted post (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFvUlxj1axU). you can try to guess what we were talking about. or ask a mod. i was saying lions and tigers should be considered the same species. and some other stuff.
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Do you have any more suggestion for restructuring the species designation system?
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Would the species rank occupy the same space as the genus rank?
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domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species
what if their lineage seperated more than 8 times?
and how do we know how many times they seperated?
what if the two species you descended from could interbreed so it was actually 4 species descending from a common ancestor rather than 2 species descending from two species 2x2=4?
ancient species older than after some time can’t be cloned and tested for interbreedability. so morphological classification is the only thing you can do. besides, 99% of all species go extinct, and many of them don’t fossilise, so its all incomplete information anyway.
i think, after luca, and after sexual reproduction gets discovered, each species that gives rise to more than 1 species should be called a genus. for that time. lets call it genus. every genus that is descendant of the first genus should be called a second genus. after that, third genus, etc. so i think they shouldn’t be fixed to 8. and in different brances, they don’t need to have the same number. so for example, maybe the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees would be called an “8th genus” but the common ancestor of two insects that live today may be something like “30th genus”, assuming they speciate more frequently.
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I guess that could work. But when do you draw the line between a new species coming from an old species and a new genus coming from an old genus?
every time speciation occurs, call that species a genus.
you can’t mate with your very old ancestors. even if they hadn’t speciated into your cousins. but calling your ancestor and you different species would be arbitrary. because its like dialect continium. if you can’t mate after 10 million years, and 35 million years passes, does that make 3,5 species? that is… odd. and complicated. speciation can be taken as a unit of time instead.
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Well then a speciation would accur at 10 MY, 20 MY and 30 MY, with 40 MY speciation not being achieved yet. So 3 species, atleast as per this logic.
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How did this conversation result in speciation occurring along even amounts of time??? It’s not a temporal thing sighhh
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35 million years pass
sample from 5 million years ago
sample from 15 million years ago
sample from 25 million years ago
sample from 35 million years ago
can’t reproduce. therefore there are 4 species?
sample from today
sample from 6 million years ago
sample from 16 million years ago
sample from 26 million years ago
sample from 35 million years ago
“today” and “6 million years ago” can mate. “26 million years ago” and “35 million years ago” can also mate. so it was actually… 3 species?
why not?
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You can’t mate with a species 6 million years ago, because it was SIX MILLION YEARS AGO. You can’t mate with your relatives who split off to become bonobos or whatever 6 million years ago, because they’re bonobos, but if you found a human on some island with no contact to the outside world, but whose people had exchanged DNA a bit with other humans over the last 6 million years, you could have a kid with them. If you are separated you can rapid become a different species. Six million years of separation WILL make you a different species, but what about 500,000? I bet some relatively stable population that isn’t undergoing aggressive selection could very well mate with their former kin after half a million years, but a small population under aggressive selection that isn’t literally identical to the community they split from could very well have no ability to mate with their former kin. Evolution isn’t a fixed speed. at a scale of 5 or 10 million years you are basically required to split from anyone you are separated from, but not from you last common ancestor, we can’t check, because those guys lived 5 million years ago, etc.
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Yeah, how would you even get a sample of something which lived that long ago with well-preserved DNA?
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what is your point? “you are a different species than the napoleon’s generation” ? or “who cares how many species there are” ?
replace “million years” with “ticks”, some unit of evolutionary incompatible stuff evolving speed. and the argument still stands. 3,5 ticks later, you can’t tell if that was 3 species or 4 species.
if you evolved really rapidly. so much so that nothing happens for 20 million years, you can breed within that 20 million years later, 100k years later you can’t mate with 100k years later, and 100k years more, you can’t mate with 100k years ago. does that count as double speciation? lots of such stuff would go unnoticed if you’re looking at the fossil record. which is why speciation should be used as a unit of time and you should be counted as the same species as your ancestor even if you can’t mate 5 times over with the only reason being that you don’t have any cousins.
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i don’t think a RAPIDLY evolving species could mate with it’s ancestors living 20 MY before itself…
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evolution speed can change? they can make more dna repair to evolve slower. with the added risk of going extinct when you need to adapt to a new environment. but less risk of cancer.
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In the real world it works like this: right now isn’t an edge case. Right now is a stable place in time. All species are in one species. Maybe it’s something weird like a ring species, but every creature has a species. Go back in time, find the last split, separate species there. If you find two fossils that probably couldn’t reproduce, two species. If you watch some bacteria or bugs or whatever for a century or a decade or however long it takes, and they stop being able to reproduce with the main population, that you feel has changed less or could still breed with the original population of these guy when they were discovered, new species. Basically, for the purposes of real life, transition periods are assumed to not be happening when a species is discovered. If you had started halfway between protowhales with external claws and those with no claws, you would make the split differently than someone who discovered whales as whales, or as land animals, or as seal like things, or whatever. The split is artificial. It’s usually caused by something real, like a split in niche or physical location, but the final call is made by people. For the purposes of thrive, you should be renaming your species every time you press the evolve button, but no one does because that’s a lot of work.
obviously. Covid is like 5 different species, humans have been the same one for at least a few hundred thousand years, up to 4 million, I don’t really know, I’d have to check wikipedia (not an evolutionary biologist, sue me).
it’s not necessarily about just mutation rate. It’s also selection pressure. If you can mutate a ton, but no mutation has any clear advantage because you’re either comfortable or just survival is luck, than no evolution will occur, at least not much. If the tinyest change can make you much more successful, because the face eating monsters recognize prey by something easy to change, expect that to change QUICKLY even in a species without as much mutation.
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Pretty sure that’d made every human “species” a part of the same species
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