Not really. You posted misinformation in GQ. Since not everybody was going to click on the link, or realize that what you wrote was blatantly incorrect, it was worth it for John Mace to correct what you actually posted. I almost did so myself. You certainly didn’t whoosh John.
**Colibri **got it exactly right. Note that I said “in the context of this thread”, which is asking about exotic hybrids. There might be a fine line between a “whoosh” and “posting false info in GQ”, but your post was located firmly on the latter side of that line. Nothing that one little smilely couldn’t have fixed, though. 
It would be a short argument these days. The valid taxonomic name for the domestic dog is simply Canis lupus – the same species as the gray wolf. Some authors may give the domestic dog a subspecies designation – Canis lupus familiaris – but subspecies is an unofficial rank.
Sorry to further the hijack, but why are domestic dogs classified as Canis lupus? Is it because they are genetically so similaro wolves? I realize dogs and wolves are interfertile, but aren’t most species of Canis interfertile? (This is probably a question more about the definition of “species” rather than dogs/wolves in particular.)
The problem here is that the Biological Species Concept only applies to what happens under natural conditions. Since the domestic dog has been produced by artificial selection, the BSC can’t properly apply to it. It used to be conventional for domestic animals to receive their own species designation. The convention nowadays has shifted to calling them by the name of the ancestral species. I would disagree slightly with Darwin’s Finch in that this is a matter of convention, and of which species concept is being applied, rather than a formal taxonomic necessity. I would, however, agree that it makes more sense to regard domestic dogs simply as a variety of Canis lupus than as a separate species.
there’s some messed up priorities!
Aren’t hyenas more closeley related to weasels than to dogs? (an honest question)
No, hyenas are more closely related to civets and to cats than they are to any other carnivores.
There is a basic split in the carnivores between the cat-like groups, which include the cats, civets, and hyenas, and the dog-like groups, which include dogs, skunks, weasels, bears, pandas, raccoons, seals, and sea lions.
Colibri: Aren’t hyenas most closely related to the *Herpestidae *(mongoose, meerkat, etc.) within that cat-like group of carnivores? That is, more closely related to the mongoose than to the true cats or other Feliformia?
I don’t know what the current state of play is with regard to molecular phylogenies. In the carnivore cladogram in this article, which I linked to earlier, there is an unresolved 3-way split between civets, hyenas, and cats. Mongooses split off early from the other civets, but are not more closely related to hyenas. Perhaps other sources show some different results.
I don’t mean to display my ignorance here (I welcome it being fought, however), but carnivorous pandas?
I thought they (at least the familiar black&white giant panda) just ate bamboo…is this a reference to other animals that are called pandas but eat meat, or am I being whooshed, or are you, or…arrrr…I’m corn-fussed.
Thanks. My info was coming from TV science programs-- not always an accurate dispenser of information. That was why I posed that as a question rather than a statement.
Probably more accurate to use the scientific term Carnivora than the common term carnivore…
This is kind of like using the term “human” instead of “Homo”. “Human” can sometimes mean only Homo sapiens.
As John indicated, I was using the term carnivore in the sense of a member of the order Carnivora, rather than an animal with a carnivorous diet. Pandas are actually a kind of bear. While they are the most herbivorous, most bears (with the exception of the polar bear) probably eat more plant matter than they do meat most of the time. There are some other relatively non-carnivorous carnivores, like the kinkajou, which eats mostly fruit.
Here is a 2005 article (.pdf doc), in which it does appear that Hyaenidae is the sister group to Herpestidae + “Malagasy carnivorans” (an otherwise unnamed group consisting of all of Madagascar’s endemic carnivorans, themselves forming a monophyletic clade resulting from adaptive radiation). This combined group, in turn, is part of a trichotomy with Viverridae and Felidae.
John & Colibri: Gotcha.
(Unfortunately, not “Gotcha ya!” which would have been really funny.)
But isn’t cladistics esssentially independent of interfertility? That is to say, just because A and B’s can interbreed, and C’s common ancestor with A is more recent than B’s, does not necessarily mean that A and C can interbreed. Heck, even a species (under the Biological Species Concept, flawed though it may be, since I’m not aware of any better definition) is not necessarily a clade, is it?
I wouldn’t say it’s independent. There is a reasonably good correlation between distance of relationship and the ability to produce hybrids, but you are correct that this relationship is far from absolute. If dogs a can produce fertile hybrids with jackals, it is very likely they can also produce fertile hybrids with Hunting Dogs if the latter are more closely related to dogs than jackals are. But this is just a rule of thumb, it’s not a certainty.
They normally are clades with respect to other species, although there can be exceptions. In fact, the possibility that BSC species may sometimes not be monophyletic is one of the objections brought against it by supporters of the Phylogenetic Species Concept, which is the BSC’s main competitor these days.