Something you might find of interest is the urban coyote, which is showing signs of evolving in real time. Unique individuals are showing up here and there. My personal belief is that epigenetics plays a larger role in evolution than is often cited.
Coyotes are pretty fascinating to start with. Basically a small wolf, they split from a common ancestor of themselves and the grey wolf only 51,000 years ago. The grey wolf being what dogs descended from.
The Western Coyote is pretty much what coyotes were 500 years ago, but as they spread east, they interbred with eastern and western wolves and dogs and their DNA is only 62% coyote in the North East. The Eastern Coyote is also larger on average by almost 50%. More likely to hunt deer also. The Western Urban Coyotes are pretty dangerous to small pets, a little less so for the Eastern.
They’ve adapted to humans really well and their range has greatly increased as larger predators were greatly decreased in numbers. I read they made it across the Panama Canal recently.
One of the oddest places coyotes have gotten to is Central Park in Manhattan. They crossed bridges and journeyed through the densest city in the US to make Central Park their home. They’re now welcomed, though this wasn’t always the case.
They are responsible for a beautiful transformation taking place in my area, just by killing off the cats. Song birds, reptiles and amphibians, owls, long tailed weasels are all making a comeback. After killing off most all of the raccoons and possums when they first arrived, they are even coming back now once they learned to live with the coyote. The red fox was almost wiped out by the coyote, and now they are coming back and actually expanding their range deeper into the urban areas.
Huh whuh?? Says who? How did speciation occur before humans started deliberately breeding things, back in the days when natural selection was all there was?
AIUI, speciation is just what happens when different populations of an existing species become separated enough (geographically, or temporally by becoming active at different seasons or times of day, etc.), for long enough that they end up producing descendant populations that can’t interbreed. Natural selection works perfectly fine to accomplish that.
Yeah…as I recall, there was something like that happening on the Galapagos. I dunno if that’s relevant to Darwin or anything though
I didn’t say the definition is contested, i said it’s fuzzy. There are a huge number of examples where it’s not clear where you might draw a line between different species, according to that definition.
All the absolutes i was taught in my youth, that species are well defined, that animals come in two well-defined sexes, that people come in races, even that volumes neatly add up… They were all simplifications. The world is so much more complicated.
It’s an observation that has been kicking around for many decades. Attributing it to Murray has been common recently. He may or may not have repeated the observation but it certainly wasn’t original to him.
But discussing his questions might help me refine my understanding of the actual science - or at least be entertaining enough to make it worth whiling away a little time on the subject
For one thing, I was reminded of this interesting simulation
which shows how a clock could evolve from a) a set of clock parts (gears, hands, rockers, weights, and the like) that have a tendency to stick together and are built according to a genome that can change due to mating and mutation, and b) an environment that scores fitness according to the resulting entity’s ability to keep time. Once interesting result is that although the underlying process is incremental (there are no giant steps in each mating and mutation), the system exhibits punctuated periods of sudden change - most of the time, the population is fiddling around making minor changes to the genome that don’t matter, but every once in a while a few otherwise slightly beneficial or even neutral mutations or recombinations create a much better clock-entity which almost instantly dominates the population.
So, you don’t think categories have utility? A fuzzy set has tremendous utility even if the borders can be “problematic”. But why do you think a dog is in a wolf? That confuses me.
Yeah I don’t understand why anti-evolutionists think the fuzziness of a species is some kind of a “gotcha.” Like, of the 16 million colors in the RGB system, a couple million are what we might call “red” and a couple million are what we might call “orange,” but each color has a unique code – they’re all just individual colors. So it’s true that we cannot really define where red ends and orange begins, but it’s also true that it’s incredibly useful for me to be able to tell a police officer whether the getaway car was red or orange and have her understand me.
It’s the same story with the “what is a woman” argument. Nature is hard to define but we’re humans and categorizing things has always been helpful to us.
Back in the day, I would have been all over this thread, fighting the good fight, attempting to correct some misconceptions, and all that. For Science!
But I’m a tired Finch now. The past decade or so has demonstrated amply that there are some people who simply cannot be reached. And I am not interested in trying to do.
I feel like we’re being inundated with Logical Terminators:
" It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop… ever, until you are dead!"
Oh God, is octopus still here?
Especially since the fuzziness of species was a direct strike against the previous idea of absolutely fixed and distinct species
I thought that was Dementors.
Naw, those just suck all of the joy out of you.
I think it’s the opposite. I think the fuzziness of species supports the idea of evolution. I think relying too heavily on fitting everything into boxes is damaging in a great number of ways, though.
Essentialism. The idea that everything fits into neatly defined fixed categories is so attractive to some people that they see a fuzzy category and presume that makes it invalid. Because to them the categories being neat and un-fuzzy is the whole point.
Wow, never have I come across such a succinct guide as to how not to do science. An excellent description of the scientific method would be, “Do the opposite of this”.
Of course! Why wouldn’t I be? C’mon man, there are profound topics to contemplate only to be found here.
If I thought it would do any good…
But there is no, or well little point arguing with a wall.
It’s just not worth it.