I’m for government regulation that requires individuals and corporations to stop bulldozing wild spaces, and to stop pumping toxins into the air and water. I’m against protecting endangered species by sending biologists into the woods with shotguns, or traps, or poisons, to kill one species as part of an effort to save a more endangered one.
A quick Google pops up with this… It seems to be talking about horses, not equines in general.
C’est impossible! Gould never makes mistakes! The fault must most certainly be mine!
When it says “Horses originated in North America 35-56 million years ago. These terrier-sized mammals were adapted to forest life. Over millions of years they increased in size and diversified.” If they’re starting of by calling Eohippus a horse, it’s pretty clear they mean Equidae, not Equus ferus. Note they repeat the very same mistake Gould highlighted, calling Eohippus "terrier-sized"
Note it then goes on to say “Still others spread across Asia, the Middle East and Europe, evolving into the true horse, Equus caballus.” which implies an ex-Western Hemisphere origin for the horse (E. caballus being properly E. ferus caballus), which is news to me, although that could be read as them evolving spread across there and N. America.
Side note: not sure I trust a cite that doesn’t italicize its nomenclatures to get scientific facts right, but I’m a pedant like that.
Tell that to Simon Conway-Morris !
ETA: I don’t necessarily agree with Conway-Morris overall, but I do believe he is right that most Burgess taxa, like Wiwaxia, fit into existing phyla, rather than not.
Ah, but, sadly, one of the ways we’ve chosen to protect wild spaces is to create lists of endangered species and then say “you can’t do that there - it’s a habitat for X.” The barred owls aren’t endangered and therefore their habitat is, relatively speaking, up for grabs. If the spotted owls are there, the habitat is protected. Not completely protected, but relatively protected. If there’s a buffer zone around the spotted owl area, then some of the barred owls get protected, too.
Endangered species are also used as canaries in the coal mine, rhetorically, in arguments about how much wild space should be protected. Group A says, we only need just a little tiny bit more of the wild space and this will make jobs and build white picket fences and clear these nasty dead trees so that the rainbows come. Group B might be able to argue no and make it stick. It’s easier to stop, though, if the permitting agency can say, sorry, the spotted owls are declining. See these numbers? See this graph? Are you going to argue with the graph? If you want to build here, find a way to get those numbers up.
But we are well into normal political back and forth. Everybody thinks it’s crappy to send biologists to shoot barred owls. And there are some people who are fixated on the endangered species just because it’s sad to see them go, I’ll grant you. The folks who made this particular decision, however, are managing a habitat within a set of rules chosen to protect habitat by, among other things, using endangered species as shields against habitat destruction. You’re free to argue that they made the wrong decision. Maybe they did. I’d need more information before I’d agree, but that’s me.
(Even if we taught them to use little bitty chain saws, it would only work if they were little bitty *solar powered *chain saws.)
Bumping to add an article about endangered yeast. Sound flaky? Not so. These are beer and ale yeasts. So it’s part human history and part economics.
(Note the reference to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. This shows that they are serious about their yeast. (There also are other seed banks spread between many universities. I think UC Davis banks tomato seeds.))
No habitat is being protected, but someone is thinking about the yeast.
And part taste 
Although I think that article oversells how rare real ale/top fermenting yeasts are. As a type of yeast, they’re not endangered at all.
There’s a whole lot of interest in preserving original or “heirloom” varieties of entirely human-made plants, and that’s cool. I think the less beholden we are to the Monsantos of the world, the better off we’ll be.
For this you bump a year old thread ?
Check the date on the OP. Three and half years on the thread. One year on the latest zombification.
Yeah, why not?
Can’t be bothered with even a one line summary of the video?
Okay, sorry: it’s a comedic presentation of essentially the thesis of the OP.
Not particularly interested, does it in any way compensate for the deficiencies of the original thesis or the poor explanations that followed?
Does it, for example, address the laughable notion that marine species can’t be invasive?
All species are invasive, or none of them are. This is just not even a valid category of anything.
Bullshit.
I have to disagree.
It’s *utter *bullshit.
So a species is invasive if human activity helps it move to an area it has not been before, right? I mean, wolves are in lots of places and presumably started in a smaller range but they are not invasive. Shouldn’t we then work hard to get horses out of the Western Hemisphere? The wild ones should be eradicated for sure.
Not been before? Horses evolved in North America. Anatomically-modern wild horses lived here for more than a million years. We wiped them out 11,000-odd years ago, then brought some back in the past 500.
Nope. Not every introduced species is an invasive species.
As has been pointed out in this thread before.
Ann Forsten and others have shown that Equus lambus was not genetically distinct from E. caballus.
Without getting too deep in the weeds, the simple statement is, modern horses evolved in North America, something less than 2 MYA.