In Cecil’s article about pygmies and whether or not they are a different species, Cecil says the following - **Anyone reviewing Coon’s evidence, though, which mostly has to do with superficial physical characteristics, would be a fool to agree. **
Now it is my most sincere hope that nobody miscontrues this as any sort of rascism, but based on my very limited knowledge of anthropology and biology - why aren’t the different races considered different species? Entymologists make a big deal of when they find a new butterfly, one that is exactly like another butterfly but this one has a red spot on it’s wing instead of a blue one and they call it a new species.
But the physical differences between an African, an Asian, and a Norwegian for example are much more diverse and hardly superficial. Why do only Homo Sapiens have “race”? What constitutes differences between two races as opposed to two species? Do other animals have different races? Could you compare race as being similar to breeds, like dogs or cats? Is “breed” a scientific term?
Species is a pretty fuzzy concept if you try to get down to the specific, but:
If two individuals are interfertile, that is if they can have offspring, and the offspring are fertile, then they are the same species. This is pretty obviously the case with all we normally call human.
Also, modern biology shows that the human “races” are virtually identical genetically. The physical differences truly are superficial in biological terms, and there are variations among individuals within a given “race” than are greater than the differences between theoretical average members of two different “races”. And incidentally, it takes a lot more than a differently colored spot on a butterfly’s wing for an entomologist to announce a new species.
Like Baldwin said, at the genetic level the differences between “races” are pretty minor. There’s more genetic difference between different hair colors than between different skin colors!
But thousands of years ago primitive tribes decided that skin color was ‘important’, and hair color wasn’t. If it had gone the other way, we could have had a history of brunettes oppressing & enslaving blonds (and everybody picking on the few redheads), laws prohibiting marriage between a blond and a black-haired person, etc. Preachers would have found Bible verses proving that God had cursed people with certain hair colors, and blessed others. The occasional baby born with red hair to dark-haired parents would be abandoned on the mountainside.
Interesting to contemplate how different our culture could have been if this had gone another way.
Not necesssarily. The spot could be a sexual selective trait developed in a subspecies. The members of the subspecies are ferile with the general population but only prefer to mate with other members of their subspecies. So your butterfly w/ spots only will mate w/ other spotted butterflys even though it could mate with the ubiquitous nonspotted butterfly.
I know that it is not the correct terminologybut I can’t think of it at the moment. (I just got home from work and am on my way to the pub - maybe I’ll think of it later.)
TheAndyChrist, lot’s of misunderstandings in your post.
Just because someone finds some butterflies with a red spot instead of a blue spot does not mean they think they’ve discovered a new species. They might suspect it, but to prove it requires work. You study it’s range, find out where it overlaps the blue spotted ones. See if the two choose to mate or not, etc. You then present your evidence, which perhaps others won’t accept. Some back and forth arguing, new research, etc. all takes place. Decades go buy. Maybe it will eventually be accepted as a new species. No one person can decide if a creature is an example of a new species or not.
Take the domestic animals: cats and dogs. How they should be categorized in terms of relationship to wild forms is still being hotly debated. And these are the most familiar animals to humans on the planet! If cats and dogs cause arguments after all these years, think of how much has to go into declaring a new species of butterfly.
Secondly, superficial is superficial. There are 5 or so main maternal mitochondrial DNA lines in humans. Take 3 people: A and B are Norwegian next door neighbors and C is an Australian aborigine. A and C can share the same mitochondrial DNA line and B doesn’t. If you look at all DNA, it can still easily happen that A and C share more DNA in common than with B. Skin color and hair texture are very minor traits.
This is a very common misconception. Many kinds of species of plants and animals are completely interfertile in captivity, but rarely if ever produce hybrids in the wild. The criterion for species status, according to the “biological species concept,” is that two forms rarely or never produce hybrids in the wild. Whether or not they are interfertile is not the key criterion (although forms that produce sterile hybrids, or non-viable hybrids, necessarily must be separate species.)
Of course, by this criterion also, humans consitute a single species, because human populations hybridize freely wherever they come together (regardless of whatever cultural barriers there may be to such interbreeding.)
According to now-outmoded concepts of “subspecies” used in the nineteenth century, different human populations might have been classified as separate subspecies (or races) based on superficial characteristics. However, even if these criteria were applied to humans as they were distributed before the Age of Discovery, the result would have been dozens of subspecies, not the three, four, or six conventional races.
According to modern conventions for defining subspecies, human variation (both superficial and genetic) is far too complex to allow classification into subspecies. Any species that showed the kind of clinal variation and broad “hybridization” between populations that humans show would not be broken up into subspecies by modern taxonomists.
More like a few hundred years ago, when it became important to certain poor specimens of Christians and Moslems to justify their unjustifiable behavior.
I’ve heard this comment made before. Is this a legitimate claim? People have children with hair clor different than their own, but white people don’t have black children and vice-versa.
I recently encountered a statement to the effect that, thanks to newly discovered discoveries on the Y chromosome and other, still poorly understood sex-linked genetic asymmetries, there is actually more raw DNA difference between men and women than between any other two human groups, as much, in fact, as between men and male, and women and female chimps!
(And, no, I cannot recall where I ran across it, but it wasn’t a plain-vanilla loony website or anything like that.)
In my case, it’s based on a lecture from a University professor. Many years ago now, and the science of genetics may have changed since then.
And the professor was careful to be accurate in noting that “more difference” meant that there were a larger number of genetic markers involved in determining the hair color characteristic. And that only a single gene on one chromosome triggered the male-female characteristic, but many might consider that a rather major “difference”. So I think this professor was being pretty careful to be accurate in his statements.
P.S. regarding “but white people don’t have black children”, well, yes they do, if the father happened to be black. I have a white female friend who recently had a baby fathered by her black husband, and the child clearly looked “black” to me. (But not as “black” as his father. And clearly showing some of his mother’s heritage, too.)
[ again, I would like to stress as well that this is a theoretical discussion about scientific classification (which is a murky subject as well, at best - prime example, carolus linneus = charles lynn : ) ]
umm if thw above comment was true, what about all the various dog/wolf interbreeding (canine mixes). canus is a genus not a species, last I remember (though off the top of my head). what differentiates various canine species from each other? how about the great cats? or better yet, how about african vs asian elephants? all of these can interbreed (anyone heard of the liger and tygon?)
the difference in the humanoid races is more than just skin or hair colour (though there is a lot of “blending” as one commenter noted.) everything from facial construction (yes, that’s bone structure folks…) to general builds (pygmies ARE shorter as a ppl)…
You know I think this question of species and humans could easily become a cecil question… would be cool if he answered it in a follow up (as I remember reading his follow ups in the straight dope book : )
Now I know that all varieties of dogs (barring possible interbreeding with wolves) are canis domesticus. However, that brings up an interesting point. The only way you could get a great dane and a chihuahua to interbreed would be through artificial insemination (and the great dane better be the one that gets inseminated! ). Does that make them different species? If not, why not, based on the definitions mentioned previously?
yes, but what of wolves and dogs? (canus lupus, just off the top of my head)
and how about the elephants? I was watching a show on PBS where they were interbreeding elephants, but discovered that african elephants are immune to a certain disease that asian weren’t and the young elephants were dying until they discovered the troube and the cure…so by inference, african and asian elephants (which as of a different species) can mate AND have young…
but in any case, is that the modification? not only must the interspecies have to be able to have young, but the young must be fertile? (the old mule issue…)
and how about our food industry? cattle for example? aren’t there different species of cow? (buffalo/bison for example) and haven’t they been interbred? (that’s a question not a statement : )
won’t even go into the crossbreeding of plants…lol
Wolves and dogs are different species, yet rarely produce hybrids in the wild. I don’t believe Asian and African elephants have ever interbred and produced healthy offspring.
So, I guess the answer to the OP’s question depends on whether or not Pygmies can successfully produce children with your average white guy. I suppose they could, but I’m still curious to know if it has ever happened.
Hmm, a question from this web page got me thinking.
Well, the ranges between whites and Pygmies don’t overlap. Had Motty died because he was born in captivity, or because of genetic differences between African and Asian elephants? I hereby declare that Pygmies are now to be classified as Homo Pygmius.
I don’t know either, whether there have been any documented cases of interbreeding between a Pygmy and a European (though knowing human nature, I would suspect so). But there doesn’t actually need to be, since the biological definition of species is considered to be transitive (that is to say, if A can interbreed with B, and B can interbreed with C, then A and C are the same species). And there probably have been numerous cases of Pygmies successfully interbreeding with members of other African tribes, and certainly Africans and Europeans are interfertile. This is the same situation as with a dachsund and a St. Bernard: They can’t directly interbreed, and probably wouldn’t even show any interest in trying. But a St. Bernard can and will interbreed with, say, a wolfhound, who might breed with a German Shepherd, who might breed with a terrier, who might then breed with a Dachsund. So they’re all the same species.
Incidentally, the situation with dogs and wolves is a bit complicated. Traditionally, they’ve been regarded as separate species, but wolves can easily interbreed with domestic dogs of similar size, and I’ve heard that even in the wild, it’s not unheard of for a she-wolf to use sex to convince a dog to join the pack. So a lot of biologists now refer to dogs as Canis lupus familiaris, a subspecies rather than a species.
Basically, while there’s a genetic condition among them that sometimes results in being unable to synthesize HGH, a larger factor is their poor nutrition. So that seems to make it likely that cross-breeding is just as likely with them as with any other human race.
Although there could be that issue with relative size… not that that’s a problem for most guys.
The “red dot” on the butterfly isn’t what makes it a different species; it’s just a field mark to used distinguish the two species.
The superficial differences between a Pygmy and a Norwegian are differences between anectodal individuals: differences in averages across races are much, much smaller.
By any scientific criterion (if it weren’t for politics and tradition, in other words), dogs and wolves are indeed the same species. Not only can they interbreed, but many different breeds of dogs are thought to have evolved from several different subspecies of wolves. This is of course utterly ridiculous, and is itself proof that dogs and wolves have never speciated.
). Does that make them different species? If not, why not, based on the definitions mentioned previously?