Started on what? Crashing and burning civilization and starting over again?
Do you have any evidence for this other than the usual rant about “Kids these days!”?
Speciation can occur even when the geographic range is identical. The article mentions Orca whales as an example.
Either that or genetic engineering. I’m not picky. The interstellar travel idea is good too, but that’s going to lead to some long lines at the airport.
Brandus said:
From a biological standpoint, you are correct. Better or worse would only be measured by success in their individual niches.
From a human (social?) standpoint, we can evaluate each of the species as better or worse. All depends upon the criteria of evaluation.
Smeghead said:
That’s not strictly true. Read up on “ring species”, where a distribution of types that vary across a large geographic area, any locality has all varieties present interbreeding, but populations from each end are not interfertile.
I know all about ring species. The key point about them is that they’re still a single species, because of the genetic flow. Which is the point I was making.
given that the OP is referring to humans and Neanderthals and everybody here is obsessed with interfertility, shouldn’t we say that there was no speciation there because humans and Neanderthals are thought to have interbred and produced fertile hybrids? E.g. if we were to discover surviving groups of Neanderthals nowadays, they would probably have been treated no differently from those isolated Amazonian indigenous tribes. Even if it took sign language to interact with them…
Perhaps it would make more sense for OP to be more explicit about what level of difference between groups he would accept as constituting a new species. And with advances in artificial or controlled reproduction the whole interfertility issue can become purely academic, e.g. if some groups start making “designer babies” with genes spliced from multiple people or even artificially created from scratch.
The latest thinking is that Neanderthals did interbreed with Homo sapiens. http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7018620382
Older studies felt that was not the case. Suite 101 - How-tos, Inspiration and Other Ideas to Try
It is still up for debate.
Things I track:
Autism rates
Literacy rates
Standardized test scores
Ratings for Fox News
Salary based on educational attainment
The most shocking to me is the SAT’s:
The test scoring was initially scaled to make 500 the mean score on each section with a standard deviation of 100.[26] As the test grew more popular and more students from less rigorous schools began taking the test, the average dropped to about 428 Verbal and 478 Math. The SAT was “recentered” in 1995, and the average “new” score became again close to 500. Scores awarded after 1994 and before October 2001 are officially reported with an “R” (e.g. 1260R) to reflect this change. Old scores may be recentered to compare to 1995 to present scores by using official College Board tables,[27] which in the middle ranges add about 70 points to Verbal and 20 or 30 points to Math. **In other words, current students have a 100 (70 plus 30) point advantage over their parents. **–link
In other words, we’re about 100 points stupider, as a nation, than our parents, and the average continues to drop.
And then, for those of you who don’t know, the test format was changed ~2005 to an easier format (question styles were taken from the the PSAT, GRE, etc.) and the most difficult questions (the analogies) were dropped.
None of these things are a direct indicator of intelligence.
The consensus is that the change in rate is pretty much down to better diagnosis.
Of course in many countries these scores are going up, rapidly.
And then there’s the Flynn effect of IQ testing (that IQ tests have to be made harder to keep the average score at 100).
Of course no expert thinks that any of these measures are caused by an increase or decrease in intelligence.
Not sure what your point is on this; educational attainment is a very important predictor of salary, and rightly so. OTOH it can go too far (we have quite a bit of snobbishness here in the UK on what kind of uni you went to), but that’s a cultural / social problem.
OMG we’re screwed…
Damn you, damn you all to hell!
I think it’s practically impossible for humanity to split because it only takes a tiny amount of mixing to keep the split from happening.
But I do think there are inferior and superior creatures, including humans. If you ask somebody who doesn’t know what you are up to whether he tries in life to become a better person, or whether he hopes his kids will turn out well, he’ll likely say yes. Only when you say “So you think some people are better than others?” will he start hemming and hawing.
The big difficulty with thinking about superior humans is that it’s too tempting a trap to start figuring you’re one of them, and bad things start happening when people get comfortable with that trap. Better to say, perhaps, that there must be superior and inferior humans, but it’s foolish to start sorting.
You seem to have contradicted yourself there.
Actually your question “So you think some people are better than others?” is a straw man.
Imagine a world where we are all genetically identical. And somehow the same age, gender, whatever if you want. It would still make sense for individuals to talk about being better people or others turning out well, because they are talking about improving behaviour, knowledge, skills, not the master race.
Also there is ambiguity in your question. Asking someone whether they try to be a better person is generally interpreted to mean better behaved; some mix of moral and generally wise behaviour.
But asking if some people are better than others is ambiguous. Better in bed? More moral? Better baseball players? Better average of some arbitrary set of attributes? More entitled?
As it is, the two most distantly related human beings on the planet are more genetically related than any two chimpanzees that are not identical twins. We almost were not here at all.
That is not true.
You are confusing the relative genetic diversity in the overall population with the genetic diversity of any two individuals within those populations. There are chimps who are full siblings-- ie, non-identical twins with the same mother and father. But even unrelated chimps within a given population need not exhibit the full range of genetic diversity with the whole population. Plus, the genetic diversity of chimps is greater than humans partly because there are several recognized subspecies of chimps, whereas there are none in humans. Within those subspecies, though, there is less genetic diversity than there is across all the subspecies.
Does anyone have good definitions of ‘species’ and ‘sub-species’ that could center this discussion of evolution? There seems to be a shifting standard. We don’t categorize Great Danes and Chihuahuas as different species, but if those were the only representatives of domestic dogs, I’m sure they would have been classified that way. Much of this is complicated because speciation actually defines points in time along linear evolution, where an animal would no longer be able to reproduce with one of its ancestors. We rarely know where those points are in the evolutionary path because animal’s ancestral genetic structure is usually extinct, precluding that possibility.
The most common defintion of "species is the Biological Species Concept (BSC) which defines a species as a population which regularly breeds and produces fertile offspring in the wild.
Domestic animals are, by definition, lumped into the same species as their closest wild relative. They don’t breed in the wild, so the BSC doesn’t really apply.
A subspecies is a population closely related to another population, capable of interbreeding, but which doesn’t because of some barrier, and which has some distinct morphological features. If that barrier were removed, it is understood that the population would form one species. IOW, you don’t get a subspecies if there is a gradual change in morphology over a geographic area-- it has to be abrupt.
Defining a species temporally (ie, populations separated by time), is whole different ball game. Biologists pretty much have to rely on morphology alone.
Take Neanderthals, for example. They were long classified as a subspecies of H. sapiens- H. sapiens neanderthalensis. But then the consensus switched to them being a population which did not interbreed with H. sapiens when the two interacted, and the pendulums swung to labeling them as a separate species-- H. neanderthalensis.
Of course, now there is evidence that there was interbreeding. It will take time for that to become the consensus view, even if it’s correct, so don’t look for any consensus reclassification any time soon.
Not necessarily. A subspecies is simply as population that is distinct enough from it’s neighbors that it warrants having a trinomen assigned (i.e., it’s a label of convenience for discussing particular populations), but not distinct enough to warrant a new binomen; it says nothing whatsoever about the potentiality or actuality of interbreeding (indeed, it’s rather assumed that such populations can potentially or do in actuality interbreed, otherwise they’d be classified as separate species). The aforementioned “ring species” are examples of species wherein the various subspecies freely interbreed with neighboring populations.
What do these have to do with genetic intelligence? These measure education levels, not the raw intelligence (or potential, if you will) of an individual, IMO.
Not very GQ of you.
Salary is a completely arbitrary thing, too. Is Tiger Woods or Bono a superior human being (or more intellgient) because they pull in a higher earning statement than Stephan Hawking?
It seems you are confusing education with intelligence. There are plenty of clever, creative, and intelligent people who do not have high levels of education.