The Earth stands on the brink of its sixth mass extinction and the fault is ours

[Skydash]

Originally Posted by Glenzig [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

What is a species?

Specere = to look; championed by Aristotle as a hierarchical system of classification for similar looking plants and animals based on Plato's idea of the immutable essence of things.

Leading eventually to the Binomial nomenclature defined as,

a system of nomenclature in which each species of plant or animal receives a name of two terms of which the first identifies the genus to which it belongs and the second the species itself.

Thus, if biologists are to use binomial nomenclature, and if they are to carry out the process of naming an organism in an objective manner, they need a clear definition of species. But attempts to say which populations should be treated as species have always been, and continue to be, problematic. In the long quest to establish valid classifications, a multiplicity of definitions for species have been proposed. This hunt for definitions is of such long standing, that it is known in biological circles as "the species problem."

And as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck realized, hybridization was rampant in both animals and plants,

The idea of bringing together under the name species a collection of like individuals, which perpetuate themselves unchanged by production and are as old as nature, involved the assumption that the individuals of one species could not unite in reproductive acts with individuals of a different species. Unfortunately, observation has proved and continues everyday to prove that this assumption is unwarranted; for the hybrids so common among plants, and the copulations so often observed between animals of very different species, disclose the fact that the boundaries between these allegedly constant species are not so impassable as had been imagined. It is true that often nothing results from these strange copulations, especially when the animals are very disparate; and when anything does happen the resulting individuals are usually infertile; but we also know that when there is less disparity these defects do not occur.

I wanted to here Luminari's theory of species Glenzig... and now you've ruined it.