More "miscellany" PART TWO PLUS (General)

by David Turell @, Thursday, September 22, 2022, 16:56 (553 days ago) @ David Turell

PART TWO

Shapiro

dhw: Speciation comes about through “evolutionary novelty”. Please read Shapiro’s words.

DAVID: I did, where is the word 'speciation', above? All I see is a description of adaptability.

dhw: How do “novelty” and "the production of new cells and multicellular structures" come to mean adaptation?


And when does it especially mean speciation? It's your desired inference!

An article on defining new species:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25534050-200-defining-what-constitutes-a-new-spe...

ONE thing I will admit to being quite pedantic about in my job as an editor is policing the use of the phrase “new species”. It isn’t because I don’t like the concept – there are few things I find more exciting than a newly described organism we didn’t know about before. It is because there are so many ways to interpret – and misinterpret – the idea of a new species.

***

What is a species? The most familiar definition is that it is a group of individuals that can produce fertile offspring through reproduction. It feels correct to many – a blackbird can breed with another blackbird and produce young blackbirds that are able themselves to make more blackbirds. But this definition is no use for a wide range of species, such as plants or animals that clone themselves rather than reproducing sexually, or organisms that freely hybridise with many other species. And if breeding success is the way you assess if something is a species, it is impossible to apply the concept to fossils of extinct organisms.

There may be as many as 33 other definitions of what a species is, and you can see the sense in many of them. The morphological species concept, that a species is a group of organisms that look consistently distinct, just feels right on some level – but stumbles when species develop regional variations in colour or pattern yet still fundamentally seem to be the same organism.

A genetic definition suggests a species is a group of individuals that can reproduce and that have a distinct genetic profile. With the onset of DNA sequencing in recent decades, the genetic definition has opened the door to many more “new” species being recognised.

***

One reason it is hard to settle on a single definition for a species is because we now know the old methods for classifying organisms – into kingdoms, phyla, classes, orders, families, genera and species – don’t perfectly reflect reality.

***

Then why be so pedantic? Because, while I am comfortable with there being multiple definitions of a species, I am less comfortable with ambiguity in language. When we say “new species”, do we mean it is a new product of evolution? Or a newly discovered species? And is it really new to all of humanity, or perhaps just to scientists or Westerners?

Comment: just what did Shapiro mean based on this author's thoughts?


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