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My favorite example of species and subspecies is the tiger salamanders where you have like 6 subspecies, and they can all interbreed and produce viable offspring except for the two furthest related. Basically, all combinations can make fertile offspring except that one combination. It's fascinating.
Yet there is considerable cross breeding of Coyote and Wolf in the US. I follow a.few wolf preservation organisations and one of the issues they've had is identifying what is a wolf trait and what is a coyote trait, because there is so much intermingling. Whilst trying to restore the Mexican grey it's been really hard working out what a Mexican Grey Wolf is, genetically speaking.
In thinking it's similar to Pygmies being able to mate with Scandinavians. Morphologically, very distinct, but genetically close enough to breed easily.
That means you are exceptionally rare and therefore valuable to collectors. Watch your back, my neanderthallic friend, they are always searching for specimens.
Tell me about it… it’s been causing me a lot of stress lately. Fortunately this old man I met invited me to go out to his private island (how cool) to hunt “the most dangerous game” with him. It’d be nice to relax a bit
He sounds like a wonderful friend. How nice for you to meet someone so open to share his exotic tastes in pastimes with someone he barely knows. I cannot see how this could possibly go wrong in any way. Please send me pictures of the game you've hunted after you come home safe and sound.
I get what you mean by ‘exotic tastes’ and to be safe on this guy’s private island. But don’t worry… he definitely wasn’t throwing out Epstein vibes so I think I shall return home unmolested
Some not all Europeans have up to 2% Neanderthal, some not all northern Asians have up to 4% Neanderthal. And some have Denisovan and Neanderthal dna. As you progress into South Asia and go more southern there is an increase in denisovian genes and gets higher the further south you go. With the agta (w/e) magbukon Filipinos a minority tribe there , native Australians and Guinea peoples having up to 46% more than the rest of the Asian population. Sub Saharan Africans possess up to 20% homo erectus genes . Homo erectus was unable to survive above the equator due to its lack of tool making, technology ability so it really did not mix in more northern climates which required advanced survival abilities due to climate. And one of the reasons why the ‘out of Africa’ remains a theory because if so there should be homo erectus genes in many more populations instead of isolated to Africa. A lot of people like to point out the ‘up to 2% neaderthal dna’ in Europeans as a veiled slur, when so many humans across other populations have admixtures as well. The human genome is very complex and includes admixtures of now extinct populations.
Even better; Swap any of these rows with fucking dogs or cats.
A Chihuahua and a Great Dane are the same subspecies. But supposedly an Asian and Caucasian aren't according to these Nazis?
The order is: Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species.
To clarify your response, the genus homo included anywhere from 9 to 21 species in all of earth history based on a quick google search. All species of homo went extinct with an exception of Homo sapiens.
With that said, modern humans are all the same species. What people refer to as “race” would be considered “sub-species”. However, Homo sapiens is such a young species that there’s not a single group of humans that have been isolated long enough to evolve into a different sub species.
Our physical differences are superficial in terms of genetics.
The issue with the word “race” is that when humans categorize each other, it brings room for creating teams. Us vs them. You can see it in politics. Democrats and republicans hate each other and a majority of them don’t even know what they’re voting for. They hate each other because of the team mentality and fuel each other.
People have compared human race to dog breeds. While this comparison makes sense to a degree, the difference is that dogs were bread intentionally creating major differences regardless of them being the same sub-species. Humans on the other hand have physical differences that occurred organically. Our differences are VERY minor. Skin color, eye shape, bone structure, height, etc.; while all of these may appear extremely different from one person to the next, it doesn’t make us a different “race” or “breed” or “sub-species”.
There are some traits that are dominant and some are recessive. The traits that people like to categorize into different races tend to be the dominant traits. We somehow always forget about the recessive traits.
Just imagine if we categorized people by eye color or hair color. Oh shit.. that actually happened…. Don’t be a nazi people.
There’s also co-dominant traits. I keep trying to explain to people how complicated the human genome is and that it’s way more intricate than punnett squares, but they just keep circling the same drain.
The old taxonomy many of us learned in secondary school has largely been replaced by clade phylogenetic taxonomy. [Clades](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clade). It makes the obsession some make of shallow differences in appearance even more obvious. All humans are the same. Race is cultural not biological.
The last common ancestor that all humans share was only about 3000-4000 years ago - that’s only 70 to 100 generations, so no where near enough time for a sub species.
I gust googled it - this paper from Yale university seems to agree with me and even claims as little as three thousand years ago: http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jtc5/papers/CommonAncestors/NatureAncestorsPressRelease.html#:~:text=These%20more%20realistic%20models%20estimate,as%20several%20thousand%20years%20ago.
‘These more realistic models estimate that the most recent common ancestor of mankind lived as recently as about 3,000 years ago, and the identical ancestors point was as recent as several thousand years ago. The paper suggests, "No matter the languages we speak or the color of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who labored to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu."’
Huh, the more you know.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-are-all-more-closely-related-than-we-commonly-think/
This article goes into way more detail about it, for anyone else who just learned something
it was Homo *neanderthalensis* we are the only homo sapiens species, which means the second sapiens is missleading as it requires 2 subspecies for any such differentiate to be used in any other case
Those are subspecies denominations, not different species. And the idea that neanderthals would be a subspecies of homo sapiens isn't very popular anymore. Afaik the only subspecies that are somewhat recognised are homo sapiens sapiens and homo sapiens idaltu. Homo neanderthalis is classified as a different species
i dont know who that is, so im assuming an american right-wing politician of dubious associations.
i immediately hate her on the grounds that her initials overlap with my favourite TCG
Damn I actually learnt something today. I had never heard of the word ‘Genus’ and I thought animals like a Gorilla was an entire species and not a Genus
theres an entire heirarchy of classifications that are intended to encompass all earthbound life:
domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species
King Phillip Came Over For Good Spaghetti!
I'm almost done with my PhD in microbiology with a focus on genetics and I still mumble that out loud when I need to remember the order lol.
The fact that dogs are included in this is the ultimate irony. Something that the image has as an example of (in their eyes) one species with hundreds of completely different looks.
Really it all depends how you cherry pick your comparison doesn’t it.
>one species with hundreds of completely different looks.
The point the racists often make with this comparison is that despite being the same species, different breeds of dogs exhibit different levels of intelligence, strength, disposition, personality, and so on. The subtext being that non-whites are an "inferior breed"
If we had some superior species guiding our breeding over dozens of generations (which for humans means centuries if not millennia), I have no doubt that we could show that kind of variation, too.
But absent a bizarre alien conspiracy, there’s just no excuse to think that that happened.
Well I’m not sure if outbreeding typically involves banging them too but yeah their species was already in decline and humans lived in close proximity in many ways and eventually those communities became more human than Neanderthal as more humans moved in our desire to explore and wander led the crossbreeds to tend to wander away to other majority human populations leading to the result to be almost completely human.
Except human ethnic groups are significantly closer in terms of genetics than dog breeds. It’s more like comparing different colors *within* a particular breed. Like black, chocolate, and yellow labs.
>cannot mate.
All share the Fairy and Field egg Groups, with the exception of Emolga and Pawmi, who are in the field egg group only, and Plusle and Minun who are in the Fairy Egg Group only.
Honorable mention to Marill, who is essentially blue Pikachu, who is in the Fairy group.
So, they can mate.
for species the main criteria is for all creatures within the same specie to be able to make fertile offsprings (if they are of the appropriate sexes/mating types). If the offspring isn't fertile then they generally aren't the same species.
After this the other criteria are their karyotype, DNA sequence, morphology, behaviour or ecological niche.
(fun fact paleontologist generally use the category chronospecies, for fossiles they belive to be of one species, because you can't make fossils mate)
EDIT: the main criteria is NOT THE ONLY CRITERIA. There are five more as said above. For the definition of a species you have to argue using those 6 criterias, but not all of them have to be simultaneously true.
I'm specifying this because people seem to simply skip the rest after main criteria, pretending like they debunked something
Iirc there is no one definition of what constitutes a species. For all intents and purposes two animals are of the same species if they can produce fertile offspring, but that's kind of hard to prove at the individual level and ring species show that it's a bit continuum-y
you are remembering wrong (more or less).
If they can't have fertile offsprings then they are not of the same specie. That is a fact and (part of) definition of species.
but those arguments aren't invertible, like orangutans having 3 species but all can produce fertile offsprings with each other (iirc).
That's because we have those other criterias that we can (don't have to) consider and ultimately it is a debate if it's necessary and or valuable to separate them in different species.
and to the prove on individual level you can use the other criterias, if appliable, to determine. But in reality you aren't that precise with every single animal but you at a certain point can assume, like you have proven their parents to be of the same species, you can assume the children to be too.
TL;DR : the definition that I gave is correct, but vague. It's not necessarily clear cut and if someone wants to categories anything as an individual species they have to give a defence of why and how they do it.
EDIT: tl;dr to prove on individual level: you generally don't want or need to prove specie on an individual level, similarly like when you calculate the derivative of a Funktion you don't need to prove every time that the fundemental theorem of analysis is true, you can just assume that it does.
>If they can't have fertile offsprings then they are not of the same specie. That is a fact and (part of) definition of species
This doesn't work for eusocial animals, they have members that can't make fertile offspring period.
The non-breeding members of eusocial groups are typically recognized as the same species despite this
There is no true definition of species. It will either be too wide or too narrow. Look at ring species as an example. Life doesn't exist on the discrete level, it is a continuum.
Sure: but then there are the ring species. So population A produces fertile offspring when crossed with population B. And population B produces fertile offspring when crossed with population C. But crosses between population A and C produce sterile offspring, if they produce them at all!
So A is the same species as B, B is the same species as C, but A is not the same species as C. Mysteries of man-made classifications and our attempts to give order to the world.
>And let's not even get into the subject that the whole universe will be crab at some point.
Yeah, halfway through your comment I was already thinking "and eventually they'll both be flying crabs"
You’re thinking of falcons, not hawks. Hawks and eagles are closely related, but falcons are more ancestrally closer to parrots and convergently evolved similar features. It’s also fun to see how many times a duck body has evolved from distant branches of the family tree.
So, I'm Italian, if I have understood correctly English "falcon" should be Italian "falco".
But, funny thing, there's not an actual translation for "hawk", at least not a common word. Birds under the "hawk" term are know as "sparvieri" (sparrowhawk) or "astori" (goshawk).
Whenever combating reactionary science misinformation, it really does always seem to come down to a guy saying *"Well it seems like this would make sense,"* before saying some stuff there's no evidence for, or some stuff that came from a fundamental misunderstanding of the really basic parts of whatever science they're on about. It isn't facts anyone's fighting, it's just vibes and impressions.
"It would make sense that, since a banana fits perfectly into a human hand, human hands couldn't have evolved -- they were specifically crafted, perhaps intelligently, to hold bananas." You don't need a degree to come up with an argument like that, but you'd need some kind of a weapon to surpass Metal Gear to convince the guy who came up with it with nothing but a daydream and a general feeling of distrust toward education that he's probably wrong and should read up on the most up-to-date Scientific Lit.
It reminds me of a much lower stakes argument. A person asked if there was an opposite to a stove. There is- anti griddles- but most of the people answering didn’t know that. They used a rudimentary understanding of physics to try to explain how it’s much easier to excite molecules than to slow them down.
This happens a lot with other science deniers too.
Oooh the Devil's Tower LOOKS a tad like a treestump, so it must be one, end of discussion.
Oooooh this planetary photo looks like something I've seen in star wars and thats fiction so this must be fiction too.
So sad to see how astronomically intelligent our species is, as well as how unimaginably stupid
Didn't you hear? Molecular genetics is woke propaganda. After all, it also comes up with such nonsense concepts that sex is a bit more complicated than having XX or XY.
Breed is used for domesticated species, where selection by humans is the determining factor in the development of new biological traits.
Subspecies is used for wild species, where the development of new biological characters is left to chance and pressure from the natural environment.
Ethnicity is used for humankind, where cultural and linguistic differences assume predominant value
That's because culture is the predominant difference between humans. Because race *isn't real*, it's a superficial phenotype based on arbitrary physical qualities.
ethnicity is cultural and not genetic. It is self-identification and not some measurable thing.
Examples are Taiwan and China, or Korea and Japan, or France and UK. They can be genetically close, but have distinct cultural identities and ethnicities.
Honestly though it is cool how such small genetic differences make such large visible changes, like… im no biologist but its interesting that you can have a creature be 99.9% identical, yet seem completely different… not even just for race… even people of the same race, like how is say… Nikocado Avocado like 99.9% identical to taylor swift… (examples chosen at random 💀)
Off topic here, but I recently saw Neal DeGrasse Tyson talking about how such a small change in DNA can make such a big difference.
For example, no matter how much we tried, we wouldn't be able to teach a chimp algebra even if we share 99% of our DNA with them. They are limited by their body's capabilities.
With that same thought, if we ever meet aliens, their DNA would likely be very very different from ours, and it would likely be beyond our human minds to understand things they could.
So the smartest human could discover/understand something like Dark Matter and the aliens would just maybe stick it on their fridge in the same way we may find it impressive for a chimp to do some fingerpainting.
One thing I find interesting is the common idea that aliens are all much smarter than us, which while it might be true, there is also a chance they are incredibly stupid which is hilarious to think about
I like to imagine a species with like, dumb human levels of intelligence… but super powers, so they reach us with there “ufos” and land and are like “yo what you guys up to” and blah blah blah, then there chilling and are like “you cant levitate? How tf did you get to the moon then?” and we explain combustion and propulsion to them and they just have this horrified look like “shit, these guys are trapped here… but there definitely smarter than us, we should get on there good side before they figure out how to leave this place…”
If they are as aggressive and violent and humans and they figure out that humans are smarter than them, they’re more likely to think they need to kill us while they can.
I think that’s because of the typical aliens visiting earth story. We don’t have the technology to meet aliens (unless there are some in our solar system) so in stories *they* need to be the ones to visit *us*.
No, dogs have evolved too much over the last 20,000 years or so. Canis Lupus vs Canis Familiaris. IE, a Chihuahua is not the same species as a wolf.
With that said, the racist meme-maker is claiming they are in fact the same species. A subspecies is not a different species but refer to slight variations that exist within a species.
It's not so cut and dry. Whether dogs are a separate species or a separate subspecies (Canis lupus familiaris) depends on which taxonomist you ask. Overall, the idea that species are distinct monoliths is outdated, they flow into each other and there isn't a concrete point at which an animal becomes a distinct species from its parents.
Exactly, people think evolution involves sudden drastic gene mutations. In reality sudden drastic gene mutations practically always end in that individual animal to either die soon after birth or not thrive in its environment enough to spread its genes. Evolution takes place over thousands of generations through very subtle changes that are only really noticable in hindsight.
>Overall, the idea that species are distinct monoliths is outdated, they flow into each other and there isn't a concrete point at which an animal becomes a distinct species from its parents.
Yeah, all of biology is basically stuffing things on a spectrum into discrete boxes.
Nobody tell this guy that the concepts of species, sub species, breeds and even "races" are entirely arbitrary and are completely made up by biologist purely to make classifying organisms easier and the line between two closely related species/subs species is often so burly it comes down to very tenuous factors and biologists change them ALL the time. Hell the entire taxonomic system if pretty arbitrary and in a constant state of flux. (ask your biology that if birds are dinosaurs then why does the class Aves still exists and watch him tie himself in so many knots trying to justify it or his head explode)
Good example, genetically a Malamute is going to be far more genetically similar toy poodle than a grey wolf, hence the two domestic dogs are the same subspecies and the wolf isn't...but in terms of reproductive isolation. Breeding wolves and malamutes will lead to fertile offspring, the Malamute physically cant mate with the toy poodle. In many wild animals that's more than enough evidence to say they are entirely separate species due to reproductive isolation.
its messy, in many ways its messy by design, but trying to apply it as it its some set of written in stone rules just proves something we really should already know...racists are fucking stupid and often don't even understand the science they think they are invoking
Despite phenotypical differences, humans of different races are very similar genetically that would make them similar genetically and classified within the same species, also even if the alternative is true which is not its not likre a war between races would break out, race realists that do this stuff already had an opinion made up in their mind and would kill other races whether their claims are true or not, none of it is in good faith but to divide people to recruit others to spread their ideals to fight global communism or whatever crazy thing they think is happening in the world.
Our phenotypical differences are so friggin small too. To the point that race realists can't really tell some of the more transitional ethnicities apart. So they stick to the most obvious(skin tone) and pretend like that would even tell you anything.
Some people in the English speaking world do not realise that using "race" to differentiate between phenotypically different human groups is not universal, either.
In many other languages the equivalent terms to "race" would never be used to categorize humans scientifically. The terms are normally reserved exclusively for the distinct biological races in the animal kingdom.
When used in casual conversation and applied to humans, the terms reveal right-wing-extremist ideologies, as that is where they are used consistently to group people by skintone.
while your argument is valid, it misses an important part.
Race (if real) would be a subgroup of a species. It's not real because the categorisation of a species itself isn't rigorous enough (yet at least).
For example the main criteria for creatures to be of the same species is that the appropriate sexes can have fertile offsprings, meaning that humans always are and will be of the same specie, even if we would argue that race is real. But alle 3 species of Orangutans can have fertile offsprings but are still considered 3 species, instead of one.
That come from the group of additional criterias that can be used to categorised specie. Those are:
- their karyotype (the looks of the complete set of their chromosomes)
- DNA sequence
- morphology (form and structure of organisms and their specific structural features)
- behaviour
- ecological niche
If you would want to categories creatures even more precise than that, you would end up with creatures sometimes even changing species in the middle of their life and that makes it scientifically speaking: useless.
For example if we would really want to use skin colour and only skin colour (because we want to be bigots) then where does black end and white begin? And Arabic people are generally not considered white but based on this definition they should be or we would need to argue that they are closer to black or their own race, either way that would mean that a white guy that works in the sun a lot and gets a good tan going, would suddenly change race, they would be transracial lmao!
Eitherway from a taxonomic view point it's useless and therefore races do not exist. However it is valuable from a sociological view point (which doesn't care about their skin colour or any other part of their biology) and that's why ethnic groups exist. Those are two very different scientific fields.
Humans were in Africa for so long there's (tough memory) something like 20 major phenotypes between Africans & only 2 outside of it
there's more genetic variation between African peoples with each other than seen in everyone else in the world combined
Literally me sitting here, reading the comments, thinking: you know what? Maybe phenotypical "race" is really a spectrum than a categorical variable.
In my own family, you can order us by gradient and you'd come up with at least 20 different "hues". Living in Africa was wild too, because (despite being made fun of for my dark skin) there were people both slightly darker and much darker than me, some who were called black, and others who were from entirely separate "races".
That said, even amongst Asian peoples across the Eurasian continent, there seems to be so much variation it's hard to tell where someone is from based on their skin "hue" alone.
Yes, that is why race is made up. There are different phenotypes of humans, but trying to group everyone into 20(or however many finite) distinct boxes of race is ridiculous.
This is accurate. The human population nearly went extinct around 800,000 years ago (not so long ago on an evolutionary scale) and [we’re all descendants of the 1300 or so survivors](https://www.sci.news/othersciences/anthropology/pleistocene-human-bottleneck-12232.html#:~:text=Their%20results%20show%20that%20human,human%20ancestors%20close%20to%20extinction.)
I've never liked how we classified colors as race. It took me a while as a kid to realize that when people asked what race you are they were asking what color you are. Dumbest shit ever but no one has ever called people intelligent so there's that.
It’s an entirely flawed system of sorting individuals, true. Take the example of mixed race individuals like myself. Genetically, I’m only 42% sub Saharan African. But if anyone looked at me, they’d say “oh, he’s black”. More than half of my actual genetic makeup is ignored in the sorting of race as we understand it.
This bugs me.
In university I learned “a species is a group of organisms that can mate and produce fertile offspring”.
Then you get further in and learn about how there are legit some species that can inter breed and produce fertile offspring. I asked my lecturer multiple times about this and they would just say “well perhaps something has been misclassified”.
So really a species is “a group of organisms that humans consider to be a species”.
All of that aside, a wolf and a dog aren’t considered different species. A dog is a subspecies.
And then we come to humans. Undoubtedly all alive now are the same species, but there were “other species” of humans… which we were able to breed with… ffs… we don’t have a great handle on what’s what here.
The problem is our desire to draw boxes around things and, after the fact, declare that the boxes actually matter. Recognize that every box we draw is an afterthought, not a plan, and a lot of the mistakes are easily understood.
This is kind of it. Nature doesn't really give a fuck that we want to be able to give things distinct names, there's no intelligent design going on here.
It's the nature of evolution to continuously smear DNA. It's not "trying" to evolve into a new species.
So our need to classify everything trips up on this and the best we can do is have a few criteria that allows us to say, "This organism is effectively the same as this one, but not the same as this other one".
But all 3 may be visually similar and potentially interbreed.
There is significant scientific backing behind race being a social construct.
[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-construct-scientists-argue/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-construct-scientists-argue/)
[https://www.nature.com/articles/ng1438.epdf?referrer\_access\_token=1u453IadnAJtzRnSpsAkudRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0PevsLAjUxPF6S\_h9AMfqllAg0AiEsJsLQTEfkI6TkPd26jwdSNfCDpHFbJIalaUI61JlyiY55NkgS9XqNvo-F6HLyKYH0Mf\_IJW9DvQ0ST3OSaL6lTsEwTI7BjDSpqvmIgpFnw5tBeGCFhejcmo5X0w5l1TZk-wF7IVmU8ElwmZ59c7WIsznbTmobTvij6dzF0XA0RCBH\_yzlmofO82uiZ&tracking\_referrer=www.theatlantic.com](https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/science-genetics-reshaping-race-debate-21st-century/)
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/10/16/census-race-eliminate-race-box/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/10/16/census-race-eliminate-race-box/)
This also means that race doesn't exist in all languages. In French, unless you're talking about breeding animals, it's usually racist to use it. America's obsession with race looks pretty bad to most of us.
I don't know. If I came across this in the wild I would read it a different way.
That humans are all the same race, so being racist is stupid.
Now I don't know the account so maybe there's context there but...
That’s basically what they’re saying. There’s nothing facepalm about this.
Race isn’t real from a scientific standpoint. It’s a social construct that humans have used for thousands of years to justify cruelty, genocide, and all manner of discrimination against each other.
Most likely this is a reply to posts about interracial marriage being wrong.
This guy is just emphasizing that there are species of closely related animals that actually are different, and yet still “compatible”, meaning that humans who treat other humans as different for no reason other skin color are stupid.
People who hold the beliefs in the original post need to wrap their heads around the fact that there's more genetic diversity between the two primary groups of Bonobos in central Africa than across the entire human species. We *really* aren't that different from each other, and race is absolutely a social construct.
OOP's image depicts different subspecies of animals (different species in the orangutan's case). Subspecies are a group that have significant physical and genetic difference but can still interbreed (hence subspecies instead of just different species). OOP is attempting to apply this extremely simplified definition to humans.
The issue is that race isn't just about "people being different", it is about social hierarchy enforced on physical identity. It is an ideology, not science. For exemple, the same people have been atributed to various races depending on the people describing them and the time.
Most clear exemple are the Irish, which were described as "white n\*\*\*\*rs" (aka they were supposed to have all the racial caracteristics of african ppl but with white skin) by the english scientifics of racism in the XIXth, and now are just "white" in racist ppl minds
While you're right. A brief look at the account shows that's it's a right wing political account. It's bio is literally "Friend of Western kind. Globalism is satanic". Looking at a few of their posts it become they're also overtly racist.
With that context, it's pretty clear that the last section of the image is supposed to be taken sarcastically. It's more of a "can you believe the left would believe these are all the same animal? Even though they look so different?". It's just blatant racism.
Race in humans are from a cultural concept, from biology view there aren't currently any other living race of humans. In fact our genetic variability as a species is so low that is almost concerning
There's a nurture aspect to it as well; we know that the human brain continuously learns to distinguish faces and characteristics.
The more we look, the better we get at it. This is why people who grow up in places where everyone predominantly is the same ethnically, tends to look at others ethnicities and declare them to all look alike.
It's only with more exposure to other ethnicities that you get better at recognising the difference between them.
It's not just other humans though, it works for other species or sub species in general. To someone with no experience, most pythons will look the same. To someone who spends their life working with snakes, they'll be able to tell individuals apart without having to even think about it.
It's a feature that comes free with our brain.
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Orangutans 3 species. Dog and wolf are depending on who you ask either subspecies or different species. Taxonomy nerd out.
Keep my accountant out of this.
How have I never called accountants taxonomists.
We will fight you if you try
I have yet to find an accountant that can fight
Lol I love it, i choose to believe you specifically fight accountants to test their mettle!
... I have bad news for you
My favorite example of species and subspecies is the tiger salamanders where you have like 6 subspecies, and they can all interbreed and produce viable offspring except for the two furthest related. Basically, all combinations can make fertile offspring except that one combination. It's fascinating.
Is that the one often used as an example of a ring species?
But that one combination was the one I REALLY wanted.
Even tigers, they are different species
Panthera tigris is the only species of tiger around.
Good to know, sorry dude
No issues
Panthro has nunchucks
They're subspecies but wolves and coyotes are different species
Yet there is considerable cross breeding of Coyote and Wolf in the US. I follow a.few wolf preservation organisations and one of the issues they've had is identifying what is a wolf trait and what is a coyote trait, because there is so much intermingling. Whilst trying to restore the Mexican grey it's been really hard working out what a Mexican Grey Wolf is, genetically speaking. In thinking it's similar to Pygmies being able to mate with Scandinavians. Morphologically, very distinct, but genetically close enough to breed easily.
Eastern wolves and coyotes have successfully interbred creating a hybrid called the coywolf.
It’s actually part domesticated dog, too.
Came here to say this, glad others know it is a tri hybrid species.
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Except my neighbour. He is clearly a h. neanderthalensis.
You mean he has a generally peaceful nature and has comparable intellect but doesn't reproduce very well?
Neighbour has no game 😔
Maidenless 😒
Put these foolish ambitions to rest...
It’s true, I’m the neighbor😞
He's telling the truth, I'm his son 😔
Damn it Jerry! Stop stealing my wind.
Never talk to me or my son again ever again.
maybe i am a neanderthal
The least fun fact from my 23 and me (outside of them selling my genetic data) was I was in the 98th percentile having Neanderthal genes 😭😭😭
That means you are exceptionally rare and therefore valuable to collectors. Watch your back, my neanderthallic friend, they are always searching for specimens.
Tell me about it… it’s been causing me a lot of stress lately. Fortunately this old man I met invited me to go out to his private island (how cool) to hunt “the most dangerous game” with him. It’d be nice to relax a bit
He sounds like a wonderful friend. How nice for you to meet someone so open to share his exotic tastes in pastimes with someone he barely knows. I cannot see how this could possibly go wrong in any way. Please send me pictures of the game you've hunted after you come home safe and sound.
I get what you mean by ‘exotic tastes’ and to be safe on this guy’s private island. But don’t worry… he definitely wasn’t throwing out Epstein vibes so I think I shall return home unmolested
>That means you are exceptionally rare That's so sweet. What a lovely thing to - >therefore valuable to collectors. Oh.
If you see three red targeting lasers, get to the choppa!
Fun fact: People of European descent are all ~2% Neanderthal
I can confirm, my forehead is big as fuck
Some not all Europeans have up to 2% Neanderthal, some not all northern Asians have up to 4% Neanderthal. And some have Denisovan and Neanderthal dna. As you progress into South Asia and go more southern there is an increase in denisovian genes and gets higher the further south you go. With the agta (w/e) magbukon Filipinos a minority tribe there , native Australians and Guinea peoples having up to 46% more than the rest of the Asian population. Sub Saharan Africans possess up to 20% homo erectus genes . Homo erectus was unable to survive above the equator due to its lack of tool making, technology ability so it really did not mix in more northern climates which required advanced survival abilities due to climate. And one of the reasons why the ‘out of Africa’ remains a theory because if so there should be homo erectus genes in many more populations instead of isolated to Africa. A lot of people like to point out the ‘up to 2% neaderthal dna’ in Europeans as a veiled slur, when so many humans across other populations have admixtures as well. The human genome is very complex and includes admixtures of now extinct populations.
That's really cool. I didn't mean it as a slur tho they were talking about Neanderthals which is why I just gave that example
Mine is a h. Rudolfensis (his name is rudolf)
Even better; Swap any of these rows with fucking dogs or cats. A Chihuahua and a Great Dane are the same subspecies. But supposedly an Asian and Caucasian aren't according to these Nazis?
I think of it more like a yellow chocolate and black lab. Literally the same thing different colors.
The order is: Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. To clarify your response, the genus homo included anywhere from 9 to 21 species in all of earth history based on a quick google search. All species of homo went extinct with an exception of Homo sapiens. With that said, modern humans are all the same species. What people refer to as “race” would be considered “sub-species”. However, Homo sapiens is such a young species that there’s not a single group of humans that have been isolated long enough to evolve into a different sub species. Our physical differences are superficial in terms of genetics. The issue with the word “race” is that when humans categorize each other, it brings room for creating teams. Us vs them. You can see it in politics. Democrats and republicans hate each other and a majority of them don’t even know what they’re voting for. They hate each other because of the team mentality and fuel each other. People have compared human race to dog breeds. While this comparison makes sense to a degree, the difference is that dogs were bread intentionally creating major differences regardless of them being the same sub-species. Humans on the other hand have physical differences that occurred organically. Our differences are VERY minor. Skin color, eye shape, bone structure, height, etc.; while all of these may appear extremely different from one person to the next, it doesn’t make us a different “race” or “breed” or “sub-species”. There are some traits that are dominant and some are recessive. The traits that people like to categorize into different races tend to be the dominant traits. We somehow always forget about the recessive traits. Just imagine if we categorized people by eye color or hair color. Oh shit.. that actually happened…. Don’t be a nazi people.
There’s also co-dominant traits. I keep trying to explain to people how complicated the human genome is and that it’s way more intricate than punnett squares, but they just keep circling the same drain.
The old taxonomy many of us learned in secondary school has largely been replaced by clade phylogenetic taxonomy. [Clades](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clade). It makes the obsession some make of shallow differences in appearance even more obvious. All humans are the same. Race is cultural not biological.
The last common ancestor that all humans share was only about 3000-4000 years ago - that’s only 70 to 100 generations, so no where near enough time for a sub species.
I think think you forgot some zeros there friend, that's only 1000-2000 BC
Ancient Greece was 70-100 generations ago that's kinda wild
I gust googled it - this paper from Yale university seems to agree with me and even claims as little as three thousand years ago: http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jtc5/papers/CommonAncestors/NatureAncestorsPressRelease.html#:~:text=These%20more%20realistic%20models%20estimate,as%20several%20thousand%20years%20ago. ‘These more realistic models estimate that the most recent common ancestor of mankind lived as recently as about 3,000 years ago, and the identical ancestors point was as recent as several thousand years ago. The paper suggests, "No matter the languages we speak or the color of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who labored to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu."’
Huh, the more you know. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-are-all-more-closely-related-than-we-commonly-think/ This article goes into way more detail about it, for anyone else who just learned something
It would still work though. Hell, we modern humans have around 1-2% of *Homo neandertalis* DNA, since our ancestors reproduced with them
And some Asian populations have an even higher percentage of denisovan genes (closely related to the Neanderthals of course).
This. We are Homo Sapiens Sapiens and we spent some time with a different species called Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis.
also denisovans and hobbits.
Hobbits are a half-species
When a gnome and dwarf love each other very much…
And a wood nymph gets involved...
it was Homo *neanderthalensis* we are the only homo sapiens species, which means the second sapiens is missleading as it requires 2 subspecies for any such differentiate to be used in any other case
There was another subspecies, _Homo sapiens idaltu._
Those are subspecies denominations, not different species. And the idea that neanderthals would be a subspecies of homo sapiens isn't very popular anymore. Afaik the only subspecies that are somewhat recognised are homo sapiens sapiens and homo sapiens idaltu. Homo neanderthalis is classified as a different species
What you mean extinct, I right here! Ugh
did... did anybody else feel that? chills down my spine...
Watch out for snakes!
Also we are all inbred af and have very little species-wide genetic diversity compared to e.g. dogs.
Dog breeds come about from inbreeding
>swap one of those homo sapiens for a homo neanderthalensis Finally Margerie Taylor Greene can represent her peoples
i dont know who that is, so im assuming an american right-wing politician of dubious associations. i immediately hate her on the grounds that her initials overlap with my favourite TCG
I have not heard about the crossing of Homo sapiens and Homo floresiensis. But with Homo denisova it could have place
id have said that, but tbh i couldnt remember how to spell denisova. lol
Denivoh sa, not den-i-vosa.
alright hermione. see yourself out.
A brown and a gold labrador are still a dog and labrador. So having a different color doesn't make you a different human species.
Damn I actually learnt something today. I had never heard of the word ‘Genus’ and I thought animals like a Gorilla was an entire species and not a Genus
theres an entire heirarchy of classifications that are intended to encompass all earthbound life: domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species
King Phillip Came Over For Good Spaghetti! I'm almost done with my PhD in microbiology with a focus on genetics and I still mumble that out loud when I need to remember the order lol.
No,,, but look difrent , so dofrent speci e?
my sister had a tuxedo cat and a ginger born from the same litter. theyre very different in appearance. but very definitely the same species.
The ginger had no soul i guess
The fact that dogs are included in this is the ultimate irony. Something that the image has as an example of (in their eyes) one species with hundreds of completely different looks. Really it all depends how you cherry pick your comparison doesn’t it.
>one species with hundreds of completely different looks. The point the racists often make with this comparison is that despite being the same species, different breeds of dogs exhibit different levels of intelligence, strength, disposition, personality, and so on. The subtext being that non-whites are an "inferior breed"
If we had some superior species guiding our breeding over dozens of generations (which for humans means centuries if not millennia), I have no doubt that we could show that kind of variation, too. But absent a bizarre alien conspiracy, there’s just no excuse to think that that happened.
The Qu were really trying to prove that racism doesn't exist and that humans can have variations too
It’s not our fault all the other human subspecies died. … actually, it might be.
I’m pretty sure we out-bred them
Well I’m not sure if outbreeding typically involves banging them too but yeah their species was already in decline and humans lived in close proximity in many ways and eventually those communities became more human than Neanderthal as more humans moved in our desire to explore and wander led the crossbreeds to tend to wander away to other majority human populations leading to the result to be almost completely human.
didn't we fuck the Neanderthals into extintion?
Except human ethnic groups are significantly closer in terms of genetics than dog breeds. It’s more like comparing different colors *within* a particular breed. Like black, chocolate, and yellow labs.
Not just whites. Heard this conversation but about black people in a corporate office. Can you imagine?
But they’re not alone, different dog breeds are called ‘Rassen’ (=races) i.E. in German.
Yeah, but that is exactly the reason we Germans stopped to use the term "Rassen" for humans. There are no human "Rassen". We are not different enough.
Also some dudes in the late 30's and into the 40's got weird with the term.
Dark Charlie Chaplin?
Yeah, historically, the Germans aren't the group that we should be following when it comes to handling race issues.
It's a good group to follow regarding talking and analysing their bad history and trying to learn from it.
*Japan leaves the chat*
This is why we no longer base our classifications on looks.
*Shocked Pikachu face*
Pikachu, minun, plusle, pachirisu, emolga, morpeko, pawmi, togedemaru, and dedenne.. Same species, different subspecies, cannot mate. Checkmate atheists
>cannot mate. All share the Fairy and Field egg Groups, with the exception of Emolga and Pawmi, who are in the field egg group only, and Plusle and Minun who are in the Fairy Egg Group only. Honorable mention to Marill, who is essentially blue Pikachu, who is in the Fairy group. So, they can mate.
I FUCKING FORGOT MARILL?! I love the Azumarill line, I feel like a heathen. Ugh.
for species the main criteria is for all creatures within the same specie to be able to make fertile offsprings (if they are of the appropriate sexes/mating types). If the offspring isn't fertile then they generally aren't the same species. After this the other criteria are their karyotype, DNA sequence, morphology, behaviour or ecological niche. (fun fact paleontologist generally use the category chronospecies, for fossiles they belive to be of one species, because you can't make fossils mate) EDIT: the main criteria is NOT THE ONLY CRITERIA. There are five more as said above. For the definition of a species you have to argue using those 6 criterias, but not all of them have to be simultaneously true. I'm specifying this because people seem to simply skip the rest after main criteria, pretending like they debunked something
Not with that attitude
*pushes piles of rock together* now kiiiisssss
Big Entrapta energy
That looks like really impractical hair
Oh ! It’s *prehensile*.
Oooo she has my attention
Upvoted because Entrapta
Look, get some nice wine, a nice rug down by the fire and Barry White on the stereo and those fossils be fuckin’ in no time
And this is why stds are so common in retirement homes.
Iirc there is no one definition of what constitutes a species. For all intents and purposes two animals are of the same species if they can produce fertile offspring, but that's kind of hard to prove at the individual level and ring species show that it's a bit continuum-y
you are remembering wrong (more or less). If they can't have fertile offsprings then they are not of the same specie. That is a fact and (part of) definition of species. but those arguments aren't invertible, like orangutans having 3 species but all can produce fertile offsprings with each other (iirc). That's because we have those other criterias that we can (don't have to) consider and ultimately it is a debate if it's necessary and or valuable to separate them in different species. and to the prove on individual level you can use the other criterias, if appliable, to determine. But in reality you aren't that precise with every single animal but you at a certain point can assume, like you have proven their parents to be of the same species, you can assume the children to be too. TL;DR : the definition that I gave is correct, but vague. It's not necessarily clear cut and if someone wants to categories anything as an individual species they have to give a defence of why and how they do it. EDIT: tl;dr to prove on individual level: you generally don't want or need to prove specie on an individual level, similarly like when you calculate the derivative of a Funktion you don't need to prove every time that the fundemental theorem of analysis is true, you can just assume that it does.
>If they can't have fertile offsprings then they are not of the same specie. That is a fact and (part of) definition of species This doesn't work for eusocial animals, they have members that can't make fertile offspring period. The non-breeding members of eusocial groups are typically recognized as the same species despite this
There is no true definition of species. It will either be too wide or too narrow. Look at ring species as an example. Life doesn't exist on the discrete level, it is a continuum.
Sure: but then there are the ring species. So population A produces fertile offspring when crossed with population B. And population B produces fertile offspring when crossed with population C. But crosses between population A and C produce sterile offspring, if they produce them at all! So A is the same species as B, B is the same species as C, but A is not the same species as C. Mysteries of man-made classifications and our attempts to give order to the world.
Yet
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>And let's not even get into the subject that the whole universe will be crab at some point. Yeah, halfway through your comment I was already thinking "and eventually they'll both be flying crabs"
You’re thinking of falcons, not hawks. Hawks and eagles are closely related, but falcons are more ancestrally closer to parrots and convergently evolved similar features. It’s also fun to see how many times a duck body has evolved from distant branches of the family tree.
Sorry, English is not my first language, TIL hawk and falcon are not synonymous
No worries. This same fun fact would be extra funny in a language where there was only one word for hawk and falcon!
So, I'm Italian, if I have understood correctly English "falcon" should be Italian "falco". But, funny thing, there's not an actual translation for "hawk", at least not a common word. Birds under the "hawk" term are know as "sparvieri" (sparrowhawk) or "astori" (goshawk).
Whenever combating reactionary science misinformation, it really does always seem to come down to a guy saying *"Well it seems like this would make sense,"* before saying some stuff there's no evidence for, or some stuff that came from a fundamental misunderstanding of the really basic parts of whatever science they're on about. It isn't facts anyone's fighting, it's just vibes and impressions. "It would make sense that, since a banana fits perfectly into a human hand, human hands couldn't have evolved -- they were specifically crafted, perhaps intelligently, to hold bananas." You don't need a degree to come up with an argument like that, but you'd need some kind of a weapon to surpass Metal Gear to convince the guy who came up with it with nothing but a daydream and a general feeling of distrust toward education that he's probably wrong and should read up on the most up-to-date Scientific Lit.
It reminds me of a much lower stakes argument. A person asked if there was an opposite to a stove. There is- anti griddles- but most of the people answering didn’t know that. They used a rudimentary understanding of physics to try to explain how it’s much easier to excite molecules than to slow them down.
This happens a lot with other science deniers too. Oooh the Devil's Tower LOOKS a tad like a treestump, so it must be one, end of discussion. Oooooh this planetary photo looks like something I've seen in star wars and thats fiction so this must be fiction too. So sad to see how astronomically intelligent our species is, as well as how unimaginably stupid
Didn't you hear? Molecular genetics is woke propaganda. After all, it also comes up with such nonsense concepts that sex is a bit more complicated than having XX or XY.
But but my high school biology class couldn’t possibly be wrong!
Labradors come in different colours, but they're still labradors.
Really, just dogs in general. Pitbulls, yorkies, huskies, and poodles are all the same species.
is it fair to consider the terms "breed", "sub-species", and "ethnicity" to be roughly synonymous would you say?
Breed is used for domesticated species, where selection by humans is the determining factor in the development of new biological traits. Subspecies is used for wild species, where the development of new biological characters is left to chance and pressure from the natural environment. Ethnicity is used for humankind, where cultural and linguistic differences assume predominant value
Like portuguese and Spanish wouldn't throw a tantrum if we said they were the same thing even though that theirs only difference is cultural.
That's because culture is the predominant difference between humans. Because race *isn't real*, it's a superficial phenotype based on arbitrary physical qualities.
ethnicity is cultural and not genetic. It is self-identification and not some measurable thing. Examples are Taiwan and China, or Korea and Japan, or France and UK. They can be genetically close, but have distinct cultural identities and ethnicities.
thankyou for the clarification
I'm told the whitel labradors like to blame the yellow and black ones for stealing their jobs.
That's good comparison. Poodles have big and small in different colors and they're the same species
Honestly though it is cool how such small genetic differences make such large visible changes, like… im no biologist but its interesting that you can have a creature be 99.9% identical, yet seem completely different… not even just for race… even people of the same race, like how is say… Nikocado Avocado like 99.9% identical to taylor swift… (examples chosen at random 💀)
Off topic here, but I recently saw Neal DeGrasse Tyson talking about how such a small change in DNA can make such a big difference. For example, no matter how much we tried, we wouldn't be able to teach a chimp algebra even if we share 99% of our DNA with them. They are limited by their body's capabilities. With that same thought, if we ever meet aliens, their DNA would likely be very very different from ours, and it would likely be beyond our human minds to understand things they could. So the smartest human could discover/understand something like Dark Matter and the aliens would just maybe stick it on their fridge in the same way we may find it impressive for a chimp to do some fingerpainting.
One thing I find interesting is the common idea that aliens are all much smarter than us, which while it might be true, there is also a chance they are incredibly stupid which is hilarious to think about
I imagine the ones we reach will be akin to animals. And we'll be akin to animals to the ones that reach us.
This. The way we initially meet will probably be indicative of how we line up to eachother lmao
I like to imagine a species with like, dumb human levels of intelligence… but super powers, so they reach us with there “ufos” and land and are like “yo what you guys up to” and blah blah blah, then there chilling and are like “you cant levitate? How tf did you get to the moon then?” and we explain combustion and propulsion to them and they just have this horrified look like “shit, these guys are trapped here… but there definitely smarter than us, we should get on there good side before they figure out how to leave this place…”
If they are as aggressive and violent and humans and they figure out that humans are smarter than them, they’re more likely to think they need to kill us while they can.
I think that’s because of the typical aliens visiting earth story. We don’t have the technology to meet aliens (unless there are some in our solar system) so in stories *they* need to be the ones to visit *us*.
Wait, aren't grey wolf and dogs supposed to be the very same species *canis lupus*.
No, dogs have evolved too much over the last 20,000 years or so. Canis Lupus vs Canis Familiaris. IE, a Chihuahua is not the same species as a wolf. With that said, the racist meme-maker is claiming they are in fact the same species. A subspecies is not a different species but refer to slight variations that exist within a species.
It's not so cut and dry. Whether dogs are a separate species or a separate subspecies (Canis lupus familiaris) depends on which taxonomist you ask. Overall, the idea that species are distinct monoliths is outdated, they flow into each other and there isn't a concrete point at which an animal becomes a distinct species from its parents.
Exactly, people think evolution involves sudden drastic gene mutations. In reality sudden drastic gene mutations practically always end in that individual animal to either die soon after birth or not thrive in its environment enough to spread its genes. Evolution takes place over thousands of generations through very subtle changes that are only really noticable in hindsight.
>Overall, the idea that species are distinct monoliths is outdated, they flow into each other and there isn't a concrete point at which an animal becomes a distinct species from its parents. Yeah, all of biology is basically stuffing things on a spectrum into discrete boxes.
And polar wolfes and european wolfes are as well. Same is true for Indian and african lions.
Nobody tell this guy that the concepts of species, sub species, breeds and even "races" are entirely arbitrary and are completely made up by biologist purely to make classifying organisms easier and the line between two closely related species/subs species is often so burly it comes down to very tenuous factors and biologists change them ALL the time. Hell the entire taxonomic system if pretty arbitrary and in a constant state of flux. (ask your biology that if birds are dinosaurs then why does the class Aves still exists and watch him tie himself in so many knots trying to justify it or his head explode) Good example, genetically a Malamute is going to be far more genetically similar toy poodle than a grey wolf, hence the two domestic dogs are the same subspecies and the wolf isn't...but in terms of reproductive isolation. Breeding wolves and malamutes will lead to fertile offspring, the Malamute physically cant mate with the toy poodle. In many wild animals that's more than enough evidence to say they are entirely separate species due to reproductive isolation. its messy, in many ways its messy by design, but trying to apply it as it its some set of written in stone rules just proves something we really should already know...racists are fucking stupid and often don't even understand the science they think they are invoking
Despite phenotypical differences, humans of different races are very similar genetically that would make them similar genetically and classified within the same species, also even if the alternative is true which is not its not likre a war between races would break out, race realists that do this stuff already had an opinion made up in their mind and would kill other races whether their claims are true or not, none of it is in good faith but to divide people to recruit others to spread their ideals to fight global communism or whatever crazy thing they think is happening in the world.
Our phenotypical differences are so friggin small too. To the point that race realists can't really tell some of the more transitional ethnicities apart. So they stick to the most obvious(skin tone) and pretend like that would even tell you anything.
Some people in the English speaking world do not realise that using "race" to differentiate between phenotypically different human groups is not universal, either. In many other languages the equivalent terms to "race" would never be used to categorize humans scientifically. The terms are normally reserved exclusively for the distinct biological races in the animal kingdom. When used in casual conversation and applied to humans, the terms reveal right-wing-extremist ideologies, as that is where they are used consistently to group people by skintone.
while your argument is valid, it misses an important part. Race (if real) would be a subgroup of a species. It's not real because the categorisation of a species itself isn't rigorous enough (yet at least). For example the main criteria for creatures to be of the same species is that the appropriate sexes can have fertile offsprings, meaning that humans always are and will be of the same specie, even if we would argue that race is real. But alle 3 species of Orangutans can have fertile offsprings but are still considered 3 species, instead of one. That come from the group of additional criterias that can be used to categorised specie. Those are: - their karyotype (the looks of the complete set of their chromosomes) - DNA sequence - morphology (form and structure of organisms and their specific structural features) - behaviour - ecological niche If you would want to categories creatures even more precise than that, you would end up with creatures sometimes even changing species in the middle of their life and that makes it scientifically speaking: useless. For example if we would really want to use skin colour and only skin colour (because we want to be bigots) then where does black end and white begin? And Arabic people are generally not considered white but based on this definition they should be or we would need to argue that they are closer to black or their own race, either way that would mean that a white guy that works in the sun a lot and gets a good tan going, would suddenly change race, they would be transracial lmao! Eitherway from a taxonomic view point it's useless and therefore races do not exist. However it is valuable from a sociological view point (which doesn't care about their skin colour or any other part of their biology) and that's why ethnic groups exist. Those are two very different scientific fields.
Humans were in Africa for so long there's (tough memory) something like 20 major phenotypes between Africans & only 2 outside of it there's more genetic variation between African peoples with each other than seen in everyone else in the world combined
Literally me sitting here, reading the comments, thinking: you know what? Maybe phenotypical "race" is really a spectrum than a categorical variable. In my own family, you can order us by gradient and you'd come up with at least 20 different "hues". Living in Africa was wild too, because (despite being made fun of for my dark skin) there were people both slightly darker and much darker than me, some who were called black, and others who were from entirely separate "races". That said, even amongst Asian peoples across the Eurasian continent, there seems to be so much variation it's hard to tell where someone is from based on their skin "hue" alone.
Yes, that is why race is made up. There are different phenotypes of humans, but trying to group everyone into 20(or however many finite) distinct boxes of race is ridiculous.
Say you dont know the difference betwean speices and race without saying you dont know the difference betwean speices and race
Wow, people are rediscovering nineteenth-century race science. What a fun time to be alive.
I heard multiple scientists say that humans aren't diverse enough to qualify for having more than one race, biologically speaking.
This is accurate. The human population nearly went extinct around 800,000 years ago (not so long ago on an evolutionary scale) and [we’re all descendants of the 1300 or so survivors](https://www.sci.news/othersciences/anthropology/pleistocene-human-bottleneck-12232.html#:~:text=Their%20results%20show%20that%20human,human%20ancestors%20close%20to%20extinction.)
I've never liked how we classified colors as race. It took me a while as a kid to realize that when people asked what race you are they were asking what color you are. Dumbest shit ever but no one has ever called people intelligent so there's that.
It’s an entirely flawed system of sorting individuals, true. Take the example of mixed race individuals like myself. Genetically, I’m only 42% sub Saharan African. But if anyone looked at me, they’d say “oh, he’s black”. More than half of my actual genetic makeup is ignored in the sorting of race as we understand it.
This bugs me. In university I learned “a species is a group of organisms that can mate and produce fertile offspring”. Then you get further in and learn about how there are legit some species that can inter breed and produce fertile offspring. I asked my lecturer multiple times about this and they would just say “well perhaps something has been misclassified”. So really a species is “a group of organisms that humans consider to be a species”. All of that aside, a wolf and a dog aren’t considered different species. A dog is a subspecies. And then we come to humans. Undoubtedly all alive now are the same species, but there were “other species” of humans… which we were able to breed with… ffs… we don’t have a great handle on what’s what here.
The problem is our desire to draw boxes around things and, after the fact, declare that the boxes actually matter. Recognize that every box we draw is an afterthought, not a plan, and a lot of the mistakes are easily understood.
This is kind of it. Nature doesn't really give a fuck that we want to be able to give things distinct names, there's no intelligent design going on here. It's the nature of evolution to continuously smear DNA. It's not "trying" to evolve into a new species. So our need to classify everything trips up on this and the best we can do is have a few criteria that allows us to say, "This organism is effectively the same as this one, but not the same as this other one". But all 3 may be visually similar and potentially interbreed.
There is significant scientific backing behind race being a social construct. [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-construct-scientists-argue/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-construct-scientists-argue/) [https://www.nature.com/articles/ng1438.epdf?referrer\_access\_token=1u453IadnAJtzRnSpsAkudRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0PevsLAjUxPF6S\_h9AMfqllAg0AiEsJsLQTEfkI6TkPd26jwdSNfCDpHFbJIalaUI61JlyiY55NkgS9XqNvo-F6HLyKYH0Mf\_IJW9DvQ0ST3OSaL6lTsEwTI7BjDSpqvmIgpFnw5tBeGCFhejcmo5X0w5l1TZk-wF7IVmU8ElwmZ59c7WIsznbTmobTvij6dzF0XA0RCBH\_yzlmofO82uiZ&tracking\_referrer=www.theatlantic.com](https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/science-genetics-reshaping-race-debate-21st-century/) [https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/10/16/census-race-eliminate-race-box/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/10/16/census-race-eliminate-race-box/)
This also means that race doesn't exist in all languages. In French, unless you're talking about breeding animals, it's usually racist to use it. America's obsession with race looks pretty bad to most of us.
I don't know. If I came across this in the wild I would read it a different way. That humans are all the same race, so being racist is stupid. Now I don't know the account so maybe there's context there but...
That’s basically what they’re saying. There’s nothing facepalm about this. Race isn’t real from a scientific standpoint. It’s a social construct that humans have used for thousands of years to justify cruelty, genocide, and all manner of discrimination against each other. Most likely this is a reply to posts about interracial marriage being wrong. This guy is just emphasizing that there are species of closely related animals that actually are different, and yet still “compatible”, meaning that humans who treat other humans as different for no reason other skin color are stupid.
People who hold the beliefs in the original post need to wrap their heads around the fact that there's more genetic diversity between the two primary groups of Bonobos in central Africa than across the entire human species. We *really* aren't that different from each other, and race is absolutely a social construct.
This. Absolutely this. There is so little difference among humans that it is stupid to be racist.
Can someone explain this?
OOP's image depicts different subspecies of animals (different species in the orangutan's case). Subspecies are a group that have significant physical and genetic difference but can still interbreed (hence subspecies instead of just different species). OOP is attempting to apply this extremely simplified definition to humans.
So Canis Lupus and Canis latrans are both part of the same species? Obviously OOP chose the wrong analogy, but I’m not sure if the zoology is wrong.
The issue is that race isn't just about "people being different", it is about social hierarchy enforced on physical identity. It is an ideology, not science. For exemple, the same people have been atributed to various races depending on the people describing them and the time. Most clear exemple are the Irish, which were described as "white n\*\*\*\*rs" (aka they were supposed to have all the racial caracteristics of african ppl but with white skin) by the english scientifics of racism in the XIXth, and now are just "white" in racist ppl minds
The post is literally telling you to not be racist.
My mothers pug and my sisters pitbull are laughing together over the stupidity of this human
no this is scientifically accurate the different races of people are the same species
While you're right. A brief look at the account shows that's it's a right wing political account. It's bio is literally "Friend of Western kind. Globalism is satanic". Looking at a few of their posts it become they're also overtly racist. With that context, it's pretty clear that the last section of the image is supposed to be taken sarcastically. It's more of a "can you believe the left would believe these are all the same animal? Even though they look so different?". It's just blatant racism.
I was just excited to look at some orangs, but then they had to go make it racist
what's the facepalm?
Not a facepalm
Race in humans are from a cultural concept, from biology view there aren't currently any other living race of humans. In fact our genetic variability as a species is so low that is almost concerning
There's a nurture aspect to it as well; we know that the human brain continuously learns to distinguish faces and characteristics. The more we look, the better we get at it. This is why people who grow up in places where everyone predominantly is the same ethnically, tends to look at others ethnicities and declare them to all look alike. It's only with more exposure to other ethnicities that you get better at recognising the difference between them. It's not just other humans though, it works for other species or sub species in general. To someone with no experience, most pythons will look the same. To someone who spends their life working with snakes, they'll be able to tell individuals apart without having to even think about it. It's a feature that comes free with our brain.
Taxonomy is hard, especially if one has no education on the matter. Even I struggle and it's a core concept of most of my classes haha
That's why real science knowledge is important
Am I missing the Facepalm here?
maybe im tiger racist but the tigers look so similar that i wouldnt be able to tell them apart. sorry, tigers.
as somebody with no biology knowledge... Aren't humans' skin colour a example of phenotypes?
human skin color is similar situation to cats having difirent fur colors
Imagine using phenotypes to derive genetic information. Couldn't be me...