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Hobbit Is A New Species
Migraineman writes "Over the last year or so, archaeologists in Indonesia unearthed skulls and bones from eight proto-humanoids. Critics have claimed the meter-tall specimens were either pygmies or "aberrant individuals with a pathological condition" like microcephaly. A recent article in Science[subscription] rebuffs the critics, and claims that the specimens are actually a new species - Homo floresiensis. There's a summary article over at Nature."
But did they find the ring?
Be better in bed. Wikiafterdark!
The whole idea of a missing link is a sham. It's a straw man put up by creationists. Because of the way evolution works you won't ever find a completely smooth transition from one form to another, you observe a puntuated equilibrium in the fossil record.
for those interested there's also an article about homo florensis at Bits of News
Bits of News Giving you the latest bits.
Thank you for actually referencing primary sources, and not some university or coporate PR generated press release!
While apparently the movie is bad, I thought the book this is based on is very interesting. The author's name is Vercors (French) and the book (in English translation) is called You Shall Know Them. I read it in Russian, in a collection of best French SciFi.
Anthropologists discover "a missing link" (still living, unlike our hobbits), and that forces them to try to look into the question of whether they are human or not (do they have human rights?). It forces them to try defining what makes a human being. This involves a court case (which is what most of the book is about). Overall, it has little to do with SciFi, and a lot
with philosophy. Which is probably why the movie sucked.
According to synthetic theory of evolution (neodarwinism), the key to defining a biological species is that there is no significant cross-flow of genetic material between the two populations of animals (there are very different problems with the plants).
:).
Interbreeding isn't an issue: just think about dogs and wolves. Their offspring is still fertile. But in nature, wolves and dogs have sex not very often
Maths has the "Butterfly Effect" and irrational numbers.
<mathematical_pedantry>
A rational number is a *ratio* of two integers. An irrational number isn't.
</mathematical_pedantry>
Rational and Irrational are not some play on words of "ratio", they are literally how the ancient Greek mathematicians saw such numbers, with respect to their mathematical religion. (The Cult of Pythagoras actually had the square root of two banned, because it was provably not a ratio.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"The notion of a hybrid species is nonsensical. Individuals are hybrids, not entire species. Individuals descend directly from individuals, and are thus always hybrids of those individuals, at least in sexual reproduction. Species don't descend from sexual pairing of other species. Species are merely groups of individuals that are similar enough to successfully breed."
Close but no cigar.
First off the notion of what a species is, that I have read here, is not quite right. It's not as simple as "things that will interbreed".
There are species whose populations (races, klines, what have you) will not interbreed and there are different species that will interbreed.
See _Rivulins of the Old World_, Col JJ Scheel, 1968, TFH press 1968 for all sorts of neat examples of these.
"But wait!" I hear you say, "if they interbreed then they're the same species". Well, no, that's not what a species is.
The concept of species is an artificial one invented by man to make some sense of flora and fauna. He wants to pidgeon-hole them, classify them in a taxonomy (not an ontology!) so they make sense to him. But it's pretty arbitrary.
What a species is, is what the guy who knows most about them say they are. Whacked, I know, but that's the way it works.
We look for all sort of things, merisitcs, phylogony, geography, karyotype differences, DNA analysis so on and so forth, then we make an judgement call about where one species ends and where another begins. And, keep in mind, this changes over time. Animals and plants change, sometimes in as little as 5 years (Romand, Raymond, pers. commms, viz Roloffia geryi).
Plus opinions vary. Some are "spltters" who will divide populations of a currently accepted "species" into a bunch of new species and "lumpers" will do the opposite. Some poor critters vascillate back and forth decade after decade based on who published last. The ICZN acts as the scorekeeper for animals (plants have an equivalent). They make sure the rules get followed but other than that don't referee as to what's what.
Now why is there so much difference of opinion on the way these taxa are viewed? Becuase there's no right answer of course. It's all how we look at things and how we choose to classify them and in the end consensus wins and inevitably there are those who disagree. And probably always will be.
As for species that are hybrid species I can't think of an animal off the top of my head but I can offer up Cryptocoryne x willisii as an example of a hybrid "species" (there are others). It's a cross of two known plants and we're reluctant to give it species status because it's so obvioulsy a hybrid - but it's common as dirt, grows like made and one way of looking at it is that it is a species. If I write it up as such... then it is! But we're content to view it as the way we do.
Don't get me started on sub-species, that's even more messed up as the delineation between "populations" and "subspecies" is that well agreed on by scientists. I like Bill Eschemeyers example: Atlantic and Pacific salmon are subspcies of the same fish - there's a natural geographic break. If they they were separated by only a few miles or tens of miles then they're populations, not subspecies.
Need Mercedes parts ?