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Successful Merger of Butterfly Species
Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) have recreated a real butterfly in the lab by crossing two other species of butterflies. This phenomenon, which is quite rare, is known as hybrid speciation. What is more surprising is that the hybrid butterfly has been created in just three generations of lab crosses. And BBC News tells us that the new butterfly species is a viable one, with its specific wing patterns which "make them undesirable as mates for members of their parent species." In fact, this hybridization, which occurred without any changes to the chromosome number, could mean that it is an important factor in the origin of new animal species. Read more for many additional references and a comparison of wing patterns between hybrids and wild butterflies."
You're reading that wrong.
The article is saying that they made Species C from A and B, and that A wouldn't want to mate with C, and B wouldn't either, but C's might mate with C's.
You can't possibly breed a "civilized" anything. A human baby today raised outside of civilization will not only fail to understand civilization, but will never be *able* to understand it once past a certain age. Certain parts of the brain don't develop in the necessary ways if they aren't stimulated early enough, like full language ability.
That all goes back to "nature vs nurture" arguments.
How viable are they as a species if they are unable to find partners for mating?
They mean 'viable' in the sense that they can breed and are not sterile, like many hybrid animals (think donkeys) are. The wing patterns are probably mentioned because presumably these butterflies will breed with their own in the wild, building up a population of the species without merging with the parent species by interbreeding back with them until they are indistinguishable.
The problem is that species is really only a very vaguely useful term. The line between "will not/cannot" breed with each other (and usually "in the wild" is added to this) is very very fuzzy, and there are many stages of compatibility in between, from sterile offspring, to rarely viable offspring, to rarely fertile offspring, and so on. Often species that will not breed in the wild under normal conditions will if conditions (or light levels, for instance) change.
"The butterflies COULD breed with each other, the scientists just don't think they will try."
As i noted, not reproducing without human intervention IS a barrier for defining speciation. That's why spinner dolphins and false killer whales are considered different species, even though wolphins exist in captivity. Chiclids, for instance, will only mate with certain colored fellow chiclids, but if you alter the light conditions so that they cannot make out the distinctions, then they will mate.
And so on.
One thing that I often find strange is that given the wide wide range of diversity amongst animals that are all of the same species (say, domestic dogs), people find it so hard to believe that speciation can happen, especially given that many genetically incompatible species are far far more similar to each other than dogs are morphologically. Two populations becoming genetically incompatible is really not much different from how they become visually different: it's just that the genetic changes in question happen to be working on more core reproductive elements rather than outward looks.
They can't/won't mate to produce viable offspring with their parent species (the species that were mixed to create the new one). But they WILL mate with their own species. Thus the signifier of a new species: that is, they can't/won't mate outside of their own species.
~ Anders
one common mistake is that people use darwins[sic] theories to say evolution is correct, but all his theories say is that if you survive better then something else, then you become dominant.
Have you read Darwin's work? He postulates a number of things. One is that animals that survive better breed more. One is that hereditary traits make an animal more or less likely to survive. He postulates specifically that species subjected to a specific stress will adapt based upon these two mechanisms. He calls this, "evolution."
darwins[sic] theories were not tested with wide mutated genetic variables, all of his theories were done with regular genetic variation.
Darwin did not do any real testing, only observation and hypothesis. Others tested his theories via a wide range of mechanisms, from predictions about the fossil record to direct induction of large amounts of mutagens and specific stresses. I''m not sure what you mean by "regular genetic variation" as applied to this particular subject. What Darwin did not theorize about (in his popular written works), but which is often erroneously attributed to him is a theory of the origin of life. Maybe you're thinking of Lavorkian, who proposed evolution based not upon heredity, but upon changes in a creature within its lifespan?
Lemarkian, from Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Um? Just because you were taught a definition of "species" in school doesn't mean that's the actual definition.
There a serious difficulties with the "interbreeding makes viable, reproduction-capable offspring" one. One is that it isn't binary. There is an entire range over "no descendants", "sterile descendants", "high miscarriage rate but some nonsterile descendants", and a dozen other variations. If the result of a crossbreeding is 90% of the time spontaneous abortion, but 10% of the time a fertile animal? What about crosbreeds being technically viable and nonsterile, but so sickly they can't survive outside of lab conditions? There are, as pointed out elsewhere, cases where populations A and C can both interbreed viably with B, but not with each other; how does one classify them?
Further, it provides no guidance whatsoever in the case of organisms with non-sexual reproduction, because the test can't even be applied. So at best, the sexual reproduction definition of species cannot provide guidance for classification for over 90% of the biomass of Earth. If there was a perfectly clear and sensible definition of species for asexual reproducers, and applied to sexual reproducers it sometimes divided sexual reproducers into different species and other times groups non-crossable animals into a single species, shouldn't we go with it anyway because it gives us a general rule instead of a bunch of special cases that apply to only a tiny minority of organisms on Earth?
There is, as it happens, no actual consensus in the biosciences on the definitions of any of the cladistic terms, merely a general rough working agreement with ten thousand disputed cases. You can't violate the definition of species, because there isn't one.
It was an unusual technique. The female hybrids were sterile; the males could interbreed with one of the parent species. After multiple crosses, the resulting hybrids of both genders were fertile, and preferred to interbreed rather than cross-breed with the original parent species. Link here.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.