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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."
So I wonder which species we would need to interbreed with to produced civilized human beings as offspring?
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In layman's terms...
The study demonstrates that two animal species can evolve to form one, instead of the more common scenario where one species diverges to form two.
I once read an article about the possibilities of engineering butterfly wing patterns to produce, lets say, a well known brand logo. So you could have swarms of live "nike", "samsung" banners fluttering all over your garden.
Guess this means we are one step closer to such reality. this is so Dystopian.
How long will it take for this to be dragged into the Intelligent Design community as "proof" that "Darwinism" is wrong for some reason?
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Cane Toads?
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.
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because we can now call it a "super-butterfly". It has all of the traits of the other butterflies, including super-strength, "butterfly-sense", and agility. Eventually
Think of the poor bastard superhero who is created by getting bit by this "super-butterfly" and has to live out his days with the secret identity of BUTTERFLY-MAN!!!
So what new and exciting effects will we get when these fancy new butterflies flap their wings?
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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.
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Let me guess, one wing is red, one blue, one green, and one yellow, and each wing has a tiny spot that looks strangely like the letters "m" and "s"
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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.
It isn't misleading at all. Discussions about the difficulty in defining species has been going on for some time now, very publically. You can't use the term variety because you aren't dealing with simple varieties. You are dealing with separate and distinct populations that can and only interbreed under some very artificial and rare circumstances, and then not always reliably. Furthermore, you're dealing with things that have been classed as species since before evolutionary biology even existed.
There are attempts being made to create new terminology: look at cladistics (which basically just uses numbers instead of names). But getting everyone to adopt the same system isn't easy: not because of some grand conspiracy, but simply because of habit, difference of opinion on the right way to do it, and so forth.
But what "pretense" are you suggesting anyone is trying to maintain by calling a new type of butterfly (that doesn't interbreed with other parent species) a species? What's wrong or misleading about it?
I find it interesting that H. cydno and H. melpomene would mate, yet neither would mate with H. heurippa.
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