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Should We Just Call Dog Breeds a Different Species?
Jamie found an amusing bit this morning on Scientific American where the author proposes that dog breeds are different species. Now some of you might recoil when you hear this suggestion, but if you read the article to see why he makes this suggestion I suspect you'll crack a smile and appreciate the elegance of the solution.
You know what's funny? Dogs know dogs. They can be big, small, tall, round, thin, with or without tails, brown, red, white, spotted, yellow, shaggy, short haired, long legged, squat, etc, etc, etc. There is a massive amount of variation on display within the dog family.
But despite it all, dogs know dogs. Upon seeing another, they'll wag their tails or bark for a rotweiller the same as they would for a terrier. They'll all roam about in their little packs, somehow instinctively knowing they they naturally should.
And yet, if I have a man with different skin colour, or even simply different clothing, other men will consider his life worth less than even the smallest dog.
Makes you think.
May the Maths Be with you!
Humorous take fails to be humorous.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
between race and species was species can't interbreed and produce viable offspring. So while small dogs and large dogs may be able to be divided, the line gets a lot fuzzier after that. So many years of cross breeding and inbreeding I don't think you can separate them beyond that.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
1) Creationists claim the science doesn't provide thorough enough proof of evolution
2) Evolutionary biologists should fudge their results to re-define something as being proof
3) ???
4) Profit
Something makes me think this scheme would just give creationists a big stick labelled "evolutionists fudge their results; it's all a load of cobblers" to beat the biologists with.
Just remember if you argue that dog breeds are different species, especially the case of the mastiff and chihuahua, or the teacup yorkie and newfoundland, these different species are verifiably the result of intelligent design. Selection was involved, but not natural selection.
Biologists already define a separate species as when two individuals cannot mate, be it due to genetics or mechanical or behavioural difficulties. The problem with dog breeds is that a Chihuahua can mate with a terrier, and a terrier can mate with a gun dog, and a gun dog can mate with the largest of dogs. Where would the author draw the line between species? There are a lot of cases like this in nature, and it is basically an arbitrary decision as to whether speciation has occurred. The whole premise of this article is essentially flawed, as it suggests that biologists have not already thought about these difficulties, when in fact this is basic pre-university biology.
I just knew this article would include some comparison of Chihuahuas to some breed of large dog (in this case, Mastiffs). So I'm going to go ahead and make a similar comparison of a 600-pound caucasian female to a 110-pound asian male. The male may have just as much trouble with the process as does the Chihuahua, but we'll still call the result be a human. Similarly, we'll call the spawn of a Chihuahua and a Mastiff a dog. Because it looks like a dog and it barks.
Whenever someone tells me they have a dog, I ask them what make it is. Try it, the reaction is brilliant.
Summation 2
It Makes sense, there just defending their spices! So Barking is just Alien language, they're communicating their plans for world Domination with each other!
The spice must flow?
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
Their plans for a world Dalmatian? This sounds pretty serious...
sounds rather spotty ...
Back in the 1800s there was this idea that all living things could be grouped into a neat, consistent classification system. As it turns out, reality isn't tidily organized like a giant clock.
Canis lupis is just a remarkably diverse species. Calling chihuahuas and wolves a different species is like calling Gary Coleman and Bao Xishun a different species. That is, completely ridiculous.
Arguing over where the line is between species is pretty dumb anyway. Nature is not divided into nice neat categories like that.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
When we observe Ring Species we are clearly catching mother nature red-handed in the act of speciation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species
These things are freaky:
A--B--C--D--E--F--G--A
Members of a ring species can interbreed with their immediate neighbors, but not with distant neighbors halfway around the ring. (So in my diagrom, A can interbreed with B and G, but not C, D, E, or F. Sometimes the ring develops a break, and becomes a line:
A--B--C--D--E--F--G
Then to have a speciation event, all you need is another break in the line:
A--B--C
E--F--G
There are ring species comprised of small creatures who only live in a small range of elevation around the side of a mountain, so their habitat literally looks like a small ring. Two well timed avalanches could be enough.
Definite proof that cats are better than dogs.
How many cats lead blind people?
How many cats rescue injured people?
Why is it rejecting a socially progressive idea is called "recoiling" while rejecting a socially conservative idea is referred to as a "knee jerk reaction"?
The author mentions that the varying dog breeds would be thought of as separate species if found in the fossil record, and that's probably true. There are paleontologists who argue about whether a certain small T. Rex fossil is a dwarf species or a juvenile. The hairs to be split can be quite thin.
Given that, would the morphological differences between human populations constitute splitting Home Sapiens into separate species? I think not.
The only thing this proposal will do is give the creationist/ID idiots another straw man argument: "scientists change things to justify their point of view!" The truth is, those morons are going to cling to their dogma not matter how much evidence piles up against it. We've seen it before: the Earth is flat; the Sun revolves around the Earth; Earth is 6000 years old; et cetera.
Speciation is such a slow process that we can only see it in the simplest of organisms, such as algae or bacteria. But that's not good enough for them. They apparently want to see two chimps mate and produce a human (which is absurd), and proves that they refuse to understand the subject matter.
Perhaps serious scientists should stick with doing science, rather than refuting creationists and others with ideological agendas to push. Cause when you feed the trolls, the word gets around and you draw larger and larger numbers to be fed. Or in other words, one gets the impression that the refuters have an agenda of their own to push. Like the fine article, when one gets around to reading it, leaves behind.
I suppose you could build some sort of multi-feline interferometer, and interpret the varying frequency of their mewing according to their individual proximity to objects.
Assuming you're reasonably confident not to be bumping into the ceiling or falling down holes, "how many cats can lead blind people" would be 3. 2 would lead to blind spots, 4 or more would provide redundant overlap.
How much longer before a chihuahua can't breed with *any* other dog currently listed as the same species? Won't it happen eventually?
Domestic turkeys can't breed without human intervention - but they CAN breed with the help of humans, same as chihuahuas can (and have) been bred with large dogs when given a "helping hand" or "a leg up".
There's no such thing as a "pure-bred dog" - every single so-called "pure breed" is a mutt. The kennel clubs perpetuate the myth of "pure blood lines" because there's $$$ and ego in doing so. It's not like you can't get a phony "pure-bred" registration for a dog - as an experiment, people even registered CATS as "pure-bred dogs." Time magazine published an expose on this a couple of decades ago - your "breeding papers" would be better used to toilet-train the puppy than as any sort of guarantee of anything. And no, nothing has changed in the intervening years ... it's still a crock of horse manure that promotes cruelty to animals, puppy mills, reinforcement of bad genes, etc.
That's a bad bad idea.
Everyone knows cats are covertly taking over the world. It's just a matter of time before they all get the signal, and the humans are either enslaved or killed.
Sure, use 3 cats to guide a blind person. When the day comes, they'll lead him in front of a bus. When the bus stops because they just hit him, they'll kill all the occupants too. How else do you expect a cat to make a bus stop? :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I think you do not understand who is the "pet" in a human - cat relationship.
I think that's a great analogy.
Atheism is a religion to the same extent that not collecting stamps is a hobby.
The point of the article is that for purely mechanical reasons big dogs can't interbreed with small dogs. From the definition of species - i.e. able to interbreed and produce fertile offspring they are a different species.
But the sperm from one could fertilize the eggs of another. The fact that the mechanics don't work out is like claiming that neutering your pet makes it a new species.
Of course this guy is just poking fun at creationists, but mislabelling dogs as species would really help. For that matter it wouldn't help if they really were separate species.
1) Dog breeds may be a recent thing but nobody say them evolve either - it happended over a time longer than a human lifetime. If you're of a mind to deny these things then "I didn't see it with my own eyes" argument applies just as well here. Maybe God created Chihuahas and Great Danes. I slighty smarter creationist might complain that the selection pressure on most breeds was artificial.
2) Much more to the point, there are genuine species all around us at every conceivable stage of speciation. Heading towards branching, during branching, immediately after branching, long after branching, etc.
The best answer to a creationist who says "if it's true, why don't we see it?" is to ask "what is it you'd expect to see that isn't in fact all around you right now?!!". Anyone expecting to see Tigers bifuracte into furbys and unicorns in their own lifetime isn't worth trying to argue with, but anyone who realizes the timescale of evolution should realize that's not the case. The length of a human lifetime is so ridiculously short compared to the evolutionary timescales that we're essentially looking at snapshot of a movie.
Think of it this way: earth is 4.5 x 10^9 years old. If you had a feature length 2 hr movie of the whole of earth's history shot at 60 frames per second, then the movie would have 432,000 frames, and each frame would still encompass over 10,000 years of history! (4.5 billion / 432,000). And yet these creationists are expecting to see a whole movie playing in their 100 year lifetime...
So, realizing that our brief lifetime has doomed us to only be observing a snapshot of anything happening on an evolutionary timescale, the real question isn't why arn't we seeing it happen (trivial answer: your lifetime is too short, but rather if this is the movie of evolution we're caught in a still frame of, then what would you expect to see in this still frame? The answer of course is that you'd expect to see species caught at every stage of branching/speciation, which is exactly what we do see.
1) Species accumulating genetic change, living in subpolulations, apparently heading for branching: too many to list, but including things like forest/plains elephants, dogs(!), humans (assuming the races don't in the future start interbreeding indiscriminately). Even things like lions/tigers can still interbreed so (whatever arbitrary labels you want to slap on them) are really pre-branch rather than post-branch, even if we understand the amount of interbreeding in the wild to be close to zero (although it does occur).
2) Species that are essentially at the point of branching right now. A classic example might be horses/donkeys, which can still kind of interbreed, but not quite (their offspring, a mule, is sterile). Given that branching is more of a process than event (it's something that happens to populations, not individuals) there are many more less spectacular examples - I'd probably include some of those (technically) pre-brancing examples in this class.
3) Species that are post-branch (can no longer interbreed, but are still genetically very close) : any species withing the same biological genus, familiy, etc. One's that branched more long ago are more genetically different corresponding to biological order, class, etc. For a specific example, how about oursellves and chimps still with 98% shared DNA and only a few million years after having branched from a common ancestor.
So the still frame we're living in sure fits the bill - we see everying around us that we'd expect to see if species are created by branching from each other. OTOH if the creationists are right, and species are created by God then the number of species that exist along every conceivable degree of genetic difference (as opposed to isolated individual creations) is rather embarassing!
Of course these discussions are endl
Excellent comment. To dogs, smell is very important.
The article is an example of the pseudo-science to which Slashdot editors often link. Those who play video games when they could be learning about the world cause themselves to live in ignorance.
The article says, "... the only shot a male Chihuahua has with a female Mastiff involves..."
The male Chihuahua would like to mate with the female Mastiff, but the female won't let him. Only that. The female will show that she recognizes that the Chihuahua is a dog. She just doesn't want to mate with him. They easily recognize that they are the same species. It's only the author who wrote the article to which Slashdot linked, and the Slashdot editor, who don't realize that.
TFA is laughably naÃve. They should be a different species? Oh, if only species were so cut and dry. People talk about species as if we're talking about the same thing, but the `distance` between polar bears and brown bears - considered different species - isn't as great as that between Reindeer and Caribou - considered the same species.
The dirty little secret of biology - and I'm going to get kicked out of the biologist club for this - is that we've got no ****ing clue what a species is. Oh, sure, we go around naming them all the time, but we don't actually know what we're doing yet. One list counts up to 23 different way to recognize species (known as species concepts). Some of these are mutually exclusive! The author seems to like the Reproductive isolation species concept. But under that concept, the mallard on the east coast is a different species from the mallard on the west coast. But when does the mallard cease to be east and west? What about all those ducks in between? While there's no doubt that the east coast and west coast are functionally isolated, the point at which that ceases to be is very hazy.
What about montane species? I'm thinking of Dall sheep, in particular. Geneflow (interbreeding) between sheep of non-ajoining mountain ranges is incredibly low, effectively zero. But I don't know anyone who'd make the argument that they're separate species.
So then maybe the author wants to argue that they're separate morphotypes, and should be species on that account. What about isopods, where they have a greater diversity of form within species. Let's face it, every dog looks vaguely dog-ish. The same can't be said for some isopods, or species of insects!
The truth is what is, and isn't, a species is currently nebulous, fuzzy, and wishy-washy. It may be that species, as an idea, don't exist. That wouldn't surprise me.
The definitions and frameworks we draw in science should not be based on utility in political struggles outside the scope of science. It is fine to struggle against those who are ignorant of and activist against science, but we should consider that a separate activity from the practice of science.
We don't want the process of science to be even slightly defined as an opposition to some movement - allowing ourselves that would be to weaken what science-as-an-institution is trying to do.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.