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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 5178606" data-attributes="member: 4720">True.  But felines and hominids are a rather different ballgame.Hominids will mate with a rock if it's shaped roughly the right way.  So will lots of other primates.Not remotely true.  Many types of plants do all kinds of ridiculous genetic mumbo jumbo.  In some cases, you might call it genetic gumbo.  But they're amateurs.  Multiploidy is a kid's game.  Bacteria, on the other hand, are masters.  They habitually trade genes between two cells that have almost no similarities at all besides their choice of habitat.  Oomycetes and fungi are a minefield.  They're playing every shell game and con you can imagine with their genes and chromosomes, not to mention their morphology and life cycles.  As soon as genetic testing became available, we found out that we had no idea what the heck we were talking about with most of them.  Same genetic species with multiple different morphologies.  Identical morphologies with entirely different genomes.  Interbreeding, gene transfer, and half a dozen other oddities taking place under our noses every day.But who would know?  Some scientists are still debating whether we need 7 or 8 Kingdoms of Life to account for everything we've learned, but most schools are still teaching 5 or less.  I've bumped into high schools that are teaching four.  I don't think that was ever an accepted breakdown in the scientific community, but apparently someone printed some text books that way at some point.Animals stay apart long enough to develop a different color of fur, and they might choose to shun each other for mating, even though they are completely viable together.  Some plants/fungi/etc stay apart for millions of years and mate the instant they are brought back together.... even though in the intervening eons they've developed typical physical characteristics that look nothing at all like each other during at least one phase of their life cycle.  Spores and pollen simply don't tend to be picky based on something as superficial as color.I was being somewhat facetious with the "conspiracy" stuff.  It comes down more to laziness than anything like that.  But... the fact that multiple intelligent men in this very thread have no idea how our species concept is full of holes and fallacies shows that we're really not getting our education on.It really, really doesn't hold for anything that isn't an animal.  Exceptions to the species concept are relatively rare among animals.  For every other form of life, strict adherence to the the species concept is the exception.But, if you're not a biologist... you'll never notice.  In terms of genetic bouillabaisses or chromosomic two-steps animals mostly keep it simple, and we pay a lot of attention to animals.  But the trees in your backyard are likely doing all kinds of polygenomic tangos without you ever noticing.  When it comes to crop and human pathogens, it might be having an incalculable impact on your life, but it's way below the level of your awareness.Now, considering we know about a bare fraction of the animals on the planet, and we've already found a couple dozen exceptions to the strict species concept, and non-animals thumb their noses at it constantly..... why are we surprised when we find another blip on that radar?Because we convinced ourselves that we had discovered a RULE.  When we had actually found a weak set of guiding principles.  Dethroning a RULE is hard.  Tweaking weak guiding principles is easy.  But RULES are simple and sexy.  People like them.  Weak guiding principles are complicated.  No one likes them.There are cultural issues that resist this as well, but I don't know how to talk about them within forum rules.</blockquote>

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