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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 5179310" data-attributes="member: 4720">I was running fast over the top, as befits this not being a science forum, but if you want, I'll go into some of these in detail.There are primates in the wild who masturbate vigorously by rubbing themselves on trees.  There are Old World monkeys who include sex in their social grooming, as part of the group bonding experience.  And this is just including the stuff I've seen in BBC nature shows, to say nothing of the wacky crap primatologists I've worked with have told me.  I know a dude who spent some time in Madagascar observing lemurs, and even those little punks are pretty frisky.Technically, primates don't have the lock on sex as a social tool, either.  Dolphins engage in sex as social bonding.  Canines engage in sex as dominance display.  Some birds do social bonding sex as well.As for plants.... Polyploidy in this context is referring to having various numbers of copies of the same set of chromosomes, and producing viable individuals that way.Most animals are diploid for most of their life cycle, with haploid gametes or occasional haploid life cycles.  You need one full set of chromosomes from your mom and one from your dad to be a functional vertebrate, for example.  Haploid vertebrates don't work.  Vertebrates with more than 2 sets (triploid and up) don't work.  You need to be diploid, end of story (with some noise there for extra individual chromosomes, but you'll note those always come with problems)Some plants can have 3, 4, 5, etc complete sets of chromosomes (I've heard of as many as 12), but not necessarily the same number of sets between individuals.  Sometimes a plant with 4 sets behaves very differently from a plant with 3, to the point where we call them a different species.  But they interbreed just fine.  Or sometimes they all behave exactly the same as long as they have 2 sets or more.Some plants that are actually quite distinct, genomically, can reproduce, so you end up with, say, 3 copies of one set of chromosomes and 1 or 2 of a different one.  The offspring are totally viable, and when they make gametes, those gametes might end up with one set of chromosomes, from one parent species or the other.This violates the strict species concept 6 ways from Sunday.On the bacteria thing... if I can pick up single genes or strips of genes from any other bacterium I bump into that has the right signaling molecules on its membrane, regardless of species... that's a pretty significant divergence from the strict species concept.  Genetic recombination between species wasn't even on the table.On fungi/protista/chromista/whatever-the-heck-the-current-divisions-are...  There are morphologically and genetically distinct fungi found in, for example, Europe and New Zealand, that turn out to be 100% capable of reproducing when introduced to each other.  There are bacteria-like gene exchanges between separate species.  There are critters of the exact same species who refuse to reproduce with each other, and then turn around are reproduce with something else entirely.  Some fungi that we consider one species are actually several species of haploid cells growing in a mixed-species colony.  Their diploid stage might be some other "species" entirely.  And then sometimes two haploid fungi of different species manage to randomly create a diploid pairing that works.Those are fun.  They're like a dog, a rat, a chimp, a human, and a narwhal dropping some gametes together in a spot such that they would clump together and grow into an oak tree.  That oak tree would grow up and produce seeds.   Those seeds would then grow into new dogs, rats, chimps, humans, narwhals, and every once in a while a unicorn and a hippogryph, but only paired like that, except on alternate Tuesdays, when they produce dragons and dung beetles.You don't think that might be a bit outside the species concept box that we're all taught in high school?</blockquote>

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