Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 5179507" data-attributes="member: 177">Yes, but unless you're going to claim that the monkey-puzzle tree is a result of such, I don't see how it bears on the discussion.  Masturbation behavior is not "mating".Their group is all the same species, though.  How many orgies primates have isn't the question - how often they mate outside their own species is the question.  I'd argue that it does not, and that geneticists would agree with me.  The whole notion of polyploidy admits that we are talking about the number of copies of the same basic chromosome, coming from another of the same basic type of living thing.  In terms of talking about "species", it doesn't matter how many copies of chromosomes a maple tree has if all those chromosomes all come from other maple trees!  Yes, but this is the only place where you've actually talked about natural trading of genes across species lines.  I pointed out before, though that the fact that a bacterium can pick up some genes from other species is not necessarily all that big a deal, if those genes have little impact on the beastie, and don't change it's nature overmuch.  I asked a question that seemed to have gotten lost - how much genetic difference is there between a parent bacterium and it's daughters?  How much genetic difference is there between a puppy and its dam?  Yeasts can play the trick you're talking about.  But yeast has pretty much been yeast since at least the dawn of human civilization.  Not too terribly, no.  What you've demonstrated is that creatures with only small amounts of cellular differentiation can sometimes experiment a little with their genetics.  This by no means blows the entire concept out of species out of the water - it merely indicates we have to be a little careful in discussing it sometimes.  This may have less to do with the definition of "species" and more to do with the functions of genes in life that doesn't differentiate it's cells so much.You've missed a few examples I can think of that do actually make us think a bit about what qualifies "species".  I'll see if I can get to jotting those down later today.</blockquote>

Verification