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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 5179880" data-attributes="member: 4720">Workable, sure.  But fundamentally ignorant and incapable of informing policy in the modern age.  We teach people that things are simple.  We do it in a way that reinforces cultural biases.Whenever the real world gets complicated, people think it's an aberration, because we spent high school and nowadays most of college telling them it was simple.  They ignore new evidence because we let them believe that these topics are settled.We tell them we understand things, because we want to believe we do, and we lie to them to comfort ourselves.Some of these people go on to be executives and politicians who have to make decisions about science that can affect the lives of entire countries, if not the world.  We don't need to give them all the details, but we do need to make them understand that they don't understand.  I'm getting tired of running into closed minds who declare facts "impossible" because they contradict something taught to them in 9th grade.As for what species concept "fuzziness" is relevant to the discussion... We can't decide if sapiens and neanderthalis are the same species or not, and we're passing judgment on whether they can successfully mate.We're living in a fuzzy place.  But the reaction of the average person to it isn't to get comfortable with fuzzy.  It's to make bold, unsupported, partisan statements.  I've been doing it myself for years with my insistence that they did mate, probably pretty often, but at least I'm leaning on a few eons of human behavior to justify it.  People on the other side are leaning on.... what?  Lack of evidence?  That's a pretty thin reed on which to insist on a negative.Umbran, I'm not explaining myself well.  Let me clarify.In this case, I'm not talking about polyploidy where all the chromosomes come from the same species.  We're talking about gametes from a different species entirely being part of the mix.  It's not an every hour, every day occurrence, but it's not that rare, either.  Usually they are closely-related species, but not always.  If the gametes have some convergent or conserved properties and the chromosome number isn't too divergent.... some strange things happen.The animal comparison would be if 3 dogs and a cat got together and made one puppy out of their gametes.  That puppy grows up and gives birth to a litter that's 75% puppies and 25% kittens.I also think we must mean different things when we're talking about the species concept, because as it was taught to people in some college bio classes I've seen (to say nothing of high school ones), genetic exchange is only considered possible within a species.  This is why I keep using the term "strict species concept" which is a different beast from some of the looser species concepts that have been floated since genetics came on the scene.Besides all that, we got sidetracked with the animal behavior thing, so let me try to bring it back to point.The fact that a lion won't mate with a tiger is irrelevant to the fact that a sapiens would sure as heck mate with a neanderthalis.  Heck, sapiens have been known to mate with at least a dozen genera from multiple phyla of animals, and that's just counting the ones I can confirm from talking to doctors and vets I know who have been confronted with the evidence on a bad late night shift in emergency.  I'm afraid to do Google searches for more examples.Among most animals, there are limited contexts in which you will mate.  Mating is energy intensive and risky.  So birds look for the guy with awesome feathers and great songs and dances.  Lots of female mammals will only mate with the dude with an awesome set of horns or teeth and who kicks a big, fat bag of ass.  Many animals have specific seasons or conditions in which they mate, and will not do so outside those seasons.  Many of them will look at coat color and shininess, muscle tone, and a dozen other things before choosing to mate, because they don't want to waste their resources and take risks by mating with something that is not in good health and in possession of good genes.Big cats of one sort or another do almost all of these.  Most of the larger primates do almost none of them, or selectively apply them at some times and follow alternative strategies at other times.  Primates in general are so social that they're willing to co-opt almost anything as a social tool, regardless of how energy intensive or risky it is.  And we took physiologic steps to make mating less risky overall.And hominids, IME, are a more complicated mess altogether even than "lower" primates.  We apply all of those strategies or none of them at all depending on the social conditions.  We mate for social dominance, both of the person we're with and of distal people.  We mate because we're bored.  We mate because we're excited.  We mate to obtain non-mating resources.  We mate out of curiosity.  We "mate" with other species often enough to have entire industries devoted to it, not to mention a plethora of historical anecdotes about famous people.  We break our established mating patterns at rates even greater than the more wandering among the songbirds, many of whom are utter sex fiends (yet most science texts still insist they are broadly monogamous, in the face of a couple decades of compelling evidence and a couple centuries of anecdotal evidence from the field.  Why would we do that?  ... Well, that loops back to my cultural narrative concerns).Lions (mostly) live in groups.  Tigers (mostly) live solitary.  Their behavioral mating games are quite disparate.  Both of the human subspecies in question lived in groups and were probably following the broad strokes of the social mating schemes followed by social primates in general: Dominants and Cheaters is a succinct description, though I admit it leaves a lot out.  And that's leaving aside the human adaptation of total war wherein females are mostly noncombatants to be used as chattel after a battle.  That's quite distinct from the model used by other primates, wherein the females tend to be combatants if they are not currently caring for an infant.  If that human model of tribal warfare was in play by the time Neanderthals and modern humans were bumping into each other, you can bet there was a TON of mating.  Sure, lots of the females would be killed before they gave birth, or the babies would be left to die, or any number of other fun things humans do with inconvenient children, but a few always survive.Lions probably see that striped fur and lack of mane and think "that guy must be sick.  Run AWAY!"  Humans see a person with an exotic look and they think, "Man, mating that would really irritate my parents!  And I bet they're wild in the sack."And, frankly... neanderthals weren't even all that exotic, physiologically.  They probably fit in at the family reunions better than most people on this forum do today.  After all, they were just sort of big-browed and had slightly inferior tools... we're nerds.In short, the fact that lions and tigers don't typically mate has absolutely no bearing on the human question, and I'm sorry I brought it up.</blockquote>

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