Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 5113341" data-attributes="member: 40961">Richard Dawkins has a discussion in one of his books about how people's understanding of the nature of a &quot;species&quot; tends to be impeded by an affectation for a way of looking at the world as if it were governed by platonic forms.&nbsp; That is, they envision that there's some ideal &quot;raccoon&quot; that defines what a &quot;raccoon&quot; is, and they get all confused about the idea that a raccoon could have evolved because that means that at one time there was a species of &quot;not-raccoon&quot; that has now transformed into &quot;raccoon.&quot;&nbsp; They demand to know whether not-raccoons started having raccoon babies, or ask any number of misinformed questions, because they find it difficult to intuitively grasp how a species made this massive change for &quot;not-raccoon&quot; into &quot;raccoon.&quot;His point is to explain that species exist on a continuum.&nbsp; Not every member of a species is the same.&nbsp; The population as a whole, if it interbreeds, shares some traits, but a lot of variation is included.&nbsp; Over time these traits shift, or maybe a group gets split off and no longer interbreeds, and the general composite of the population ambles around.&nbsp; Eventually humans come along and with our tendency to insist on names and categories we start putting things in boxes- raccoon, not-raccoon, etc, as if there were some essentialism that creates clear and unbreachable distinctions between genetically connected populations separated by time and perhaps geography.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Cadfan, post: 5113341, member: 40961"] Richard Dawkins has a discussion in one of his books about how people's understanding of the nature of a "species" tends to be impeded by an affectation for a way of looking at the world as if it were governed by platonic forms. That is, they envision that there's some ideal "raccoon" that defines what a "raccoon" is, and they get all confused about the idea that a raccoon could have evolved because that means that at one time there was a species of "not-raccoon" that has now transformed into "raccoon." They demand to know whether not-raccoons started having raccoon babies, or ask any number of misinformed questions, because they find it difficult to intuitively grasp how a species made this massive change for "not-raccoon" into "raccoon." His point is to explain that species exist on a continuum. Not every member of a species is the same. The population as a whole, if it interbreeds, shares some traits, but a lot of variation is included. Over time these traits shift, or maybe a group gets split off and no longer interbreeds, and the general composite of the population ambles around. Eventually humans come along and with our tendency to insist on names and categories we start putting things in boxes- raccoon, not-raccoon, etc, as if there were some essentialism that creates clear and unbreachable distinctions between genetically connected populations separated by time and perhaps geography. [/QUOTE]

Verification