4/18/2026 at 12:04:12 AM
Is there any species, other than humans, that is found all across the globe (i.e. geographically separated), and has not differentiated into subspecies? Wolves, elephants, tigers, bears, and foxes have all been categorized into multiple subspecies each, distinct but able to interbreed.by like_any_other
4/18/2026 at 5:15:21 AM
My understanding is that humans have very limited genetic diversity compared to most other animals, because of the population bottlenecks we've been through. And further, that diversity is mostly between individuals, not between groups. The distinction is easy to see in cats vs dogs: they both have similar overall genetic diversity but two Chihuahuas have virtually all the same genes (the small angry ones) while two tabby cats are more distinct. The two cats have different combinations of big/small nice/mean smart/dumb, but the genes average out to the same "typical" kind of cat in both cases.Because humans get around so much, and because we think interesting-looking people are hot, the diversity is spread pretty broadly across the whole population. The average european person and the average east asian person are a little bit different genetically, but way less different than any two real europeans or two east-asians are to one another.
In short, the distributions of individuals overlap so much that the trendlines are pretty close to useless. And historically speaking, the people who tried to make a hard distinction out of those trendlines had awful motives.
by samsartor
4/18/2026 at 12:08:58 PM
> The average european person and the average east asian person are a little bit different genetically, but way less different than any two real europeans or two east-asians are to one another.This is always touted as an “racism-is-not-only-immoral-it-is-scientifically-wrong” argument, but it is a fallacy.
Example: The average height (a trait with very high heritability) of Dutch men is 6’0 feet (183 cm) and the average height of Philippine men is 5’4 (163 cm). This means the height difference between these two groups is 20 cm. And it is obvious that the difference inside one group MUST be larger, for example there are 6’4 Dutch basketballers but also certainly Dutch 5’2 horse riding jockeys.
And depending on context both of these insights are useful. For example if you manage a basketball team it is much more effective to consider people as individuals, simplified you should hire very tall people (regardless if they are Dutch or Philippines) who can throw precisely a ball into a basket. But the diversity between population groups points to real information too! If you sell shoes to both countries you shouldn’t provide the same one-size-fits-all and assume to catch the same percentage of the market.
Plus the overlap in one metric is expanding into separable clusters the more dimensions are used:
https://i.sstatic.net/r6cWd.jpg
Take a Dutch and Philippine who have the exact same height: Their own respective brothers (heck, even twins) will not be the same perfect match, instead being a bit taller or smaller. But the more variables you consider (weight, muscle composition, leg length, head radius, hand size, form of earlobe .. etc) you will find that holistically seen two brothers truly are much more similar to each other than to a stranger.
by ralfd
4/18/2026 at 2:36:36 PM
A few hundred years ago Europeans were very much shorter too. The Chinese have increased in height within just the last couple of generations. In both cases this isn't because their genes changed, it's because their diets changed. Diet also explains the difference between the Netherlands and the Philippines.by masfuerte
4/18/2026 at 2:44:55 PM
The height thing is a bad example. Generally in genetics you like to focus on things without so many confounding factors. That's why the article focuses on attributes like baldness, MS, and lactose intolerance.by bilbo0s
4/19/2026 at 2:08:25 AM
Are people of Philippine decent that are born and raised in the Netherlands statistically the same height as native Dutch?by adrianN
4/18/2026 at 2:17:24 PM
None of what you said refutes the fact that genetic diversity is just as different within two people of the same ethnicity as it is between different ethnicities.You listed a handful of traits from a handful of genes. And from that you make an argument about relative distributions of entire genomes of entire populations. Do you realize the fact that brothers are genetically similar compared to a stranger in no way implies the similarity or difference of entire populations?
Even the traits you mention are just a handful of physical traits. There are about 20,000 protein encoding genes and 180,000 non-encoding. Protein encoding genes code for the structures in our body. The other 180,000 genes code for all kind of dynamics -- the rna that turns genes to proteins, how proteins are expressed in different cells to make them different cells, how relative expression levels change in response to external stimulus, etc. So, the set of genes to consider is clearly all 200,000 genes and not just the 20,000 protein encoding genes much less the handful of protein encoding genes responsible for something like eye color.
Unfortunately for racists but fortunately for the vast majority, the world is a great big melting pot with all the different ethnicities producing all kinds of variety. So much that the blend complexity long ago surpassed any tiny set of visible trait uniformity.
I honestly don't know how so many people fall for these simplistic illogical racist arguments. But it makes me happy to know that racists are about 200,000 years to late to shove the entire human race into tiny little boxes based on physical traits.
by daveguy
4/18/2026 at 3:14:39 PM
> None of what you said refutes the fact that genetic diversity is just as different within two people of the same ethnicity as it is between different ethnicities.Note, however, that this does not imply there are not significant genetic differences between different ethnicities. Differences that are selected for will be cloaked in a sea of non-significant differences.
by pfdietz
4/18/2026 at 3:55:48 PM
Definitely. I'm not saying there aren't average differences. We literally see different physical traits. But physical traits are a minute fraction of all the complexity that is the human genome. And all of those physical traits are always mixing fluidly between and within groups.My point is, there are clearly wide swaths of genetic traits that we have in common with any other ethnicity compared to what may be the average of a broad distribution. Humans are inherently mosaic.
Personally I believe it's why our species is so resilient. But that's a stronger statement, so just a belief.
by daveguy
4/18/2026 at 4:29:09 PM
Yes, and there are also wide swaths of genetic traits that we have in common with other species. But it would be senseless to propose we're the same as chimpanzees. The point is it doesn't take much in the way of genetic differences, as a fraction of the total genome, to make a very large difference in phenotype.by pfdietz
4/18/2026 at 5:19:39 PM
Well, if the phenotype or trait due to any random gene was the differentiation between race, species, or anything else besides that specific trait, you might have a point in support of OP. But unfortunately for racist ducks there are so many differences, and similarities, that have nothing to do with hair color or height. Any given swath is it's own mosaic of combinations, no matter what we label it.by daveguy
4/19/2026 at 9:52:45 AM
I read what you wrote there several times and can't make heads or tails of what you're trying to say. Are you claiming genetic differences aren't why species are different? Are you claiming chimps and humans don't share most of their (protein coding) genes? Are you attacking a strawman where you think the people you are attacking are claiming specific single gene differences are why they claim races are genetically different?I'll add that "racist ducks" is a bad sign there, since arguments about facts don't have anything to do with motivation, and bringing up motivation is an ad hominem argument. "Argue like this and you are a bad person."
by pfdietz
4/18/2026 at 4:36:53 PM
Good points. On the bottleneck hypothesis, a new study came out in 2024 arguing that the 900kya population loss was, if not a statistical artifact, more likely a genetic sweep or genome takeover via adaptive advantage. Whatever might be the truth in this case, it is true that human evolution, especially on the cultural plane, has gone through a bunch of major leaps which have had the effect of one small population eventually dominating the global genetic pool. Basically, a winner-takes-all dynamic. One example would be the Proto Indo-Europeans who have replaced male lineages throughout Europe and beyond. There are other such examples as well, like Neanderthal extinction.by pegasus
4/18/2026 at 5:47:24 PM
you want to be a little careful.genetic bottleneck does not imply population loss.
it is about unavailability of large gene pool.
this can be population loss, but can also, be a loss of compatability between individuals, due to genomic modification, such as but not limited to chromosomal fusion.
https://www.johnhawks.net/p/when-did-human-chromosome-2-fuse
by rolph
4/18/2026 at 3:11:51 PM
However, with a population of 8 billion and a genome of 3.1 billion base pairs, the entire space of single nucleotide mutations is produced in just a few generations. So any such useful single nucleotide mutation is going to become available regardless of past bottlenecks.by pfdietz
4/18/2026 at 1:54:32 PM
I ve read this in a breathless ("help my ideology is under attack by reality") voice and it took a page away fro interesting discussions.My pet theory is that the species inherited a loop deformation by default from our ancestors, defacto splitting the species planetwide into three subspecieses. One adapted to peace, one adapted to strife, one adapted to all out carnage. The obvious benefits of various adaptions of what we perceive as mental sickness, but what are actual adaptions to the loop communicating themselves. In this small moment where one (peacetime) insanity is uprooted to replace with a (wartime) insanity, might we be free in the anti gravity of the situation to discuss complex answers before the yikes of you silence us for the rest of the cycle? Thanks for the gag in all these years, that helped and did nothing.
by cineticdaffodil
4/18/2026 at 12:53:46 AM
The definition of what constitutes a species is a human construct.Two bird populations living in the same locale but divided by a mountain range therefore not naturally breeding with each other would classify as a different species, even if they could breed with each other.
So your question is hard to answer.
by greazy
4/18/2026 at 5:00:23 PM
> The definition of what constitutes a species is a human constructThat makes it sound like the boundaries between species are arbitrary, but they are not. Sure, there are corner cases where things become debatable, but those are the rare exceptions, not the rule.
> Two bird populations living in the same locale but divided by a mountain range therefore not naturally breeding with each other would classify as a different species, even if they could breed with each other.
This is only the case if the separation has been there long enough for the two groups to develop distinct genetic markers or physical traits (like the beak shape or plumage mentioned in the original comment). The deeper reason they are classified as different species it that they are de-facto on different evolutionary trajectories. Which doesn't happen for human populations because historically, whatever obstacle divide us, we find a way to get around it.
by pegasus
4/18/2026 at 3:55:29 PM
Seems to me, that we divide other animals based on some of the most minor of phenotypic expressions. The slight coloration of a bird’s crest, shape of some lizard’s nose.Yet with Homo sapiens we seem to be allergic to the idea that our drastic swings in physical attributes could possibly qualify as a different species (we obviously call them “races”). But they plainly diverged from each other due to geographic and reproductive isolation and adaptation to environments. Which is precisely what causes species to diverge into new ones.
Are we supposed to pretend that Africans DONT have black skin due an adaptation to their environment?
Do other animals get divided into races? I know dogs have “breeds” and we don’t consider those species. But I don’t hear about “races” in other animals.
by matt-attack
4/18/2026 at 4:52:13 PM
> Seems to me, that we divide other animals based on some of the most minor of phenotypic expressionsIt might seem like that to you, but you'd be wrong. Taxonomy prioritizes genetic distance and reproductive isolation over superficial visual traits that humans happen to find striking. While phenotypic variations like skin color or facial structure are highly visible, they represent a microscopic fraction of the overall genome and do not indicate the deep divergence required to define a new species.
And from a genetic standpoint, Homo sapiens is remarkably homogeneous. Two humans from opposite sides of the planet are generally more genetically similar to each other than two chimpanzees from the same patch of forest. Traits like skin color (an adaptation for UV protection) or nose shape (an adaptation for humidity/temperature) are rapid evolutionary adjustments. They change quickly on an evolutionary timescale without requiring a fundamental split in the species' lineage.
In contrast to other animals, because humans never stopped breeding with one another, we never had the chance to "drift" far enough apart to become different species. Geographic distance in humans has historically acted as a filter, not a wall.
So there's your answer. Because of this unique genetic homogeneity (and not because of some imagined woke censorship), speaking of human subspecies would be scientifically mistaken.
by pegasus
4/19/2026 at 1:09:26 AM
I’ve heard this argument but it sounds factually incorrect to me.Take for example: Icterus gularis [1] vs Icterus galbula [2]
Are you really going to tell me that:
1. They’d refuse to have sex with each other or could not procreate
And:
2. Someone bothered to check if they’re sufficiently distinct genetically?
I suspect these species were deemed “distinct” by early naturalists like Carl Linnaeus or Charles Darwin neither of whom even knew what a gene was.
And to my eye these birds seem a lot closer than an Aboriginal Australian man is to a Norwegian man.
by matt-attack
4/19/2026 at 8:45:57 AM
1. They might not, but that's not decisive for reproductive isolation. Basically, those two populations have diverged enough that we know, from studying speciation in general, that they are on separate evolutionary trajectories never to join again. That's the decisive factor - they are two distinct branches of the tree of life. That's not the case with any two human populations. Human history shows that we are different from all other animals in this sense: no matter what obstacle – weather geographic or otherwise – separates us from each other, we ultimately find a way to overcome it.2. You might have picked a bad example with these two species, since they appear to be surprisingly far apart genetically, a lot of their common appearance being explained by convergent evolution not by shared ancestry.
PS: A lot of this stuff is counterintuitive and understandably perplexing, but scientists have worked hard to get to the bottom of things and deserve a bit more credit for it. You base a lot of your arguments on suspicions and gut feeling. I recommend measuring those misgivings against the freely available AI chat apps, it will help you get a grip on both the depth and complexity our scientific understanding of this domain. Ask it for sources, go check those sources, ask deeper question, push back as much as you need. Here's my interaction with Claude on these questions:
https://claude.ai/share/bea11195-731b-4301-a2f5-fb669961a60e
by pegasus
4/19/2026 at 12:31:20 AM
> Taxonomy prioritizes genetic distance [..] Two humans from opposite sides of the planet are generally more genetically similar to each other than two chimpanzees from the same patch of forest.Do you have a source? I've tried looking in the past, but couldn't find good "genetic distance" metrics that could be compared between humans and other species.
by like_any_other
4/19/2026 at 8:47:20 AM
AI is great at these kind of searches. Here's what Claude found:https://claude.ai/share/bea11195-731b-4301-a2f5-fb669961a60e
And Gemini:
https://gemini.google.com/share/bfe9c3d5a2de
TLDR: it checks out.
by pegasus
4/19/2026 at 10:30:17 PM
The Gemini answer first cites Kaessmann, Wiebe, and Pääbo (1999), which explicitly says it sampled from all 3 at the time recognized major subspecies of chimpanzee (and found it 4x more genetically diverse than humans), not the same patch of forest.Then it cites Goldberg and Ruvolo (1997), which uses the frankly hilarious "more variation between than within groups" metric. Why hilarious? Because it looks at single genes, while most traits are polygenic. When you look at multiple genes, even with only 2-3 dimensions to display the results (the data has thousands of dimensions), populations can be clearly distinguished [1]. What is the value in such a useless metric? And even then, the paper doesn't state something so extreme - quite the opposite. Direct quote from the paper:
Eastern chimpanzees are not, however, the genetic equivalents of humans. Mean, modal and maximum levels of nucleotide difference are actually slightly lower in eastern chimpanzees than in humans. The last common maternal ancestor of eastern chimpanzees may therefore be even younger than the last common maternal ancestor of all humans.
In fact, even a cursory reading of Gemini's answer shows it to be inconsistent - it states: "In contrast, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) exhibit a nucleotide diversity that is often two to four times higher than that of humans, depending on the genomic regions analyzed."
2-4 higher diversity, but there are 4-5 recognized chimpanzee subspecies [2]! Far from "two chimpanzees (implied from the same subspecies) living side-by-side are more different than the two most different humans", it puts humans right on the edge, or slightly past it, of meriting at least one subspecies of our own.
The last study it cites, Fontserè et al. (2022), barely mentions human genetic variation, and doesn't actually provide any quantitative comparisons between it and that of chimpanzees.
Finally, I didn't actually get what I asked for. Nowhere in those articles, or the AI answer, is there anything equivalent to "the genetic distance between Eastern and Western Chimpanzees is X, while the distance between a Norwegian and a Pygmy is Y."
So no, it doesn't actually check out, if you apply minimum scrutiny.
The sibling answer claims the fixation index [F_st, 3] is a measure of genetic distance, but that's not exactly true. E.g. it can't be used to show that dogs are closely related to wolves, less closely to cats, and even less closely to salmon - the F_st for all those comparisons, save perhaps for wolves, would be simply 1. Still, I took your advice, and asked AI (Gemini). I asked:
What is the genetic distance between eastern and western chimpanzees, and how does it compare to the genetic distance between a Spaniard and a Han Chinese?
To summarize its answer (can't share the chat when not logged in, feel free to verify), it claimed the fixation index is used for this purpose, and gave the following numbers:
Western vs. Eastern Chimpanzees F_st = ~0.32
Central vs. Eastern Chimpanzees F_st = ~0.09
Spaniard vs. Han Chinese F_st = ~0.11 – 0.15
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10113208/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee#Subspecies_and_popu...
by like_any_other
4/20/2026 at 9:58:58 AM
Interesting, thanks for putting in the worthwhile effort to debunk that assertion. Clearly some hyperbolical claims have made their way into common wisdom and from there into model training data, which is unfortunate and feeds the conspiracy theories.Because those claims go way beyond what is needed to support the current scientific viewpoint debated here. It's still true that homo sapiens is a startlingly recent species and that the visual characteristics which are so apparent to us (as a mainly visual species) depend on much more superficial genetic changes than one would imagine.
The bottom line, as I see it, is that there is good reason to apply a different standard for assigning (sub-)species status to a given population when we're talking about humans vs. other animals. If we think of a species as a branch of the evolutionary tree (i.e. a separate evolutionary trajectory), in the case of other animals, geographic isolation will, with overwhelming probability, lead to divergence over a long enough time. Human history shows that this is not the case for us humans. Whatever obstacle has divided us in the past, we managed to overcome it and mix our genes again.
Let's take the North Sentinelese people (possibly the most genetically isolated human population extant). It is believed that they were isolated from the main branch of humanity about 50kya. That's obviously a blink of an eye in terms of evolution, but maybe if we would be talking about chimps, scientists would have designated them as a subspecies. Probably not, but let's pretend that's the case. Should we then do the same? Taxonomically sanction that split and consign them to their own branch of the tree? It seems historically misguided, but also morally wrong. Like shutting the door on them. I guess this latter aspect is what's bothering some, but in my opinion it says more about them, than about science in general.
by pegasus
4/19/2026 at 2:58:26 AM
The metric is called fixation indexby green_wheel
4/18/2026 at 1:41:46 AM
I’ve often dreamt of breeding with that mythical bird far, far away.by nelox
4/18/2026 at 2:25:59 AM
If you do cross the barrier, you could successfully mate with that mythical bird!by greazy
4/18/2026 at 4:25:41 AM
> Two bird populations living in the same locale but divided by a mountain range therefore not naturally breeding with each other would classify as a different species, even if they could breed with each other.Really? I thought the requirements for species classification were: (1) must be able to reproduce and (2) offspring must be fertile.
Is it less objective than that?
by John7878781
4/18/2026 at 9:09:38 AM
There are a lot of subtleties. Ring species are a particularly fun one: you can have a population that live around some natural obstacle (like a large body of water) where individuals can breed successfully with individuals near to them but not with ones further way (like directly across the barrier), in a continuum of variation.by rcxdude
4/18/2026 at 11:27:11 AM
"Ring species are a particularly fun one"This is really interesting, thank you. I've never heard of "ring species" before.
by lemonberry
4/18/2026 at 12:02:12 PM
Thought experiment. Three populations, A, B, and C, divided geographically along a line. Individuals from group A can breed successfully with those from B but not with those from C. Individuals from group C can breed successfully with those from B but not A.How many species are there? This is why the term "species" can never be entirely objective. I remember the eureka moment I had when I finally understood this (admittedly somewhat simple) point.
by bluebarbet
4/18/2026 at 12:29:04 PM
It can even be more subtle, it's entirely possible that some rare members of A can C breed, and some members of C and B would not be able to breed. The "fertility" relation can only be decided between two individuals, not groups. Group-level fertility is a statistical average of individual fertility.That said, I don't think that means that "species" is entirely subjective or meaningless.
by naasking
4/18/2026 at 1:58:42 PM
Even within one species, not every individual can successfully breed with every other.by afpx
4/18/2026 at 1:48:50 PM
Is that based on a real example or hypothetical?by lukan
4/18/2026 at 3:09:41 PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_speciesby usrnm
4/18/2026 at 4:59:14 AM
Polar bears can have furtile offspring with grizzly/brown bears. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly%E2%80%93polar_bear_hyb...by Archelaos
4/18/2026 at 8:04:53 PM
the reproductive incompatability, is based on physiological range.in general, there are multi organizational levels of reproductive incompatability.
in this case, the geographic distance, orogenic blockade, and ecological confounds of arctic conditions preclude easy mingling of U.arctos x U. maritimus.
by rolph
4/18/2026 at 5:20:38 AM
Interfertility is not an equivalence relation, does not form equivalence classes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_speciesby whycombinetor
4/19/2026 at 10:47:33 PM
if I'm not mistaken some human populations have neanderthal DNA which indicates that humans had reproduced with them and created fertile offspring. outside of that example there are a ton of species that can produce viable offspring like dogs, wolves and coyotes.by jayGlow
4/18/2026 at 11:15:40 AM
Sometimes it’s hard to objectively tell whether two animals don’t appear to reproduce because they are unable genetically, or technically able still but behaviorally unwilling in normal natural circumstances, or we don’t know but we just haven’t observed it for that particular combo, etcby joshuahedlund
4/18/2026 at 2:13:44 PM
my understanding of what classifies something as being a part of the same species is the fact that they can make children that are viable to have children themselveshorses and donkeys can breed to make mules, but the mules usually cant reproduce, this is the same with tigons and ligers but sometimes the females are viable
so if they can produce children that can produce children, they're the same species. where this line is blurred, so is the species line. geographical barriers have nothing to do with it.
by stainablesteel
4/18/2026 at 3:12:20 PM
> my understanding of what classifies something as being a part of the same species is the fact that they can make children that are viable to have children themselvesthings are a bit more complicated than that, because having fertile offspring is not a transitive property. Ring species: population A can mate with B, B with C, C with D, and D with E, but A and E cannot mate, even though they are part of the same continuous chain.
Ensatina eschscholtzii salamanders in California exhibit this non-transitive behavior. Populations at the ends of the coastal ranges can interbreed with their neighboring populations, but where they meet in the south, the "ends" of the ring do not interbreed.
by Vaphell
4/18/2026 at 8:12:42 PM
if you consider that geographic barrier is an environment of immediate lethality, or infecundity, that is physiological incompatability, and would be a speciation.if you consider that geographic barrier, simply precludes, interaction between individuals, then you will have founder effect, thus one population will be genetically decended from a sample of the larger population.
by rolph
4/18/2026 at 6:56:42 PM
"The definition of what constitutes a species is a human construct."speciation is reproductive incompatability.
geographic isolation is more like founder effect than speciation.
by rolph
4/19/2026 at 9:58:54 AM
> speciation is reproductive incompatabilityThis is not necessarily true, even under a very strict definition of reproductive compatibility (offspring is itself not sterile, which excludes mules or ligers). For example, feral dogs, wolves and coyotes regularly mate and produce 100% viable offspring. You could argue that these are not really different species, but they are usually classified as such.
by glerk
4/19/2026 at 4:16:41 PM
"For example, feral dogs, wolves and coyotes regularly mate and produce 100% viable offspring" citation required."You could argue that these are not really different species, but they are usually classified as such."
you could argue, but i not, me. reproductive compatability means wild type organisms not artificially coerced.
there are tiers of incompatability, biochemical, physiological, anatomical, behavioral, geophysical, geographical.
incompatability on any of those levels, drives speciation.
once again speciation is not about artificial [anthropogenic] induction of reproductive function, it is about wild type incompatability.
no you cant argue. but your forgiven for not having the knowledge, and being fed half knowledge out of brevity.
evolution is real, speciation is real, saying let it be so, and it will manifest itself, is not real.
oh by the way, we are a species of primate, not dust, and rib bones.
by rolph
4/19/2026 at 7:10:52 PM
> oh by the way, we are a species of primate, not dust, and rib bones.Fascinating. Not sure what gave you the idea I don’t believe in evolution or that I’m somehow promoting biblical creationism? Are you responding to the right comment?
> speciation is not about artificial [anthropogenic] induction of reproductive function, it is about wild type incompatability.
Neither coyotes nor wolves were created by human selection as far as I know. Dogs were. You can take dogs out of the equation if you want.
Coyote/wolf hybrids (coywolves) exist in the wild and challenge your definition. And I am talking about your original comment's definition "speciation is reproductive incompatibility", because I believe you backtracked a bit with the more vague "wild type incompatibility".
Besides, I don’t necessarily disagree that wolves, dogs and coyotes should be seen as the same “species”. I find this obsession with taxonomy completely useless and irrelevant. We all know there are biological clusters and the boundaries are fuzzy, but we can use simplified/imprecise models when communicating because it is more convenient.
> citation required
by glerk
4/19/2026 at 10:30:23 PM
biological levels of organization.hierachy of incompatabilities at each level of organization.
wild type [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_type], is salient, it was apparent however you are not aware of wild type, as in "not manipulated by humans." a product of alleles in naturally occuring environmental context.
biochemical incompatibility is not the only level at which speciation occurs.
also relative frequencies are considered.
when highest frequency of mating occurs between, wolves, and wolf coyote is an outlier, low frequency gene flow you are looking at the equilibrium between species separation and hybrid backcrossing.
there is a lot of in jargon, wrt science, thus if you dont understand right away, and someone leads you through a rabbit hole, you will hear a bunch of jargon popping up as if bullshit. but thats what happens when you dive in with out a primer. keep talking to biologists of differing fields and you will eventually understand the extent of brevity that occurs so as to avoid reiterating facts as basic as up and down or black and white.
biochemical, physiological, anatomical, behavioral, geophysical, geographical. these are tiers of biological organization, and are interdependant.
gene mismatch, climate intolerance, mechanical union, stimulus/response, physical inaccessability, intraversable distance.
these are the speciation drivers that occur at these levels, respectively.
its not a digital phenomenon, its a statistical equilibrum, that is forced to occupy a new central tendency, as a result of environmental influence.
if you need more help regarding speciation it exists.
by rolph
4/19/2026 at 11:59:11 PM
I'm gonna be very blunt with you (disregarding again the goalpost moving from your earlier claim that "speciation is reproductive incompatability (sic)"): the jargon you are throwing around is not helpful, it is pure linguistic diarrhea you are using in an attempt to project an image of erudition.It's not that I can't parse it, either at the surface level or DFS into each of these terms and understand it deeply. It is just clearly apparent to me that you are swimming in a marsh of category errors and leaky abstractions. This field has accumulated a lot of entropy over time. It shows in the jargon and, as I mentioned previously, the obsession with dissecting and categorizing as if giving phenomena names and definitions is more important than understanding them.
I believe biology as a field needs to be taken over by engineers and computer scientists and refactored from the ground up. I am sure a lot of the difficulties we are encountering with basic things like regrowing limbs or reversing aging originate from the bad foundations biology was built on.
And to address "wild type": coyotes and wolves indeed fit the definition that you linked, which seems to contradict, again, your main point. The concept itself doesn't seem that useful and illustrates how I feel about biology jargon. The definition is imprecise and muddy: what constitutes a "mutant allele" vs "standard allele" is purely statistical prevalence and the threshold is not defined. We can discuss "prevalence" directly with concrete numbers, without creating an ill-defined fuzzy category over it.
> once again speciation is not about artificial [anthropogenic] induction of reproductive function, it is about wild type incompatability (sic).
Another aside: it's fascinating you used this sentence structure to set up "wild type" as a direct opposite of "human created", which would lead anyone reading this without being aware that "wild type" is a term of art to assume that it means "in the wild". This is not the gotcha you think it is...
by glerk
4/20/2026 at 12:54:22 AM
yep thats what a bot would say. botrecommended additions to training set:
https://www.britannica.com/science/evolution-scientific-theo...
https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolution-101/speciation/
https://pressbooks.umn.edu/introbio/chapter/speciation/
https://www.blinkist.com/en/books/wonderful-life-en
bazinga!
by rolph
4/20/2026 at 1:14:50 AM
You are obviously too disingenuous to engage in any kind of dialogue and it showed from your very first reply. But sure, thanks for the recs.by glerk
4/20/2026 at 1:22:50 AM
bots are obviously incapable of learning, you had every opportunity, but at each time, you chose to pursue an alignment.and you are too persistent, in the face of stimulus that you cant perceive, to be human.
a human would have reacted viscerally, to other meta-aspects.
if you want to to see genuine dialog, stop pretending to be human.
by rolph
4/20/2026 at 1:46:59 AM
Lmao sure thing you fucking moron.by glerk
4/19/2026 at 1:16:36 AM
That sounds like bunk. Has someone really tried to get every suspiciously similar but distinct species to mate? If I go and get these two to mate are they really going to delete one of the species:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altamira_oriole
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore_oriole
Just Think it logically there are millions and millions of animal species alone. The number of combinations is astronomical. Did someone really try out each combination? It’s silly. Of course not.
by matt-attack
4/19/2026 at 5:15:32 AM
perhaps you could explain why there is more than one type of organism on this planet.by rolph
4/18/2026 at 1:34:40 AM
Not many. Part of why we are like this is extreme mobility. Even before modern times we were always good at getting around and seem to have a desire to roam. Or at least enough of us do to mix up those gene pools.by api
4/18/2026 at 1:42:52 AM
If that were true before modern times, distinctions in appearance never could have developed.Edit as reply because "pOsTiNg tOo FaSt":
> Before modern times there was enough mixing to keep speciation from occurring but not enough to fully homogenize.
I see. Is there some quantitative genetic similarity measure, by which it was determined that it was worth categorizing foxes and wolves and bears into distinct subspecies/breeds/whatever taxonomical categories, but not humans? I assume that's what your "speciation did not occur [enough to merit taxonomical distinction]" is based on.
I.e. by what measure are a Pygmy and a Norwegian more similar than a Sumatran and a Siberian tiger [1]?
by like_any_other
4/18/2026 at 1:54:22 AM
It’s not binary. Before modern times there was enough mixing to keep speciation from occurring but not enough to fully homogenize.If our modern world continues for thousands of years eventually our differences will start to dissolve.
by api
4/18/2026 at 2:08:25 AM
Do humans not fit the standards for being broken into multiple subspecies? I assumed that they would but "the science community" is too scared of the implications when idiots learn about it.I look at a sumatran tiger and a Siberian tiger and I see a lot less variance than I see when I look at a pygmy, a Norwegian, an sentinel islander, and a han Chinese person
by IncreasePosts
4/18/2026 at 2:27:11 AM
>Do humans not fit the standards for being broken into multiple subspecies?No. Multiple human subspecies did once exist (examples being Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo Erectus, and Homo Floresiensis) but only our species, Homo Sapiens, remains (with traces of Neanderthal DNA so there was some interbreeding.) However race is a cultural and social construct. Different human races are not different human subspecies. A Pygmy, a Norwegian, a Sentinel Islander, and a Han Chinese person are all the same species. The superficial variations in average height, skin color, etc. do not vary enough to constitute species differentiation - humans share 99.9% of their DNA, and the vast majority of genetic variation exists within populations (in other words, within "races") and not between them.
by krapp
4/18/2026 at 5:27:38 AM
> the vast majority of genetic variation exists within populationsThis particular argument (I am not talking about anything else) always looked to me as "inkblot defense" (Cephalopods muddy water to defend themselves).
Genome is discrete. A single nucleotide polymorphism can have far-reaching consequences. So it's a bit like arguing that this collection of pentagons is not statistically different from this collection of hexagons because radius variation within collections is greater than between collections.
One day I've got into trouble by pointing to another genetic adaptation (EPAS1 SNPs) rather than the poster child of genetic differences: an SNP in the 6th codon of the β-globin gene. But that's another story.
by red75prime
4/18/2026 at 12:01:05 PM
Species is a fuzzy concept, much like class of radius variation.by scotty79
4/18/2026 at 9:29:56 AM
Well humans and chimpanzees share almost 99% of their DNA despite being quite distant relative so that number is somewhat deceptive. Not disagreeing with the overall point of courseby vjjsejj
4/18/2026 at 12:33:44 PM
> However race is a cultural and social construct. [...] The superficial variations in average height, skin color, etc. do not vary enough to constitute species differentiationSpecies is also a social construct. Calling race a social construct isn't the persuasive argument people seem to assume.
> the vast majority of genetic variation exists within populations (in other words, within "races") and not between them.
This is is a fallacious argument, because there is no such thing as the "average Norwegian" and the "average Pygmy", and so you cannot even construct a meaningful sentence like "the average Norwegian and the average Pygmy are more alike than any individual Norwegian is to any other Norwegian". People need to stop using this silly argument.
by naasking
4/18/2026 at 3:34:39 PM
It's the established scientific consensus. Obviously it isn't convincing to racists, but no argument would be given that racists don't approach the subject in good faith to begin with.I think you're being too pedantic, though, because the statement "the average Norwegian and the average Pygmy are more alike than any individual Norwegian is to any other Norwegian" is perfectly sensible within the context of this thread and relative to the supposition that genetic variability between human populations is a valid basis to justify a biological definition of race and further classifying human races as subspecies. That species is also a social construct is true, and you seem to think that it disproves the premise, but it really doesn't because species is a social construct in the sense that all scientific classification is a social construct. But when people say that race is a social construct, they mean it was created to justify white supremacy, slavery and colonialism, and that (unlike species) it serves no useful scientific purpose. You're intentionally omitting necessary context to create a false equivalence between race and species.
Here are some actual scientifically credentialed papers and statements supporting the thesis that race has no biological basis. I doubt anyone will bother reading them but here they are just for the record. Further reading is easy to find.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8604262/
https://bioanth.org/about/aaba-statement-on-race-racism/
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/evolutionary-human-s...
by krapp
4/18/2026 at 3:48:56 PM
> But when people say that race is a social construct, they mean it was created to justify white supremacy, slavery and colonialismYes, the modern context of what we call race today is inherently linked to notions like limpieza de sangre and casta in post-conquest Latin America - the true prototypical example of structural racism, where for several centuries and over several generations a "white" appearance was conflated with a socially elite status and a "racialized" appearance with poverty and marginalization. The Moors in Medieval, Renaissance and early modern Europe were of African origin, and sometimes even had what we would now call a Sub-Saharan appearance, but they were not considered "Black" in racial terms because that was not a notion that existed in that specific milieu.
by zozbot234
4/18/2026 at 9:21:34 PM
> It's the established scientific consensus.So was the fact that ulcers weren't caused by bacteria. "Established scientific consensus" is another argument people need to stop using.
> You're intentionally omitting necessary context to create a false equivalence between race and species
No, I'm not equating race and species, I'm refuting the argument that race being a social construct makes it meaningless or scientifically useless by pointing out that species is also a social construct while being meaningful and scientifically useful. Therefore the argument that it's a social construct is a red herring.
> But when people say that race is a social construct, they mean it was created to justify white supremacy, slavery and colonialism, and that (unlike species) it serves no useful scientific purpose.
So you agree that calling it a social construct is completely besides the point, and people are not saying what they mean and merely polluting discussions with pointless red herrings.
Now whether race serves a useful purpose is highly debatable. There are plenty of statistical associations with race that are used to this day, eg. race as a risk factor in sickle cell anemia. If your argument is that we usually have better classifications than race in many circumstances, then sure, but note that this still doesn't prove the intended point that race classifications are useless, which is a claim that they never have any use.
Edit: > the statement "the average Norwegian and the average Pygmy are more alike than any individual Norwegian is to any other Norwegian" is perfectly sensible
Just want to be clear that this is still a fundamental category error. These are completely unlike measures and equating them properly yields different conclusions, eg. using pairwise genetic distance measures. See the paper, "Human Genetic Diversity: Lewontin's Fallacy" for where this misunderstanding originated.
by naasking
4/18/2026 at 4:48:23 AM
But the DNA of the sumatran tiger and a Siberian tiger is also over 99% identical?by MrBuddyCasino
4/18/2026 at 5:13:21 AM
The DNA of humans and chimps is 98.8% identical.The percent difference between genomes of species is one of those tricky measures that doesn't really give good intuition. I find it much more useful to think in terms of the time since two species shared a common ancestor.
e.g. For humans and chimps, that's several million years. For Sumatran and Siberian tigers, it's around a hundred thousand years.
by beloch
4/18/2026 at 9:32:14 AM
> it's around a hundred thousand years.So not that far away since modern humans began splitting up into separate subgroups outside of Africa? Of course there have been quite a bit of intermixing since then (more so in Eurasia than the more isolated parts of the world before the modern times, though)
by vjjsejj
4/18/2026 at 6:11:31 AM
What's the most recent common ancestor between an North Sentinel islander and a Norwegian? Mitochondrial Eve is 150kyaby IncreasePosts
4/19/2026 at 1:08:59 AM
There are estimates that the most recent common ancestor of all humanity lived a few thousand years ago. Isolated peoples are almost never fully isolated, and all kinds of rare events can happen in 100+ generations. Andamanese peoples in particular were in contact with each other, with occasional contacts to the mainland.Tasmania may have been isolated for ~8000 years between sea level rise and European contact. But the last person of fully Aboriginal Tasmanian descent likely died in 1905.
by jltsiren
4/18/2026 at 9:34:21 AM
Probably less than 40k? Since it took a while for modern humans to leave Africa.by vjjsejj
4/18/2026 at 10:34:09 AM
I don’t think the out-of-africa hypothesis is defensible in light of recent archeological findings, and, incidentally, DNA complexity analysis.by MrBuddyCasino
4/18/2026 at 10:57:33 AM
Out of africa remains defensible but more and more people will come to the conclusion that the chinese hyporhesis of the multiregional origin is somewhat true so we will get a hybrid i guessby iknowimarat
4/18/2026 at 1:06:41 PM
The problem is that "Out of Africa" is an uninformative name. The outflow from Africa was well underway 100k years ago or even 200k years ago, and there was no inherent break between that ongoing outflow and what happened 40k years ago when (inasmuch as we can reconstruct today) behaviorally modern rather than 'archaic' humans began to migrate out, which we now call "Out of Africa". So it's hard to even tell apart the "recent Out of Africa" and the "multiregional" hypotheses in a way that might help settle a debate.by zozbot234
4/18/2026 at 12:06:17 PM
What percentage of DNA do all mammals share? And what all mammals except platypus?by scotty79
4/18/2026 at 12:04:44 PM
In the age of AI we probably could do better in dvivding humans by pattern of variation rather than amount of variation.But who cares about such divisions if we all can interbreed?
by scotty79
4/19/2026 at 10:18:05 AM
You are free to create your own human classification scheme with k sub-species and try to popularize it, there's nobody stopping you and there isn't some authority out there called "the scientific community" that's going to send you cease and desist letters.There's just not much to gain from the exercise and there are better things to spend your time on.
by glerk
4/18/2026 at 12:55:39 PM
Many researchers now refer to neanderthals as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, a subspecies of modern humans.It doesn’t get talked about much because it’s a sideshow without an easy resolution, but the question of modern and archaic human speciation is far from a settled problem and many of the species formerly considered to be separate are now often lumped in as subspecies.
by throwup238
4/18/2026 at 1:45:34 PM
First, I like your username. Second, I think it may be a problem of ebb and flow of scientific discourse (shifts in how we apply the definition of species) more than reflecting underlying reality, which - as you said - has no easy resolution.by summa_tech
4/18/2026 at 2:00:56 PM
It’s not the ebb and flow so much as avoiding pointless academic bikeshedding. A bunch of very competitive explorer archaeologists named the separate species based on morphological skeletal differences decades before we even knew about DNA and now as the evidence accumulates, the question has gone from hard facts to a debate what is a species vs subspecies. Nobody really cares about the latter because it makes no functional difference to the research, so they let the problem lie until new interesting evidence presents itself. We know the species could interbreed, which is what matters to us now, not whether their taxa is three words or two (which is what this boils down to, some people write one way, some people the other and both know what each other is saying)by throwup238
4/18/2026 at 3:15:51 PM
> now refer to neanderthals as Homo sapiens neanderthalensisWhat do you mean "now", they definitely were called that 30 years ago, when I first learned about them
by usrnm
4/18/2026 at 10:34:43 AM
So have humans. There are white, red, black, brown, yellow people, and they live in their own happy places on the planet, except for the fact that we now move them around by plane, boat and goat.by abc123abc123
4/18/2026 at 1:41:50 AM
How about Taraxacum officinale, the common dandelion?It’s not quite all across the globe but pretty close, and is so adapted that it is not considered invasive any more in most places.
by showerst
4/18/2026 at 2:26:26 AM
Or, it's equally invasive everywhere.by chrisweekly
4/18/2026 at 10:12:11 AM
Lol everywhere there are manicured lawns?by cwmoore
4/18/2026 at 8:55:35 AM
[dead]by redsocksfan45
4/18/2026 at 12:59:45 AM
They have to be. The snail darter is genetically identical to another animal and is a separate species. Most likely different humans are as well.by renewiltord
4/18/2026 at 11:58:15 AM
I think subspecies is: "doesn't generally interbreed" and "generally lives apart"by liveoneggs
4/18/2026 at 12:47:44 AM
Humans have, obviously. Just interbreeding with ancient species was enough to do it, even without separate evolution.by erichocean
4/18/2026 at 12:15:03 AM
Dogs?by meroes
4/18/2026 at 12:20:27 AM
Aren't dogs technically one species?by paulryanrogers
4/18/2026 at 12:51:09 AM
This distinction seems more arbitrary over time. Growing up I was taught different species couldn’t interbreed. But what about Neanderthal and Sapiens?by hooo
4/18/2026 at 2:31:08 AM
Funny tangent: this comic has strong feelings about such distinctions, using "dog" as the canonical example:by chrisweekly
4/18/2026 at 12:24:41 AM
I don't think you could have chosen a worse example. Dogs are themselves a subspecies, and are split into many different breeds, of wildly different character and physiology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog#Taxonomyby like_any_other
4/18/2026 at 12:57:50 AM
Breeds and species are different things. Parent post is making a (very good) point that dogs can pretty much all breed with one another.by idiotsecant
4/18/2026 at 1:14:42 AM
> ...distinct but able to interbreedI mean people won't like the idea but that's not my point; what you describe variety in superficial traits while maintaining common traits
Applied to humans; skin color, eyes, dwarfism, hypertrichosis... can still interbreed
When it comes to categorization and taxonomy in leaky abstractions like languages the boundaries get a bit hand wavy and usually land on whatever fits the prevailing social desirability bias of the day
by yabutlivnWoods
4/18/2026 at 1:33:20 AM
> you describe variety in superficial traitsThe same selection pressures that produced the variety of "superficial" traits also act on "non-superficial" traits - nature does not recognize this distinction.
by like_any_other
4/18/2026 at 1:56:37 AM
You cherry picked one idea from my post. I was not addressing nature but human social tropes.What is a subspecies and species is random gibberish of the living humans
by yabutlivnWoods
4/18/2026 at 2:06:14 AM
We dont categorize humans that way; not because humans are different but because of cultural norms.The generous idea is that "subspecies" does not provide an anthropologist a useful lens to look at humanity, therefore we do not classify.
The alternative is that "subspecies" is too close to "race" for scientists, publishers, and funding bodies to touch, so its deliberately ignored.
by SloppyDrive
4/18/2026 at 5:05:42 AM
I agree - cultural educating trumps scientific definitions.by verisimi
4/18/2026 at 9:36:08 AM
It’s not like those scientific definitions are particularly consistent or stable, though. In a large part it’s still a matter of convention when it comes to non human species as wellby vjjsejj
4/18/2026 at 5:44:59 PM
Science, or you, can make up whatever definitions they wish. The question is not if a definition is "true", but what it's useful for.Sure, you - or scientific authorities, whoever they might be - can declare that there are multiple modern human species. The question is, what are you intending to use that definition for?
That applies to other branches of the tree of life, too. There's not some objective genetic distance measure which says what's a species and what is not. It can vary widely on different parts of the tree. But it's driven by pragmatism - sensible biologists will not waste time arguing whether some mushrooms should be one species or two, if they otherwise agree on the facts.
If you can't say plainly and clearly what the purpose of your delineation is, and it's in your own part of the tree, of course people are going to have their suspicions.
by vintermann
4/18/2026 at 5:15:27 PM
I think cultural norms enforced over generations can lead to altered genetic variability.by scotty79