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At 23:12 -0800 1/21/06, Bernard Cleyet wrote:cut
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I was told different species can't produce fertile offspring. II don't think this is either a necessary or sufficient condition for
suspect in the course of change a time comes when there are two
lineages that, tho mating would be successful, don't mate because
they "look ugly" to each other (metaphor). At this point change will
accelerate to the point they are "really" different species.
defining a species. It certainly is rather difficult to verify if we
are talking about species definition from the fossil record, since we
have no examples that we can point to and claim that they can or
cannot produce fertile offspring.
I believe that I have read about organism that have been asserted to
be different species (a difficult task among closely related
specimens) even though they did produce fertile offspring.
I remember a novel from, I think, sometime in the 50s or maybe a bit
earlier, called "The Missing Link," in which a variety of humanoid
simians is discovered on Borneo, or somewhere like that, that seems
to be so closely related to humans that it was questioned if this was
the missing link between apes and humans. To attempt to settle the
issue, one of the scientists impregnates a female, who gives birth
and then the scientists kill the infant. They are tried for murder
and the argument they make in their defense was that the infant was
not a human, and so it could not be murdered. I don't remember how it
turns out. It's an interesting premise, but I doubt if it has any
scientific validity.
Hugh
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Hugh Haskell
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