the-pi-guy said:
It's entirely arguable whether neanderthalensis and homo sapiens are considered to be separate species. Which is why some call them homo sapiens neanderthalensis. "Short answer The concept of species is poorly defined and is often misleading. The concept of lineage is much more helpful. IMO, the only usefulness of this poorly defined concept that is the "species" is to have a common vocabulary for naming lineages. Note that Homo neanderthalis is sometimes (although it is rare) called H. sapiens neanderthalisthough highlighting that some would consider neanderthals and modern humans as being part of the same species. Long answerAre neanderthals and modern humans really considered different species? Often, yes they are considered as different species, neanderthals being called Homo neanderthalisand modern humans are being called Homo sapiens. However, some authors prefer to call neanderthals Homo sapiens neanderthalis and modern humans Homo sapiens sapiens, putting both lineages in the same species (but different subspecies). How common were interbreeding between H. sapiens and H. neanderthalis Please, have a look at @iayork's answer. The rest of the post is here to highlight that whether you consider H. sapiens and H. neanderthalisto be the same species or not is mainly a matter of personal preference given that the concept of species is mainly arbitrary. Short history of the concept of species To my knowledge, the concept of species has first been used in the antiquity. At this time, most people viewed species as a fixed entities, unable to change through time and without within population variance (see Aristotle and Plato's thoughts). For some reason we stuck to this concept even though it sometimes appears to not be very useful. Charles Darwin already understood that as he says in On the Origin of Species (see here)
You might also want to have a look at the post Why are there species instead of a continuum of various animals? Several definitions of species There are several definitions of species that yield me once again to argue that we should rather forget about this concept and just use the term lineage and use accurate description of the reproductive barriers or genetic/functional divergence between lineage rather than using this made-up word that is "species". I will below discuss the most commonly used definition (the one you cite) that is called the Biological species concept. Problems with the definition you cite
Only applies to species that reproduce sexually Of course, this definition only applies to lineages that use sexual reproduction. If we were to use this definition for asexual lineages, then every single individual would be its own species. In practice In general, everybody refers to this definition when talking about sexual lineages but IMO few people are correctly applying for practical reasons of communicating effectively. How low the fitness of the hybrids need to be? One has to arbitrarily define a limit of the minimal fitness (or maximal outbreeding depression) to get an accurate definition. Such boundary can be defined in absolute terms or in relative terms (relative to the fitness of the "parent lineages"). If, the hybrid has a fitness that is 100 times lower than any of the two parent lineages, then would you consider the two parent lineages to belong to the same species?" http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2010/05/pizzly_bears.html
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(that is why liberals are dishonest when it comes to the subject of genetics and should just stick to just climate science and it should instead be the alt-right that funds genetics research more often)Good post from the-pi-guy! Nice shades of grey :D
And nice to know that fatslob thinks that I am marxist ideologist :D I don´t really know why that is? Maybe fatslob knows more than I do? Did you secretly take a dna sample to see whether I´m more "western" finn or "eastern" finn? Or how did you make that assumption?
I think that science should be done objectively and not to suit some agenda. The whole race thing should maybe be taken out of taxonomy and replaced with another word, as it creates too many misunderstanding etc.
Maybe race as a social construct has too much influence and differiating biology and social construct of race seems to be hard. If we would go by genes and to force some sort biological races of white, black, asian etc. then many blacks would be white and many whites would be black and so on. It would not match our perception of races that well, especially in USA (where race seem to be of importance).
