On a chart section spanning around 5 million years, are you asking about the millions of years where there was “all this diversity and branching” as contrasted with the last ten thousand years or so where there is less observed branching?
That seems more likely statistical than ideological to me.
Totally agree. Unfortunately we are living in an age of mass stupidity’s volume overtaking critical thought and analysis by those who are truly educated. The amount of moon landing conspiracy theories I see online is deeply disturbing - some even going as far as suggesting space doesn’t even exist. Truly disturbing times.
meaning we're all the same? doubt. I know there have been bottlenecks, but they don't seem to have limited human variation among geographical groups. life tends to specialize very efficiently.
I don't think anyone can look at the incredible diversity of humans we have now and say they're all the same species, while looking at birds or other animals and say they deserve to all be different species. One of those trains of thought are wrong, and humans seem to be the outlier.
That said, I don't want to be the one to have to tell people they're another race. I think calling all humans the same race simplifies a lot of life, and there's no reason we can't treat ourselves differently.
I feel like you're conflating race/ethnicity with species when the two are completely separate concepts. There's a great amount of diversity between dog breeds, including wolves, but little disagreement that they are the same species. Variation between members of a certain species is expected
Isn't the general separation between species that they no longer can cleanly interbreed (generate fertile offsprings)? I'm no biology expert though, but I always thought this is how to separate things.
Humans of all kinds can breed and make new humans easily. Same for dogs... easily can breed with each other and increase diversity. So in both cases same species. But humans and chimpanzees? Probably not (albeit there are rumours? :) ), so different species.
Yes, but the difference also has to do with geography/preference. Brown and Polar bears can and do produce viable offspring, but because they're generally geographically separated we consider them separate species. Same for birds; many could mate but they choose not to (different mating calls, etc), and for that reason combined with different looks we classify them as separate species. Neanderthal, who are accepted as being a different species of human, interbred with humans before going extinct.
It's my opinion that if aliens visited earth 30k years ago and used our definition of the word, they would classify us as different species. To be clear I'm not advocating that we should refer to humans as different species, just that because we're capable of such advanced thought we should abide by different rules than we hold other animals to.
A species is defined by one simple thing: if individuals can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. There are complications related to ring species and few others, but they're not applicable here.
All human beings from all over the world can interbreed and their children will be fertile themselves (with the same rate of accidental infertility they would find in their own populations). As such, it would be completely preposterous to claim that there is more than one species of human on the planet today.
The definitional limit on interbreeding includes geography and preference; black/brown/polar bears can and do interbreed in captivity but because they live in different locations and they look sufficiently different/have different diets we consider them different species.
If Aliens landed on our earth 20k years ago and used our definition of the word there's no doubt in my mind they'd consider us different species, we'd be like bears. As far as I can tell the only reason we don't classify people as different species is for the sake of society, as people would naturally then try to determine differences and rank them, which has an obviously bad long-term outcome.
There are much better arguments that brown/polar/black bears should be considered a single species, and that they perhaps would be if they were first discovered today. It is true that the distinction between "two closely related species that diverged recently" and "two distantly related varieties of the same species that are diverging more and more" is quite vague and subjective - especially when there are large phenotypic differences.
However, few of these arguments apply to human populations. With the exception of dogs, cats and other domesticated animals, few or no other mammal populations that have diverged as recently as humans are categorized as separate species (for example, brown and polar bears have diverged ~600k years ago, before our species even existed). Human populations only began spreading out of Africa some 150k years ago, which is not a lot of time in evolutionary terms at all, for a mammal that only reproduces around 1/year and needs more than a decade between generations.
Not to mention, the separation between all human populations is merely geographical. When different human populations came into contact, even ones that had been isolated from each other for tens of thousands of years, they virtually always interbreeded in significant numbers, contrary to, say, wolf and dog populations. This is also a strong argument against considering distant human cousins different species.
Additionally, morphological variation among isolated human populations is actually quite small, compared to intra-population variation. Skin color is the single biggest morphological difference, by far; followed by the size/hardness of our hairs, especially the ones on the head. Apart from these, virtually all other differences are more about statistical prevalence of certain traits (e.g. blue eyes are more or less common in various populations, body hairyness is more common in some populations than others, tallness is more common, etc).
There is actually a substantial debate on whether wolves and dogs are the same species or separate, precisely because they produce fertile offspring so easily. While wolves are firmly identified as Canis lupus, you can find modern sources calling dogs both Canis familiaris (a separate species), and Canis lupus familiaris (a subspecies of wolf).
Probably the better example you could give is bears, where brown and polar bears are always considered separate species, but they do successfully interbreed, even in the wild occasionally.
The species concept is a little too vague, and essentially the difference between two closely related species and two distant varieties of the same species is fuzzy and often historically biased (if the two populations were considered separate species for a long time, there is large inertia against re-categorizing them as a single species when evidence of genetic similarity and interbreeding arises).
Please educate yourself about basic biological taxonomy before you accidentally and publically position yourself as a practitioner and champion of flawed race science.
If a group of humans gets isolated in an island, the moon, etc., experiences a population bottleneck and bigtime selection pressures, a new species might emerge after 500 generations (about 10,000 years).
Research is coming out specifically regarding the COVID genome which suggests missing sequence data was routinely filled in from baseline reference sequences. In turn, the reference sequences suggest during later analysis constant reversion back to the baseline. These gaps are the (dot) product of limitations of PCR * computer processing algorithms. No reason to believe the problem is limited to COVID.
Does this explain the conspiracy theories about “insertions”? When I looked into it, many other virus species had similar “insertions” - the problem seeming to be the sequencing itself not being accurate (as opposed to every viral disease being cooked up in a lab for the last 5,000 years)
The races roughly correspond to long-term biomes along longitudinal regions, meaning there are multiple races of black, white, and brown respectively.
There are Slavic white, who are in the same vertical slice (roughly, around water) as Arab brown and Ethiopian black, genetically.
Then there are western African black along another band that are closer to Irish and Scottish than some other black people.
There are white, black, and brown East Asians - the whole spectrum from North Korea and Japan down to Malaysia, Vietnam, and Samoan.
It’s not as simple as black, white, brown - this spectrum emerged multiple times in our evolution mostly due to climate patterns and differences in coastal vs inland, and cave vs outdoor, living conditions that relate to the weather.
Any large vertical region we inhabited in ancient times, with dark cold places in the north and hot sunny places along the equator with coastal and inland options, a racial spectrum like that would emerge over time.
As if to head them off, as if she could not bear the implications of their threat, Babette said pleasantly, “Why is it these UFOs are mostly seen upstate? The best sightings are upstate. People get abducted and taken aboard. Farmers see burn marks where saucers landed. A woman gives birth to a UFO baby, so she says. Always upstate.”
“That’s where the mountains are,” Denise said. “Spaceships can hide from radar or whatever.”
“Why are the mountains upstate?” Steffie said.
“Mountains are always upstate,” Denise told her. “This way the snow melts as planned in the spring and flows downhill to the reservoirs near the cities, which are kept in the lower end of the state for exactly this reason.”
I thought, momentarily, she might be right. It made a curious kind of sense. Or did it? Or was it totally crazy? There had to be large cities in the northern part of some states. Or were they just north of the border in the southern part of states just to the north? What she said could not be true and yet I had trouble, momentarily, disproving it. I could not name cities or mountains to disprove it. There had to be mountains in the southern part of some states. Or did they tend to be below the state line, in the northern part of states to the south? I tried to name state capitals, governors. How could there be a north below a south? Is this what I found confusing? Was this the crux of Denise’s error? Or was she somehow, eerily, right?
The radio said: “Excesses of salt, phosphorus, magnesium.”
The protagonist seems to believe that "upstate" must mean "in the north of the state", which it doesn't. It's completely true that wherever possible, cities will not be located in mountains.
Towle I. Clades, Grades, and the Genus Problem: A Case for Revising Hominin Taxonomy. Am J Biol Anthropol. 2026 Aug;190(4):e70344. doi: 10.1002/ajpa.70344. PMID: 42612121; PMCID: PMC13485234.
To me, the choices of names for clades seem like madness:
All apes (superfamily): Hominoidea; great apes (family): Hominidae; African great apes (subfamily): Homininae; Pan‐Homo clade (tribe): Hominini; human clade (subtribe): Hominina. [0]
The potential for error seems enormous, and also imagine speaking those words without creating confusion, or try forming singulars and possessives that, in text and speech, unambiguously identify the clade.
Can anyone on the inside shed insight on why they do this to themselves, and to everyone else who has even less understanding? Is it self-hate? Imagine a large codebase that named variables like that - there would be a lynching late one night when the bug was found to be confusion.
Despite my reaction, I guess there is some good reason that all these smart, experienced people make this choice.
That's just the established naming convention. For brown bears, you have parvorder Ursida, superfamily Ursoidea, family Ursidae, subfamily Ursinae, tribe Ursini, genus Ursus, and finally species Ursus arctos. When there are millions of taxonomic names, you want to establish some kind of regular structure, because you are going to run out of useful distinctive names.
What happened there? The normal thing would be for the species name to be identical with the genus name, but as far as I can tell Ursus ursus doesn't refer to anything. Why break into Greek?
Ask Linnaeus? Wikipedia has a picture of Linnaeus's 1735 taxonomy [1] giving what I think is Ursus ursus, Ursus coati, and Ursus wickhead, and the 10th edition in 1758 has Ursus arctos, Ursus luscus, Ursus meles, and Ursus lotor.
I don't know when it changed between the 1st and 10th editions, or why, and trying to read Latin taxonomical texts with many abbreviations makes my head hurt.
> I don't know when it changed between the 1st and 10th editions
If we're talking about Linnaeus's Systema Naturae, quite a bit: Binomial nomenclature wasn't included until the 10th edition, for example. And from an prominent 2015 paper [0]:
"In modern-day classifications, the starting point for botanical names is Linnaeus' Species Plantarum and for zoological names it is the tenth edition of the Systema Naturae."
> The normal thing would be for the species name to be identical with the genus name
What does this mean? Most species names differ from their genus name, for example Homo sapiens. But I suspect I misunderstand you.
Binomial nomenclature, the standard that was developed by Linnaeus (in the 10th edition cited by jcranmer), is Genus species, with the genus always capitalized and the species always plural - in case that is somehow relevant.
> Most species names differ from their genus name, for example Homo sapiens. But I suspect I misunderstand you.
A genus is typically named after a species. That species retains its name as the species name, and gets it again as the genus name.
So, for example, the Latin word for "toad" is bufo, and the name Bufo bufo went to the species that was considered the most standard, toadiest toad, which wikipedia still calls the "common toad" today. More exotic toads will be called Bufo [something weird].
Ursus arctos clearly has the same form; it's the Latin word for "bear" followed by... the Greek word for "bear". The normal thing would have been to name this species, the prototype for all bears, Ursus ursus.
Homo sapiens is a special case where we specifically wanted to say something nice about the species.
Thanks for explaining the naming of protypical species, though I think terms like 'typically', 'weird' and 'special case' overstate the case significantly. Though I'm not an expert in the field (maybe you are?), I encounter many binomial names and few where genus and species match. How does that reconcile?
Here are a list of common animals, and then a comprehensive encylopedia; notice that very few names match genus and species:
And while I'm thinking of it, among the most common binomial names - and most typical species - in science are Drosophila melanogaster, Caenorhabditis elegans, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Danio rerio, ..., though there is Mus musculus! Homo sapiens isn't a special case.
Honestly, you get used to it. I find hierarchial binomial/trinomial naming system used in biology a lot more clear than the TLAs so common in engineering. Half of the terms are pretty uncommon as well.
Clearly Homo idiotensis here is incapable of cultivating a factual ontology that would place it below the 'great apes' as the type species amongst amongst the 'asshole apes'.
52 comments
[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 21.8 ms ] threadThat seems more likely statistical than ideological to me.
That said, I don't want to be the one to have to tell people they're another race. I think calling all humans the same race simplifies a lot of life, and there's no reason we can't treat ourselves differently.
Humans of all kinds can breed and make new humans easily. Same for dogs... easily can breed with each other and increase diversity. So in both cases same species. But humans and chimpanzees? Probably not (albeit there are rumours? :) ), so different species.
It's my opinion that if aliens visited earth 30k years ago and used our definition of the word, they would classify us as different species. To be clear I'm not advocating that we should refer to humans as different species, just that because we're capable of such advanced thought we should abide by different rules than we hold other animals to.
All human beings from all over the world can interbreed and their children will be fertile themselves (with the same rate of accidental infertility they would find in their own populations). As such, it would be completely preposterous to claim that there is more than one species of human on the planet today.
If Aliens landed on our earth 20k years ago and used our definition of the word there's no doubt in my mind they'd consider us different species, we'd be like bears. As far as I can tell the only reason we don't classify people as different species is for the sake of society, as people would naturally then try to determine differences and rank them, which has an obviously bad long-term outcome.
However, few of these arguments apply to human populations. With the exception of dogs, cats and other domesticated animals, few or no other mammal populations that have diverged as recently as humans are categorized as separate species (for example, brown and polar bears have diverged ~600k years ago, before our species even existed). Human populations only began spreading out of Africa some 150k years ago, which is not a lot of time in evolutionary terms at all, for a mammal that only reproduces around 1/year and needs more than a decade between generations.
Not to mention, the separation between all human populations is merely geographical. When different human populations came into contact, even ones that had been isolated from each other for tens of thousands of years, they virtually always interbreeded in significant numbers, contrary to, say, wolf and dog populations. This is also a strong argument against considering distant human cousins different species.
Additionally, morphological variation among isolated human populations is actually quite small, compared to intra-population variation. Skin color is the single biggest morphological difference, by far; followed by the size/hardness of our hairs, especially the ones on the head. Apart from these, virtually all other differences are more about statistical prevalence of certain traits (e.g. blue eyes are more or less common in various populations, body hairyness is more common in some populations than others, tallness is more common, etc).
Probably the better example you could give is bears, where brown and polar bears are always considered separate species, but they do successfully interbreed, even in the wild occasionally.
The species concept is a little too vague, and essentially the difference between two closely related species and two distant varieties of the same species is fuzzy and often historically biased (if the two populations were considered separate species for a long time, there is large inertia against re-categorizing them as a single species when evidence of genetic similarity and interbreeding arises).
Two populations definitely do not belong to the same species if they generally can't interbreed even if they are morphologically identical.
ChatGPT helped me identify likely articles: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6a8a7e1c82308191be82762907a607de
There are Slavic white, who are in the same vertical slice (roughly, around water) as Arab brown and Ethiopian black, genetically.
Then there are western African black along another band that are closer to Irish and Scottish than some other black people.
There are white, black, and brown East Asians - the whole spectrum from North Korea and Japan down to Malaysia, Vietnam, and Samoan.
It’s not as simple as black, white, brown - this spectrum emerged multiple times in our evolution mostly due to climate patterns and differences in coastal vs inland, and cave vs outdoor, living conditions that relate to the weather.
Any large vertical region we inhabited in ancient times, with dark cold places in the north and hot sunny places along the equator with coastal and inland options, a racial spectrum like that would emerge over time.
“That’s where the mountains are,” Denise said. “Spaceships can hide from radar or whatever.”
“Why are the mountains upstate?” Steffie said.
“Mountains are always upstate,” Denise told her. “This way the snow melts as planned in the spring and flows downhill to the reservoirs near the cities, which are kept in the lower end of the state for exactly this reason.”
I thought, momentarily, she might be right. It made a curious kind of sense. Or did it? Or was it totally crazy? There had to be large cities in the northern part of some states. Or were they just north of the border in the southern part of states just to the north? What she said could not be true and yet I had trouble, momentarily, disproving it. I could not name cities or mountains to disprove it. There had to be mountains in the southern part of some states. Or did they tend to be below the state line, in the northern part of states to the south? I tried to name state capitals, governors. How could there be a north below a south? Is this what I found confusing? Was this the crux of Denise’s error? Or was she somehow, eerily, right?
The radio said: “Excesses of salt, phosphorus, magnesium.”
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13485234/
Towle I. Clades, Grades, and the Genus Problem: A Case for Revising Hominin Taxonomy. Am J Biol Anthropol. 2026 Aug;190(4):e70344. doi: 10.1002/ajpa.70344. PMID: 42612121; PMCID: PMC13485234.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.70344
All apes (superfamily): Hominoidea; great apes (family): Hominidae; African great apes (subfamily): Homininae; Pan‐Homo clade (tribe): Hominini; human clade (subtribe): Hominina. [0]
The potential for error seems enormous, and also imagine speaking those words without creating confusion, or try forming singulars and possessives that, in text and speech, unambiguously identify the clade.
Can anyone on the inside shed insight on why they do this to themselves, and to everyone else who has even less understanding? Is it self-hate? Imagine a large codebase that named variables like that - there would be a lynching late one night when the bug was found to be confusion.
Despite my reaction, I guess there is some good reason that all these smart, experienced people make this choice.
[0] From the paper the OP describes: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13485234/
[Sorry I never joke but surely the biologists were joking when they came up with that so it should be fair game]
A Roman walks into a bar and says, "Can I have a martinus?"
The bartender asks, "Don't you mean a martini?"
The Roman responds, "If I wanted a double, I would have asked for it."
What happened there? The normal thing would be for the species name to be identical with the genus name, but as far as I can tell Ursus ursus doesn't refer to anything. Why break into Greek?
I don't know when it changed between the 1st and 10th editions, or why, and trying to read Latin taxonomical texts with many abbreviations makes my head hurt.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Linnaeus...
If we're talking about Linnaeus's Systema Naturae, quite a bit: Binomial nomenclature wasn't included until the 10th edition, for example. And from an prominent 2015 paper [0]:
"In modern-day classifications, the starting point for botanical names is Linnaeus' Species Plantarum and for zoological names it is the tenth edition of the Systema Naturae."
[0] Michael A. Ruggiero, Dennis P. Gordon, et al. A Higher Level Classification of All Living Organisms. PloS One. (April 2015) https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... (see also this correction: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... )
The characteres generum column entry for Homo is Nosce te ipsum, "know thyself".
The scan is at a very low resolution for such a significant document. :(
What does this mean? Most species names differ from their genus name, for example Homo sapiens. But I suspect I misunderstand you.
Binomial nomenclature, the standard that was developed by Linnaeus (in the 10th edition cited by jcranmer), is Genus species, with the genus always capitalized and the species always plural - in case that is somehow relevant.
A genus is typically named after a species. That species retains its name as the species name, and gets it again as the genus name.
So, for example, the Latin word for "toad" is bufo, and the name Bufo bufo went to the species that was considered the most standard, toadiest toad, which wikipedia still calls the "common toad" today. More exotic toads will be called Bufo [something weird].
Ursus arctos clearly has the same form; it's the Latin word for "bear" followed by... the Greek word for "bear". The normal thing would have been to name this species, the prototype for all bears, Ursus ursus.
Homo sapiens is a special case where we specifically wanted to say something nice about the species.
Here are a list of common animals, and then a comprehensive encylopedia; notice that very few names match genus and species:
https://byjus.com/biology/scientific-names-of-animals-and-pl...
https://a-z-animals.com/animals/scientific/
And while I'm thinking of it, among the most common binomial names - and most typical species - in science are Drosophila melanogaster, Caenorhabditis elegans, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Danio rerio, ..., though there is Mus musculus! Homo sapiens isn't a special case.