anotherfilthyape

Then should we not call the process speciation but populationization? Or something like that? Anyway, semantics aside... I have now to give my counterargument in the form of semi-rethorical questions; You see any merit in studying life forms by taxa (whether you study common properties among the same species or common properties among the same family or common properties among the same subspecies or common properties among the same order or so on? Do you see any value in that or do you hold that every study for animals must be done in the population level? So far it seems you only consider that population is what has to be analysed in the subject of speciation but you have left open the possibility that in other fields their is a use for higher taxa? (by the way if populations are so pertinent they must be added to the taxonomic sistem as a taxa below subspecies, it must be data that common people can access too if they ever get interested to if we are to help humanity, I mean.. With the threats of obscurantism in the hands of religious zealots science and philosophy needs to be unified and more professionals should leave their desk and join the previous ranks of science popularizers and, furthermore, philosphy popularizers must arise too... Because only these fields of study; philosophy and science can save our future as... ¿a set of populations? although I guess that migration is so often in the human enviroment that you cannot treat cities as populations, you can? or you treat the whole of humanity as a single population? What do you do in regards to populations? how do the categorization of speciation by population behaves in relation to the mythology that we have races or to the more cultural than biological concept of ethnicities?) How many populations can a species have? How do you delimitate a population to determine it is not the same population as another population? I mean, when you say "this species is not the same species as that" you have phenotypical divergences to prove they are different species (my favourite argument against the impossibility of Noah's ark is that you would demand that a man that confuses a bat with a bird determines that a moon bear and a sun bear and a spectacled bear are not the same despite having little differences that can be recognized only when you have accepted they are different species and it also applies to determining that a donkey and a horse are not the same species despite being so closely alike... sidenote; all the examples I know of hybridization between species of animals prove that sterility is the common ground between different species and the reason why hybridization is not considered a factor for evolution like mutation is so that is why I would learn a lot of you mentioned me any species that produce hybrids that have the same chances of sterility as purebreeds... however this could be more an argument against splitting two populations into different species than an argument against considering that there is any value for speciation in the concept of species but species also show phenotypic patterns common between individuasl we lump in the same species and a similiar make up in their DNA print) Now I want... What do you use to say that individual A is not of population alpha but of population B? as far as I know pulations can sometimes find meeting places... Cannot they? and how many populations would a species have thus how many populations would compose the world? I already use the argument against the Noah's Ark that species on the world are too many (and many more are unknown) to expect that a primitive fool could have identified a couple of each and that his ship was big enough to hold them all despite the little time he had to built it and collect them. But I was sidetracking on other possible counterarguments... My interest to know is what solution you offer to ethologists and other people studying natural sciences like ecology or the relationship between humans and the animals they developed with throughout history or people studying any field of natural sciences where species or higher taxa are pertinent when they want to stablish a relationship between their field and the speciation process? Can people studying evolutionary psychology get far rather than obstaculized by the difficult of working with populations instead of species? You are right. I assumed however that "arbitrary" was not a technicism of scientists and thus it mean the same in the context of science as it meant in other contexts... What you say about scientific communication is also true about legal language and that kind of strict lack of "ambigousity" is something I which we could extend to every noun; only nouns; to have a scientific language to identify objects without ambigous nature, I mean, it is a problem when a word has one meaning in one dialect and another meaning in another dialect and a way more complex meaning on another language... It is what I wanted about morphology.... Anyway I will take your position now that arbitrary means "the boundary is a best guess"; Ok, the boundary is a best guess; Is not that true about everything about science? Everything about science is a best guess, you cannot be a good scientist without remembering two things 1.the problem of induction looms like the sword of Damocles over your head 2.Science is the field of analysing the past to make educated guesses to predict the future and prevent what you do not want and achieve what you do want and therefore it relies on being open to change the educated guesses as soon as it is proven necessary... Considering that, tell me; what is the meaningful difference between "best guess" and "educated guess"? Should we not consider species as valuable as populations? (Sidenote, Since we are now three people discussing these subjects and two of us have already manifested their academic background, what is your academic background Ringer? I want to know for mere curiosity)

Well, you are right but then the mistake is in the realms of communications; People learning to communicate better (from writers of any kind to public speakers an politicians) know that you use words based on their most common usage unless you want to exploit its flexibility in any way, either for fun or to twist the legal validity of the claim, that is why laws are worded with great effort and a very technical language in those places that do not use the common law... however, I must have you explain me what you say is any of my examples about "a single person making a claim", any claim, I need to understand what example you are refering to so I can explain (or better say, give deeper motivation) to how come it can or should invalidate what you call "the fact that the boundaries of taxa are arbitrarily decided"... So far I gotta say that the strongest realism has ever gotten has been when the concept of probability was deviced; rather than claiming that things are 100% real you assess a percentage bet on how real you think they are and you treat them as real if the chances are high... That is how modern science works (to circunvent the problem of induction) and how communication works (to understand a higher number of people)... That is why statistics is so meaningful; it does not give perfect resolution but it gives a proportionated solution... (For example, you trust condoms but we know that condoms are not 100% effective, but they are... good enough) Edit: I find your description of my example to be too vague to be sure which example you are referign to or, better said, to make me remember what example I could have given that fits that description...

I'm must disagree with you, arbitrary means it is decided by an arbiter, a referee, a judge... Someone that could do so out of mere whims... Arbitrary often implies that it indeed has been done out of pure whim... In this way what is arbitrary is rarely what is real... As by being arbitrary you can, on purpose, go against reality... For once I remember a guy that wanted to offend me so he arbitrarily claimed that everyone in my city and country lives in a straw house based on a photo he picked on the net despite it not being reality (where you life depends on how rich you are, poor people life in straw house but only the pporest of people, even the poor can sometimes afford brick houses)... I do not think that arbitrary oposes reality and I think nothing in reality is absolute... Everything is part of some continuum... by the way... I am confused... Ringer and Arete are different people? Aren't them? Because "ringer" can mean "postcript" in television if my memory serves right... and I was arguing with arete when a post came labeled "ringer" but then a guy or gal answered a question I needed solved and he or she used the name "ringer" and then again this time the answer is not a post after the post made by arete but after my post... I am confused...

Oh I see... then I was wrong to believe you knew a lot of the subject but that was not your specialty... You are licensed to be an authority in the matter yet accepting your word for that reason would be an ad verecundiam... Is your position favoured by the scientific community or is your position one you are proposing to be incorporated? Anyway, here I will tell you about many things you will consider mumbling if you do not read the whole text so please, read the following from the start to the finish; Between lumper and splitters there is a lot of opposition in any field where categorization is necessary... I'm not graduated yet but I hope you dont take this to underestimate my words ro dismiss me as uninformed... That would be ad hominem and ad verecundiam fallacies and prejudice... However I admit you may have more scientific knowledge on the subject than me but I can provide you with a philosophical perspective (I am non-graduated student of philosophy, my knowledge is greater on ontology, philosophy of language, gnoseology and philosophy of biology than on any other field yet I prefer ethics and politics and may create a field of philosophy dedicated to narrative and categorization so the acknowledging of the lumper and splitter debate is important for me)... In narrative we have clichés and similiar phenomenon that are called "tropes" by the best source of information about them I have ever found, the webpage "tv tropes". They too have lumpers and splitters that wanted to use less categories or split hairs... Wikipedia has an article for lumpers and splitters to (and wikieditors that want to lump every related article into one and wikieditors that want to split every article into more detailed articles)... Here is what wikipedia says on the subject: A "lumper" is an individual who takes a gestalt view of a definition, and assigns examples broadly, assuming that differences are not as important as signature similarities. A "splitter" is an individual who takes precise definitions, and creates new categories to classify samples that differ in key ways. Before that they present the same idea I am telling you; Lumping and splitting refers to a well-known problem in any discipline which has to place individual examples into rigorously defined categories. The lumper/splitter problem occurs when there is the need to create classifications and assign examples to them, for example schools of literature, biological taxa and so on. Wikipedia gives examples of the divide in the subjects of industry, biology, history, software modelling , language classification and liturgical studies but I can give further examples... Do you know the individualist and collectivist divide? Marxists are mostly collectivists (they champion equality at the cost of freedom), liberals are mostly individualists (they champion freedom at the cost of equality), neither get what they want (you cannot have freedom without equality and you cannot have equality without freedom)... Balance is necessary (ethics is very much shaped by the lumper/splitter or collectivist/individualist divide and I propose that neither position should we underestimated; altruism a lumper/collectivist position and egoism an individualist/splitter position, should be balanced according to my position; racism, classism, xenophobia, sexism and other such "me versus you" are other kind of intermediate position between lumping and splitting, they split humans by race/class/nationality/gender and lump individuals by the same categories, so you can see it is a double edged sword as you can do a negative balance of splitting and lumping, but you can go to the other extreme and lump everything as an animist would do and refuse to eat because any destruction is evil to you, then you would die from starvation as you can feed on air, and I have heard of a guy that actually died because he tried to eat nothing but air, it was in the news... in the opposite direction you can be an extremist splitter and follow Ayn Rand or, even worse, follow Ayn Rand with no concern for your future because "you are who you are now, you are not who you gonna be")... This is just a long foreword to an accusation I have against you, but take it as positive criticism; you are splitting lifeforms too much when you split them into populations... It is next to impossible to work as a biologist or a scientist of any pertinent field with creatures on the population and generation level. Think how absurd would it sould if I splitted things even further and claim that since each individual is a snowflake with unique genes (or in the case of a snowflake, unique shape) I preteneded to claim that I can survive doses of water that would make any person of my age and weight and physical condition suffer water poisoning... Would it be logical if I did that and proceeded to experiment on it? Think of the problem of induction, it is a criticism against lumping things too much, i.e. it claims that lumping the past into the future as to assume that the laws of reality are permanent is a mistake, however we still do science that pretty much assumes that there is no such problem of induction... Why do we do so? Because we are pragmatic; We need to act and we need to act on educated guesses because we know we are always really betting and guessing but we realize that an educated guess has a better cost-benefit nature than a random guess. What do we use for educated guesses? Empirism and rationalism well balanced... What are classifications of categories for? They are a bet and the bet is that we can get results from lumping or splitting something to some degree between one and another point of lumping/splitting... So sure, you can bet to divide creatures on the population level but think of the computing power it would demand on those studying life and its relationship to humans in the interest of the benefits of humanity? Lumping populations into species is much better according to a quick non-professional cost-benefit analysis and yet the lumping is not entirely arbiratry as you think, not more arbitrary than any use of language because emergence is a real phenomenon of nature... Rather than making myself the point on how lumping is not arbitrary I will refer you to the book that introduced me to the beauty of emergentism; "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter. There it shows how while ants are thought to be individually instinctual they can show some degree of intelligence on the collective level... How sociology, anthropology and such sciences that study human collectivies study something that only exist in the plural that emerges from interaction of the singular, how reducing all sciences to physics just because physics center on the founding particles of existence is a mistake... Because things do have meaningful existence as collectivities... Even if they are not touching each other which you can argues is the truth about all reality, at the subatomic level we are all quarks not in contact with each other... But are we just that? Are we just quarks? Are we the machine Descartes thought animals were? My favourite field in science is anthropology (comparative mythology) and ethology and I hope I can study them both eventually so I can get better justification for lumping humanity as a species in the name of promoting secular humanism (many marxist, despite their collectivist nature, tend to oppose such lumping, they claim that what works for Europe does not works for Peru because we have different cultures, they lump philosophers by nationality more than they do by philosophical position, which I find stupid, I think that a British rationalist has more in common with a French rationalist than a German empirist with a German rationalist, likewise they oppose the lumping of people beyond the class criteria, because most of marxists are dirt poor or slightly more wealthy and resent the wealthier people, personally I am a social democrat and I believe in direct democracy and in the importance of simple living and investing everything one does not really needs in the benefit of one's society, so I have many points in commong with marxists, we are both left, but I'm not that bloodthirsty; as I learnt more about world mythologies I realized how human nature is so meaningful similiar between people, I love animals and that is why I love ethology but I would specialize in lumping anthropology on ancient humans with ethology on modern primates if I got to study those careers... Polymaths in the past like Leonardo Da Vinci lumped fields even less connected to each other so why would I not be able to if I succeed?). Empiric evidence shows that sentience is a meaningful classification, psychologists, ethologists and those researching the possibility of inventing artificial intelligence are not following a study of fictional elements... And the fact we have conscience and are exclusively physical has motivated the debate of dualists and monists that argued over splitting mind/matter or not, those that lumped mind and matter, monists, were further divided whether to accept mind (Descartes in some extent, Berkeley and other idealists) or to reject it and find everything to be material (Descartes in some extent, Marx and his many followers and Julien Offray de La Mettrie and other materialists)... So think about species and see how meaningful it is, and by meaningful I mean "not exclusively arbitrary" or "not carelessly whimsical" or "useful for understanding, reaction and developing further knowledge and determining further action"... I should quote wikipedia again; The sorites paradox (from Greek:soureites, meaning "heaped up") is a paradox that arises from vague predicates. The paradox of the heap is an example of this paradox which arises when one considers a heap of sand, from which grains are individually removed. Is it still a heap when only one grain remains? If not, when did it change from a heap to a non-heap? The word "sorites" derives from the Greek word for heap. The paradox is so named because of its original characterization, attributed to Eubulides of Miletus. The paradox goes as follows: consider a heap of sand from which grains are individually removed. One might construct the argument, using premises, as follows: 1000000 grains of sand is a heap of sand (Premise 1) A heap of sand minus one grain is still a heap. (Premise 2) Repeated applications of Premise 2 (each time starting with one fewer grains), eventually forces one to accept the conclusion that a heap may be composed of just one grain of sand (and consequently, if one grain of sand is still a heap, then removing that one grain of sand to leave no grains at all still leaves a heap of sand; indeed a negative number of grains must also form a heap). Now wonder... Is not this solved by the premise that a heap of sand becomes such when a critical number of grains of sand are accumulated together as to hold them into the shape we have identified as a heap? Is not this meaningful and useful to determine the behaviour of a heap of sand versus the behaviour of scattered sand or oen grain of sand or sand in the beach in greater quantities than a heap? The same applies to the realism of intelligence and species... Are species arbitrary then? Not entirely because they are real... You know what is arbitrary? Calling a whale a fish, a bat a bird and an earthworm a snake, but before Linnaeus such classifications happened often (just read the bible or use the skeptic's annotated bible to find the lack of scientific rigor in the bible)... They are meaningless from a biological and genetic perspective but they are useful for an anthropological perspective and from an ecological perspective (If we had morphological categorization of animals we would know which niches relate better to which shapes, why the tasmanian devil looks so much like a canine, why not every aquatic mammal is as fish-like as whales and dolphins, I mean, just take a look at pinippeds, they are unique in shape, they dont look like amphibians or transitional species that life between water and earth, they have some common features but not all, this is what we can learn about ecology from inventing a morphological classification, for anthropology we can understand human interaction with animals and the role of animals by their niche and shape in human culture, the term "serpent" is already used in English for any creature, both real and mythical, that looks like a slender living cylinder, we can argue that dragons are a morphological-taxa above serpent because serpents can be dragons but dragons can be other than serpents) The coastline paradox and the ship of Theseus, Heraclitus' maxim "you never bath twice in the same river because the apparent second time you do so neither you nor the river are the same" and even Zeno's paradoxes relate to the lumping and splitting divide... By splitting too much Heraclitus believed that tempus fugit, pantha rhei, carpe diem and you should not accept the "you versus other" dichotomy because even the idea of such a "you" being real is a mistake... By realizing that empirism favours splitting and rationalism favours lumping Zeno argued that empirism is an illusion and only the mind exists... Plato followed his teachings very closely... Thanks Aristotle came and set the studies in line for science to appear or we would be living with the technology of ancient greece or worse and believing in topos uranus and other useless heavens... Maybe under the golden dictatorship Plato wanted us to have in The Republic... If you wonder the coastline paradox is the paradox that the shape of a coastline is different at different degrees of analysis (i.e different scales) while the ship of Theseus is the question whether the ship is still the same after you replace one of its constitutent elements for an equivalent and so on until every element has been replaced; Is the ship the same if the elements are new? Likewise the problem of the philosophical zombie (whether a person can show sentience but actually lack it) is related to a variant of the ship of Theseus, known as Swampman; Suppose Davidson goes hiking in the swamp and is struck and killed by a lightning bolt. At the same time, nearby in the swamp another lightning bolt spontaneously rearranges a bunch of molecules such that, entirely by coincidence, they take on exactly the same form that Davidson's body had at the moment of his untimely death. This being, whom Davidson terms 'Swampman', has, of course, a brain which is structurally identical to that which Davidson had, and will thus, presumably, behave exactly as Davidson would have. He will walk out of the swamp, return to Davidson's office at Berkeley, and write the same essays he would have written; he will interact like an amicable person with all of Davidson's friends and family, and so forth. Donald Davidson, in his 1987 paper "Knowing One's Own Mind" wrote these words and then claimed "it can't recognize anything, because it never recognized anything in the first place." refering to the swampman as "it" instead of as "him" But I guess he did not read Hofstadter's book (that was published earlier in time, like 8 years or so I think)... You know Star Trek? I hope you do because I will take my example from an episode of The Next Generation and an episode of Deep Space Nine... You know they have "transporters", machines that do on purpose what coincidence did on Davidson's swampan thought experiment... William Thomas Riker, a character known in the older series as a commander and the right hand man of the captain of the spaceship where the adventure happens, was accidentally duplicated when he was still a lieutenant, the duplication meant that one of his two bodies lived for eight years stranded alone in a harsh planet and the other duplicate continued to ascend in ranks until he became the right hand man of a captain (and in future works a captain himself)... Which one is the real William Thomas Riker? At the time of the accident neither, and every second thereafter both were progressively growing into a newer character... One was known as William Riker and, for eight years, the other one was totally unknown so there was no one to give him a name and therefore he lost the right to the name William and instead became Thomas Riker... They further differentiated over time; William kept loyal to the federation and rised to captain, Thomas joined some rebels... Why do I give this solution to the swampman problem and the ship of Theseus? Because a person is not his body but his mind, even if his mind is just a codified organization of matter, this all has to do with the solution I give to the problem of lumping and splitting; critical mass. So this all relates to your splitting species to the population level... It can be a valid taxa (I advice you to propose populations as a subtaxa, below subspecies if you are so confident of their meaningful nature) but it is not a reason to disregard the value of species as a taxa (species are meaningful in genetics and biology and in ethology, what you learn about one horse applies equally well to a horse of a different population if you study them from the fields of genetics, biology or ethology)... For instance I favour the taxa of species but I acknowledge that the higher taxas are useful too (therefore I want to lump ethology and comparative mythology which I think is a form of anthropology that studies the instincts and primitive drives of humans; because I think I can learn about humans from studying animals and specially primates and other hominids)... But the origina poster asked whether we have examples of common ancestors and even you agree we have them; dogs and modern wolves have ancient wolves as common ancestors... the line in paranthesis should read "and wikieditors that want to lump every related article into one and wikieditors that want to split every article into more detailed articles, they call them mergists and separatists"

<BR><BR>Well, if I were a genius polymath that could understand every science to enough depth to avoid being acused of not being realistic by those who specialize in any pertinent field... I would be writing hard sci fi because I think that literature is better about the impossible made probable through means of realistic storytelling... But since I lack the skills for hard-sci-fi and I hate soft sci-fi... I try to justify anything that science cannot explain by the use of magic, in the end result I write in the genre of science fantasy rather than science fiction... I still try to use science whenever I can but when I want that science is becoming a obstacle for storytelling I allow "a wizard did it" as an escape and thus I claim science is about rules and magic about exceptions... So if you wonder... Yep I try to be very realistic until I am making exceptions that in-story are justified by magic and out of story by the need of narrative flexibility... <BR><BR>Edit: THANKS For the info!

Ok, now I understand you, well I don't think species is an artificial and meaningless classification, no do taxonomists and most evolutionary scientists nor do anyone that understands emergentism

But who is speaking about populations? I am speaking about taxa, taxa down to the smallest taxa; subspecies... Human subspecies do not exist but wolf subspecies do exist and my great grandparent may belong to a different generation and a different population (half of my great grandparents are Italian if not more than that, one is Scottish and I am Peruvian and mostly of Spanish ancestry but we are all human) but he belongs to the same species/taxa... Well, yeah, plants can go through different processes but in that regards they still apply as more resistant to time... I did not know however that the more a plant can survive the later it reproduces, from an ecological collective perspective its logical but from a evolutionary individualistic perspective it makes no sense, however if scientific evidence corroborates their is an average constant proportion or some small range between life expectancy and reproductive maturity for plants I cannot argue otherwise but instead mention tardigrades and other extremophiles that have been known to lay dormant for many years and then, when the conditions allowed, get back to life, such creatures could survive to coexist with their evolutionary descendants...

I was designing the atmosphere of the homeworld of a species that is used to has lungs that make use of both oxygen and nitrogen, but for different things... They breath like us but also benefit from nitrogen (they can survive between 5 months and less than 4 years in our atmosphere but with ngeative consequences after 5 months or so of not breathing nitrogen) and this meant they had to have much more nitrogen in their atmosphere which meant I had to sacrifice oxygen because argon and carbon dioxide are almost non-existent and since carbon dioxed is a waste product of breathing oxygen and being carbon based I replaced argon with an unspecified nitrogen compound I called "nitrious waste"... But I do not know how would humans feel in their planet... Would they need oxygen tanks? Would it depend on the ethnia to which you belong and the altitude where you were born? So here is the 4 main gases in this artificial atmosphere: 89.10% nitrogen 10.89% oxygen 0.0088% nitrious waste 0.00037% carbon dioxide Please, can anyone be kind to me and, despite knowing that I am just wanting to use this for fiction tell me how much oxygen decreases with altitude? (I guess the question may belong to the realm of physics and chemistry nonetheless oxygen is a vital chemical for earthen life so it is also a question about ecology and the enviroment) At which height is the available oxygen about 10.89%? At a height lower than the height of the Everest? At a height lower than The Andes or the Alpes? How do humans fare with that amount of oxygen in the air they breath? (Note I'm considering the same atmospheric pressure as there is at sea level despite the planet is so large that it has 13 times the pull of the earth, it means if you go there with machinery to support your weight you would find that you weight 13 times what you weight on earth so it is necessary to use exosuits if you are human and want to be on it, but I prefer that breathing were not an additional demand on human visitors)

It is a matter of lifetimes, sad thing I'm more informed about animals than about trees I cannot provide examples but I bet it is viable for an ancestral population that evolved into a different kind of plant to exist simultaneously... The ancestral population would survive through centuries in the same place while isolated descendants would evolve into something esle... When I mentioned my great great grandparents I refered to them as an example of dead beings that I am pretty sure belong to the same species as me... Furthermore, to the same taxa...

That would then be a petitio principi because I am contesting the point one one and thus the point two is not accepted either

I'm not getting your point here... and I meant that the reduction ad absurdum was saying that chickens are fish (the delimitation of species is genetic, phenotypic, morphological, etc.)

I cannot contend your other arguments... I am not saying we consider contemporary species to be the same as their ancestors, only that they are the same to those ancestors that are phenotipically and genetically the same... But your point is reduction ad absurdum... I could apply it to your point too... Am I a different spcies from my paternal grandfather because he died before I was born? Am I and my family a different species than the grandparents of the grandparents of our great grandparents? My point is that ancestry for individuals means "earlier in the phylogenetic genalogic tree" and for species it is the same but with the added feature of "with genetic and phenotypic divergence big enough to consider them different species"; extinction or lack of it has no role on this definition nor it needs to have a role...

False? Only when you consider that my claim needs hybridization to reproduce sterile creatures more often than not... Tell me about hybrids that tend to be fertile rather than tenbding to be sterile and you can claim my point is false... I do not touch the case of plants becuase with them you can have chimnerization that makes it hard to determine when hybridization has produced fertile offspring or actually chimerization has happened. Ernst Mayr proposed that... Was his position accepted by every serious biologist (non-creationist by definition of course) or at least by the majority? How do you determine a metapopulation to be independetly evolving? How doy ou determine it is a metapopulation and not a population? Which dog breeds has this been tested with? Any of the toy dogs, lap dogs, purse dogs, micro dogs or mini dogs? I bet none of those are capable to survive in the wild on their own instinct and abilities or that they revert to anything like wolves... Maybe they take badger or rat-like characteristics but not wolf-like... Convergent evolution would probably result in thus as they are not fit to fill the niche of the true wolf. Have you evidence to the contrary? Actually, linguistically if your position were right we would call those "pre-wolves" because the word "wolf" is applied to the wolves as modern humans have known them, which are necessarily the same wolves that are living nowadays... But evolution cant be fast enough to give any sign of phenotypic change between pre-domestication wolves and current wolves and anyway, even then it does not matter, my position in this respect is that there is a known ancestor common to two taxas, that of wolves and dogs, (namely these taxas are subspecies or a type species and a subspecies). The problem is not that your position is not understood, the problem is that I do not believe it to be logically possible or to be true and I need evidence. I have never claimed that the dog is a different species, I have claimed it is a different and unique subespecies, a different taxa if you wish. Actually each breed should be considered a unique taxa (maybe a different infraspecies if the term is allowed as a taxa inside subspecies, sidenote, human races, a fiction, and human ethnias, an anthropological tool, would not qualify as infraspecies because hybridization is not flawed between human races or human ethnias but between dog breeds hybridization is flawed)... As for the claim that it is false that some breeds cannot have viable offspring with wolves I stand by this fact because I know for certain that some breeds; 1.Cannot have natural birth 2.Cannot survive pregnancy with a puppy from the other breed 3.Cannot impregnate some other breeds The reason for 2 and 3 is not genetic but what in tv tropes and bulbapedia is known as "hot skitty-on-wailord action", http://bulbapedia.bu....net/wiki/HSOWA so you see, you have the fictional idea of the extremely smalls eevee, rattata, seedot, skitty and diglett merging with wailord, these are all fictional creatures from pokemon franchise of which I found out by investigating on the subject of fiction on tv tropes... Common sense shows that equivalents would not work in real life... And your human-dog analogy is failed because male human dwarves are not incapable of fertilizing normal female humans and female human dwarves never have children with normal male humans (if I am wrong provide evidence to the contrary but men never fell in love with female dwarves but the way sexism is structured women do accept shorter, dwarven men as mates and partners because they do not care about looks as much as they care abotu personality and economical situation)... I dont remember the dog breed, boxers or bulldogs or some similiar dog breed cannot survive natural birth because of how their bodies are formed so they cannot produce offsprings with wolves unless artificial mingling is done... your human and dog analogy would be realistic if human variability were extreme as breed variability... If you had 13 cm tall human breeds and 4 meter tall human breeds, well, maybe we do not need that much height, lets heep the 2.72 m height maximum of real world humans and add a breed 13 cm tall... Even that would be sensible... But humans have no breeds, the 2.72 m tall human is not that tall because he belongs to a special breed, he is that tall because his pitituay gland failed... The shortest human is not 54.6 cm tall because his breed tends to make people that short but because he was a random genetic mutation, a minor flaw, yet he would not inherit his height to his children. My assertion is not sci-fi, you have made your arguments with so much seriousness, you dont need to get offensive now by calling it Jurassic Park sci-fi (did ya get the idea from my mention of it before? So it seems),,, My assesrtion is a bet and speculation based on the idea that evolution takes too much time for aurochs to possibly be so genetically distinct from modern cattle as to prevent non-sterile hybridization between them. Yet, even as speculation I began defending the position I began defendign as criticism against the notion that an ancestor, to be such must be dead/extinct when the word "ancestor" both etymologically and historically (and by historically it means "up to these times") have always meant "that precedes in philogeny in a genealogical tree or philogenetic tree or taxonomic tree" not that it means "extinct/dead predecessor".

Which dogs? There are many breeds of dogs that would die if they mated with a wolf (if the dog breed is female) and many dog breeds where a male dog wont be able to fertilize a female wolf... Maybe the differences are physical and mechanical but not genetic, but they are still good enough to avoid this mingling... Now, I dont know if red junglefowl and chickens can mate or if wild pigs and domesticated pigs can mate. But now... If we "resurrected" aurochs through the same theory applied on Jurassic Park (cloning... with aurochs it is more feasible than with dinosaurs becuae their dna is easier to find) I bet they could mate with modern cattle succesfully, but we still consider aurochs to be ancestors of cattle (and the idea "aurochs are not extant so they can be considered ancestors" does apply with them)... Ancestry is between taxas of any kind... Species and subspecies, so it is moot point whether tehnically dogs and wolves are just differentiated in that dogs are a subspecies, wolves still are ancestors to dogs... It explains how you cannot pinpoint it, but not why ancestry should be just "extinct" species.

a). I understand that species are distinguished based on their ability to produce fertile offsprings one with each other, that is why I mentioned hybridization b).yes I know domestication is evolution at the fast lane but that is the same reason we can detect evolution happening at domestication so that is why I chose domesticated animals as examples... C)Wolves have not stopped evolving but since domestication is evolution in the fast lane the evolution of wolves, junglefowl and wild pigs is not fast enough to make the pre-domestication wolves significatnly different than current wolves, wild pigs and junglefowls... First a new species is such when it has outgrown the ten percent of the older species, second it is a different species when it cannot produce fertile hybrids with the parent species... Third, their must be some degree of uniqueness in its genotypes and phenotypes... Evolution in nature is too slow to allow for ancestors of domesticated animals (which have evolved faster by artificial selection) to have evolved into anything different than what they were when humans domesticated a portion and generated the domesticated spinoffs... Furthermore, in nature evolution has varying speeds depending on changes in the conditions and of migration to places with new conditions and isolation after migration... This means that a population can stay the same in the region it originated but evolve where it migrated to and thus the ancestor and descendant cohabit the same place. I dont know why Dmehlinh is defending my post but he is completly right about what he says... Mmmm... Is he the original poster? So he is defending his question? Are you the original poster Dmehlinh?

Ok but it does not need to happen in two generations... you can make a distinction between a polar bear and a sun bear... a distinction between a horse and a zebra, a distinction between a lion and a tiger, a distinction between a cat and a dog, a distinction between a bonobo and a human... you can determine they are different species becuase they are physically different and they are genetically different and of the pairs I have described only few of them can produce offsprings but these offsprings are necessarily infertile if not often infertile or infertile based on gender... Now... By definition of what "ancestor" means if you have a species from which another species or subespecies developed it does not matter whether the older species is extinct or not, it is the ancestor species... Wolves are ancestors of dogs... It does not matter if they are not extinct... by this logic it is perfectly valid to say that the red junglefowl is an ancestor of the chicken... The Sus scrofa is the ancestor of the Sus domesticus... Et cetera...

why cant an ancestor be such and be extant? My father and my grandparents are my ancestors even if they are alive when I am alive... So... Why could this not apply to species? It just makes no sense

out of my head I can think that the Doberman and the Shitzu both evolved from the wolf and the three are very different, but I guess that is easy because they are subespecies rather than species, but other taxa of recent speciation may also qualify, I jsut do not know which...

thanks for the answers and I had a list of 7 ancient species; Proconsul africanus, Ardipithecus ramidus, Nakalipithecus nakayamai, Aegyptopithecus zeuxis, Saadanius hijazensis, Pierolapithecus catalaunicus, Orrorin tugenensis, some of these are identified as ancestors of humans, I was searching for others that are more relevant to what I wanted to illustrate and those are the ones I asked for... thanks anyway, however now I wish experts came in to answer my questions...

the one I voiced the worst was "I am also searching for the latest common ancestor of gibbons and humans" because I did not specify "known"... but I know we can know for sure if X is the father of Y... So thriough your own claims and by extrapolatin I guess we could have a family tree for species... Cant we? Good enough to answer my questions, anyway, the link: " http://tolweb.org/Catarrhini/16293 " is not as deep as I had expected... Just checked what timetree is... It seems to be better at giving ages for time split but worse at giving ancestry (no naming of ancestors just calculations of splits)... And it lacks some famous species from its list (polar bear, true sharks, true piranhas, saltwater crocodiles, electric eels, etc) and some not so famous species (bili apes)... etc...

Charon, if so is the way things are... can you gimme the solution to my 8 original questions? The ones posted in my original post? Please...

mmm... So... how do we proof evolution is right with humans? I mean, I know creationism is just uuter garbagre and completly stupid but... If you cannot prove ancestry, how do we prove human evolution? And I find many species being refered to as ancestors of other species, rather than as cousin of said species' ancestors, both in Time Life and Wikipedia...

great list

Thanks Paul, I will try Edit: I tried and the link is not helping me, it fails to give any detailed info on human ancestors, I mean, it only show non-extinct species with the exception of cousin species that did not survive, it does not shows ancestors but cousin species...

After reading the wikipedia article on dogs I realized that they are way more valuable I had ever thought (I'm more a cat person, but nowadays, I am a cat and dog person), it so seems that human and dog evolution (dogs are technically still wolves and wolves evolved independently from humans, but they are also a subespecies and all their differences from wolves are evolved from their interaction with humanity) somehow influenced each other... Culturally and phenotypically both the domesticated wolf and the human developed the most succesful symbiosis of all... Human has domesticated other animals but none to the success and variety than dogs... Anyone knows profesional books on the subject? (From an evolutionary or anthropological/cultural perspective) I can check those in the wikipedia article but I want further reading too... And I prefer the less obscure books so I can find them more easily... Suggestions?