wtf-r-species.bsky.social
natural historian, PhD Texas, native Londoner. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/taxome/jim (Profile pic from Mauro Cutrona https://facebook.com/profile.php?id=100006219407348)
94 posts
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156 following
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Hey 9yo! Mine’s 12! Less snuggly now ☹️
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Wow! How are you? Still in Mass.? Wot’s up with you? Yeah, I’m still here. Can private email with more news
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I checked, and me too! kiki.huh.harvard.edu/databases/bo...
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Apologies!
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The echo chamber is nearly impenetrable. People can now pick their own realities, and they do it without even thinking. Because the Comcast basic cable package comes with a 24/7 fascist infotainment channel.
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Thank you for your robotic inquiry! Maybe “Measles vaccine works!”?
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CO 2 pump handle is still on you tube. youtu.be/8KrgPPO1h0A?... this animation shows how carbon dioxide has been increasing in our atmosphere, and goes back hundreds of thousands of years through ice core data. It is a NOAA product, so it will be interesting to see if it gets censored
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I’ve used it for teaching too! But apparently it’s offline due to a planned server upgrade, so maybe we shouldn’t all jump to conspiracy theories just yet!
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Apparently it’s just due to a planned outage on the NOAA server and should be back in a few days! We’ll see!
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Should this North American icon, known to every school kid, be conserved under the “Endangered Species Act” of 1973? Hell yes! It has declined catastrophically even over the last 20 years. 3/3
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Is it even a species? No. It’s a migratory form of a largely tropical and subtropical butterfly. 2/3
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… and that species and varieties are the same sorts of things, contra Mayr. 2/2
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Well, I don’t think you have to decide on species delimitation exactly the same as my “revelation” on being asked that question by a student. But when you say “I’m not totally convinced…” I think you fall closer to Darwin’s argument for gaps between species, but not between “varieties” than Mayr 1/
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Here's the text on the homology of domesticated varieties and species:
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Teaching a course on speciation right now, where we discuss Mayr's view of Darwin, on which I have written. So I published my view of this in 2008: doi.org/10.1111/j.10...
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I’m not a grate punster myself. I’m British, and I think America is already grate, and it doesn’t need grateness thrust upon it by the feds
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Clearly, it should be a state-by-state issue!
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Kind of agree but your hyperlink didn’t work for me
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He’s going to make America grate again!
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Did you hear that Trump is going to ban packets of shredded cheese?
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To Darwin, and after this, to me, artificial selection is not just an analogy of natural selection, it is the same thing! Today we are steeped in ideas of "reproductive isolation" and "speciation barriers", but Darwin seems to have got it right all along 3/3
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ca. 1998 I had a revelation when after my explanation of what I thought species were in an undergrad lecture, a bright student asked: "well doesn't that mean dog breeds are different species?" And she was totally correct! THAT was exactly what Darwin was trying to argue in his book! 2/3
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Agreed it doesn't (see earlier reply). I think the same thing applies all the way to species. Corn is a different species from teosinte, because as well as being divergently selected in mates assortatively, mostly because of mutualism with humans, and human husbandry.
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True, in a way. We are of course very anthropocentric in our view of selection! By "natural" we mean "non-human-adapted." But "human-adapted," or "obligate human mutualists," expresses the same idea as "serpentine-adapted," I think.
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My small, cute, fluffy dog is highly adapted to her anthropogenic environment, but I always worry that a coyote will be on the loose and take her out one day. She has no defenses to aggression whatsoever! 2/2
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I agree with that in principle. However, I think you could say that artificial selection, by increasing qualities important for humans, is liable to decrease fitness important in non-human environments. 1/2
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I think I’d be more sympathetic to TikTok users if Chinese internet users had unfettered access to American programs like
Google
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chiton of some sort
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The Endangered Species Act of 1973 argues that "(16)
The term 'species' includes any subspecies of fish or wildlife or plants, and any distinct population segment of any species of vertebrate fish or wildlife which interbreeds when mature." So I think snail darters qualify.
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I'm somewhat mystified by this article, which I have perused. Allopatric taxa are always somewhat arbitrarily defined as species or subspecies, or even populations within subspecies. Is this paper seriously arguing that snail darters should not be conserved?
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Is glume in the scrabble dictionary? I guess not!
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We should talk rather than tweet, but my interpretation of speciation is based on natural history. Two problems with the Mayr/Coyne idea: 1. Not clear whether allopatric “species” ARE species. 2. Gene flow between sympatric, often non-sister species is common. Gene flow does not stop on speciation!
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Coming as I do from studying ecological races in insects, I am sympathetic with the view of your students! Reproductive isolation mostly arises as a by-product of divergence. I believe the Mayr/Coyne views that you espouse have it the wrong way round
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I totally agree! I wrote an essay on entropy-driven evolution in my u/g finals at Oxford, but the Profs didn’t like it! But I interpret Jenn to mean that this principle doesn’t mean energy wasting mammals like us are “improvements” on ektotherms.