Comment on What actually came first? The chicken or the egg?

• guy@piefed.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Sure, and since that means that there can be no new species unless they magically appear, there is only one species on this planet. Just very.. varying

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  • hperrin@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Ok, let me put it another way. Green and red are clearly different colors, right? But if you make a gradient where the green smoothly transitions to the red, there isn’t one single point where it changes from “green” to “red”. This doesn’t mean that the two colors on the ends aren’t completely different colors, it means that when you look at every pixel, they’re almost exactly the same color as the pixel next to them.

    Different species exist. Speciation is a thing. I’m not claiming otherwise. But creatures don’t birth a species other than their own. It takes many many many generations over eons of time for a population to speciate. Speciation is something that happens to populations, not individuals.

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    • rikudou@lemmings.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Funny you mention colours, you can very easily determine the point where it’s more green than red.

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      • hperrin@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Maybe if you examine the hex codes, but what if it’s paint? And what do you call that color in the middle? Is it green? Or red? Or neither? Something in between? What if the lighting conditions mess with it?

        Species aren’t measured digitally, so the metaphor isn’t perfect, but I hope you can see what I mean by it. My bigger point is that speciation happens on a population level, not an individual level. Parents don’t have children of a different species. Populations evolve into different species.

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