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Notes -
Experts: "Demagogues whipping up distrust in us is irrational, unfair and disruptive to progress."
Also experts: "We can now admit we made up an entire species 50 years ago in a bid to stop construction of a dam."
What is the actual definition of a species? Like we all learned in middle school biology that it’s two individuals can produce fertile offspring, but there’s tons and tons of fertile hybrids. By that definition a ton of genera would actually be species instead. Declaring this one population of fish a separate species is like the 10,000th most arbitrary decision in that regard. It’s not any worse to make it up so a dam doesn’t get built than that so you can name something after yourself, and these stupid fish aren’t inherently more valuable than some other stupid fish that happens to be part of a different species. They’re slightly different shades of minnows either way.
If anything, I react to this story less with ‘we should trust experts less, because they change the definition of species for political reasons’ and more with ‘we should introduce every species everywhere in the world simultaneously because species don’t matter for biodiversity. Τωι Κρατιστωι!’
*τωι. I guess I now know that you're one of the people who pronounces the ι sub/adscripts.
The Greek extension on my keyboard doesn’t allow subscripts. Edited for the omega.
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