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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2557 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 2, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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This scientific article on wolf species and subspecies spends several paragraphs discussing this issue. tl;dr: In modern taxonomy, ability to interbreed is only one of several factors that inform the definition of a species.

This is an eclectic approach that seeks to identify species as separate lineages supported by concordant data from various classes of genetic markers, morphometric analysis, behavior, and ecology.

Yeah, but the TLDR of that article is that canis lupus is not a grouping of common descent that includes every race of common descent from that particular ancestor. Very literally not a species under linnaean terminology. It's just a scientific name for a common name(wolf means 'big, pack hunting wild canid regardless of genetics' and that's fine, but the entire point of binomial nomenclature is to not do that)- and that genetically some wolves are more closely related to coyotes than to other wolves.

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