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Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 4, 2023

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?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Species doesn't have a consistent definition, so we run the same risk here we do when we argue over questions like "what is a woman" in some metaphysical sense while neglecting any real object-level concerns. The argument for wolves, domesticated dogs, or coyotes being separate species cannot be made on the basis of infertility, but instead on "reproductive isolation" i.e. they don't commonly interbreed due to their different behavior and habitats.

By this logic, you could perhaps claim that the different human races were different species in the past when they did not intermarry often, but that today we are (with the exception of a few isolated tribes) one species because we form a single gene pool. I don't really know what that gets you though. Certainly the different human populations we mixed with in the distant past (Neanderthals, Denisovans, whatever we end up calling the ones in Africa) were more different from our ancestors than any two modern populations, so those could be more comfortably called distinct species or subspecies.

Ultimately there isn't ever going to be a neat way to divide things up to everyone's satisfaction here, no more than for what gender, the difference between language and dialect, or between a dumb LLM and an intelligent AI is.