"What's a Species, Anyways?"

"To environmentalists, the idea of letting the red wolf go extinct is simply unthinkable. But scientific research has complicated their standoff with local hunters and property owners. Since the red wolf was originally classified as an endangered species, biologists have studied it intensely—sequencing its DNA, scrutinizing its morphology, and piecing together its evolutionary history. And they’ve put forward a compelling new theory: The red wolf, an animal the U.S. government has spent decades and millions of dollars attempting to save from extinction, may not actually be a distinct species at all.

The implications of this idea extend far beyond the swamps and farms of North Carolina, threatening the very foundations of biology itself. “Not to have a natural unit such as the species would be to abandon a large part of biology into free fall, all the way from the ecosystem down to the organism,” the noted biologist and theorist E.O. Wilson wrote in his 1992 book The Diversity of Life . And yet, the research into the red wolf challenges our accepted notions about how species are defined—and about how evolution actually works...

Wayne and Jenks started with blood samples from red wolves living in captivity in American zoos, focusing on 4 percent of the genome. When they sequenced the DNA, however, they were mystified. Every section of red wolf DNA matched almost exactly with the equivalent section of DNA from two other animals: the gray wolf and the coyote. They found no part of the red wolf’s genome that was unique. “I kept running the analyses and checking and double-checking for contamination,” Jenks said. The conclusion, however, was inescapable. “Finally it occurred to me it would make sense that they’re hybrids,” Jenks said...

The Interior Department, charged with enforcing the Endangered Species Act, has reversed the government’s position several times over the years as to whether the law protects hybrids. Initially, the government adopted a general policy to “discourage conservation efforts for hybrids,” under the common notion that hybridization destroys species instead of creating them. Then, in 1990 Interior determined that “rigid standards should be revisited, because the issue of hybrids is more properly a biological issue than a legal one.”...

The idea of a species may be fundamental to biology; but science offers no precise definition of what a species actually is. Anyone can recognize a black bear and a cardinal as distinct animals, but what about two minnows scooped from separate ponds? For centuries, taxonomists delineated species based on morphology, ecology, and behavior, but there was never any standard method to their classifications... evolution helped biologists in the twentieth century land on what seemed like a firmer definition: A species was not simply a group of animals that looked alike, but rather a population whose members could reproduce only with each other... It was not until biologists gained the ability to examine animals’ DNA in the 1980s, though, that they began to discover that species do not always fit the categories that men have drawn around them...

Even human beings aren’t quite as distinct as we once thought. The genomes of European and East Asian peoples contain genetic material from long-extinct Neanderthals, indicating that hybridization has played a role in our own development as Homo sapiens."

https://newrepublic.com/article/124453/whats-species-anyways?mod=e2this

This really raises the question about what the value of a species classification IS, what it can tell us about (in this case) this wolf vs. that wolf. In biology, I might care about different species of lab animals if one has different properties from another that are relevant to my research (say, different versions of a gene, or only one has the behavior/disease I care about) but even within a given species, there is variation between lab strains. There has been a ton of interesting/troubling research about how even genetically identical lab mice, raised for a few generations in different labs, might have different biological characteristics. For example, mice that have been bred for generations in environments without exposure to seasons might have lost some of their circadian rhythm, so they can't be used for experiments about seasonality.

Anyway, we need a more rational and replicable system.

Related: nautilus one on evolution and chaos; another on commonly assumed thing finally being tested? If there is one besides Native Americans not having a gene for alcoholism; I feel like there was another one about how there is no such thing as a species

FB: "few would suggest jettisoning the concept of a species altogether: It is, as E.O. Wilson wrote, too fundamental to human ideas of nature. The difference would be recognizing that a species is a human construction rather than a biological reality—a shift in perspective that would, if anything, give conservationists more flexibility to pursue their goals."