Question: Are species real? I mean, if we resurrected every life

>>8923342
And the obligatory follow-up question: in humans, is race real? If so, what is it, like a further subdivision of homo sapiens??

>>8923342
Yes. They are just labels for convenience. Labels are constantly in flux. They are updated or removed in response to new information.

>>8923354
But then, isn't one of the 'litmus tests' of species that they can produce fertile offspring? Isn't that - as well as phylogenetics - a more valid approach to defining species?

>>8923353
So is race like a sub-species or what?

>>8923342

Species are not "real". The term "species" is a human construction that helps us classify animals. But it's very arbitrary.

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>>8923421
Yes
>>8923426
You sound just as retarded as the tumblrinas who play some pretty hardcore mental gymnastics to justify their claim that "gender is non-binary in human beings"

>>8923556
Question: I was playing this game where I found an object called a "Bow"?

Yet when I enter the action menu, there's a "Bow" which causes my character to sort of bend himself?

How can two things with the same name mean different things?

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>>8923342
No species are not real. Life is all the same thing. Genetic code and niche construction are a sort of "constrictive vitalism. Basically life is a system of constraints that allow the system to interpret and interact with the world, in order to survive and reproduce the system.
Pic related, a very simple representation of how I imagine life would look like In evolutionary time, it's missing space as a dimension and would have many, many more walks and layers

>>8923615
But the arrow of descent goes up, right?

>>8923556
He's not wrong. There is no precise definition of what distinguishes one species from another. Saying something is arbitrary is not to say it's meaningless.

So like at what point of genetic divergence does a new 'species' begin? If I took a lizard or monkey or whatever, how many base pairs would I need to change before I had a new species?

>>8923556
So race is enough genetic diversity to produce significant phenotypic variation, but not enough to prohibit interbreeding?

>>8923426
>But it's very arbitrary.
no it's not, you fuck. species are classified as such when they can't reproduce with others or at least can't produce viable offspring with each other. it's biological inherent in species, and as such not a human construct. just because we gave a name to it, doesn't suddenly make it 'human'. a flower isn't a human construct just because we gave it a name, you dumbfuck.
>>8923633
but he is. while people don't always agree on the finer points what makes a species, the general rules for them as stated above are accepted by the entire scientific community. don't lie.

And while we're on the subject, is there a good video of our current understanding of the line that led to humans, beginning with micro-organisms?

>>8923626
No down, the arrow is abiogenesis, the y axis is complexity and the x axis is time.
This is just for organismal living systems. Graphing multilayered networks for the evolution of higher and lower order life, like ecosystems and immune systems, is beyond my imagination.
That's why I'm learning set theory and so on until it's not. I told highschool to go fuck it's self and now I can't make intellectual contributions that I want to make. Just watch me do it with informal logic.
I don't think humans producing a unified theory of life is to too far in the future. Hopefully then people will get deep ecology, free life.

>>8923651
>species are classified as such when they can't reproduce with others or at least can't produce viable offspring with each other.
So infertile humans are a different species?

>>8923651
OP here. Let's try a thought experiment. Let's examine the evolutionary lineage of any (sexually dimorphic) animal. Each generation is like a card in a huge deck. Now, once we select a card, there are a certain number of cards forwards (in time) and backwards that it could breed with. But at a certain point, in either direction, it can't, right? So, species is arbitrary in the sense that we could pull out any card and say, 'this is a species', but not arbirary in the sense that, once we've selected a card and labeled it as a species, it does have a precise phylogenetic relationship to all the other cards?

>>8923651
A flower is a flower.
Don't you get it? It's all the same set [123...] where subsets produce unique patterns and introduce novel elements to the set by means of interacting with the world.
Mathfags please tell me why I am wrong I just briefly learned about set theory on math is fun yesterday. And I don't into logic yet so please no bully, maybe teach me how to say this right?

>>8923342
yes, species are real
the idea that a thing isn't real if it shades into another thing is called the fallacy of the heap and it's recognized since ancient times
imagine a bunch of hills with different numbers of trees on them: the first hill has one tree, the second has two, the third has three, etc. until the hills have hundreds of trees on them
which is the first hill that has a forest on it?
forests are real even though they gradually shade into non-forests

>>8923735
Yes, but I was thinking in more of the strict biological sense.

>>8923660
infertile humans are defective organisms, and seeing how the genome of them are the same as the majority of humans who can breed with each other, they are the same organisms. i really hope you are joking with this one.
>>8923674
i agree that species as a categorization isn't set in stone, but the phenomenon it categorizes is quite real. saying that it isn't because we used a label to differentiate based on that phenomenon is ridiculous.
>>8923677
We define 'species' as a category of a phenomenon that is already present. it has nothing to do with math, and everything with gradations of divergence. we class life in categories which are divergent enough to warrant a classification. take for example the domains. sure, prokaryotes, archea and Eukaryotes function similarly on fundamental mechanics, but the difference between them aren't non-existent just because we classed them. similarly how we called a flower a flower. a flower is classed as such with defining features.
sure, the categorization itself isn't fundamental and the levels it describes could be different, but they define a specific feature, which in species' case is inability to interbreed properly.

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>>8923762
Literally rolled my eyes. I was almost exclusively reading animal encyclopedias by the age of 4 and have continued to use a freakishly large pile of experience studying biology. I understand taxonomy very well. It's a useful catagory of reduction consider this analogy.
>dump pile of Legos in front of large group of childern
> each childern builds an undeniably unique invention
>all made out of the same Legos.
All life is the same life and is physically connected(strong connection with information, weak connection for energy and matter.
I was trying to use set theory to describe life as an interactive whole let's look at the organismal level.
[abcty...] where each element is a living systems
Subsystems [a,b] interact with eachother(which exist on a higher&lower order sets, ecological, cellular...) where novel traits emerge(which exist on lower & higher order sets (genetic ethological ecological,developmental) and organisms evolve, adding a new element to the set of organismal life.
I am trying to explain what a general theory of living systems would look like. At the highest order life would be a set of all the sets of lower order living systems(including interactions)
I am saying life is all the same thing and is a single mathematical structure with information as its quantum.