Re:We haven’t seen a quarter of known bee species since the ...
by xipho on Wednesday February 24, 2021 @02:27PM
(#26254429)
Well, I'm 99% sure you're trolling at this point. So that this ad-hominen is allowed on this website I'll clarify to others why so that they might not fall into the same trap.
Your argument comes down to "one counter example proves I'm right". For those of you who want to see a quintesential source of this type of argument go look at the evolution of the newsgroup talk.origins. There you can see a plethora of examples just like this.
Re:We haven’t seen a quarter of known bee species since the ...
by Blikkentrekker on Thursday February 25, 2021 @06:46PM
(#26269853)
> Your argument comes down to "one counter example proves I'm right".
Not only would that be a valid reasoning, but the number of counter examples is far from one.
Horizontal gene transfer is not something that happens only rarely, it is extremely common among bacteria and your model is based upon the assumption that it not happen.
To you, perhaps, but my point is that this is not how species are defined in practice.
There is no consistent way to define species, whatever specialist working with it will define it however he sees fit at the moment with little consistency, and different specialists will come to different conclusions as to A) how many species there are among any population of organisms and B) what organisms should be placed under what species.
> The cutting edge way of doing this is to look at the evolutionary distance between species and weight those species (sorry, sets of traits), that contain unique evolutionary tradjectories higher.
Given the extremely common occurrence of horizontal gene transfer in actual reality, the concept of “evolutionary distance” itself is a nonsensical one.