
Homo sapiens - apsec112
http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/136584/0
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deepnet
Georgina Mace, the redlist author, was just on BBC radio's _Life Scientific_

"Georgina Mace has devoted her Life Scientific to trying to limit the damage
to our planet's bio-diversity from this alarming loss. For ten years she
worked on the Red List of Threatened Species, developing a robust set of
scientific criteria for assessing the threat of extinction facing every
species on the planet. When the list was first published, she expected
resistance from big business; but not the vicious negative reaction she
received from many wildlife NGOS. Her careful quantitative analysis revealed
that charismatic animals, like the panda and the polar bear, are not
necessarily the most at risk."

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07jys1h](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07jys1h)

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chasing
My home is infested with humans. They're loud, they're smelly, and they leave
the toilet seats up.

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throwanem
Yeah, you've got to watch out for that. Once they reproduce, it can take
_decades_ to clear them out.

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TheSpiceIsLife
Surely the police can take them away after just 18 years?

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Camillo
Full Account -> Classifications -> Uses:

    
    
      Food - human
    
     Local : check 
    
      Sport hunting/specimen collecting
    
     Local : check
    

D:

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LeifCarrotson
Habitats - All "Suitable" except:

    
    
       0. Root -> 6. Rocky areas (eg. inland cliffs, mountain peaks)  
        Suitability: Marginal 

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russdill
Humans have the widest distribution of any terrestrial mammal species,
inhabiting every continent on earth (although there are no permanent
settlements on Antarctica). A small group of humans has been introduced to
space, where they inhabit the International Space Station.

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mrfusion
Wouldn't mice be everywhere humans are? Dogs too? Except the iss of course.

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akavi
Are there dogs at the antarctic research stations?

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undersuit
Not anymore, apparently the dogs were attacking the penguins.

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themgt
> Two countries, China and India, hold approximately one-third of the entire
> human population alone, with 1,318 million and 1,312 million people,
> respectively. The United States of America is third with 302 million.

This sort of "breaks the fourth wall" for me, using national boundaries
defined by human culture/civilization in a biological definition of humans.

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ekianjo
> currently no major threat to humans

Id say global nuclear war is a very real and very tangible threat to humans
and many other species around.

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blowski
Why are humans so obsessed with 'the end of the world'? In times of yore, we
predicted it using religious texts as evidence. Now we use science.

I'm not saying the science is wrong, just that there's a constant thread
throughout human history of worrying about it.

~~~
Cthulhu_
I don't mind it, as long as it's based on logic and actual possibilities
instead of a supernatural event that happens on a dat coming out of books if
you look at them in an adequately convoluted manner.

Global nuclear warfare would've happened by now if it wasn't for both the fear
of mutually assured destruction and global nuclear conventions, I think. And
sheer luck.

And preparing for an extinction-event sized asteroid isn't a bad idea either;
the chances of it occurring in our lifetime is small, but the chances of it
occurring again is 100%. The chances of people being able to detect it early
enough and do something about it are actually pretty high, in part due to the
fear of it happening again. Detection could still be better, of course.

~~~
sevenless
> Global nuclear warfare would've happened by now if it wasn't for both the
> fear of mutually assured destruction and global nuclear conventions, I
> think.

More like pure survivor bias on your part!

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Azy8BsKXVko
I love how this and the Wikipedia article have such neutral, scientific tones.
I understand why, but it makes it sound like an alien wrote it, and it's
amusing.

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Symmetry
I was sort of hoping they'd also have some of the other, extinct, species of
humans. But a search for _neanderthalis_ didn't turn up anything.

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JetSpiegel
Disappointed by the 'Image and External Links' tab, I was expecting porn.

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adamnemecek
Sounds like an invasive species.

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known
Just drop a
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermobaric_weapon](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermobaric_weapon)
in Antarctic ice sheets. You'll drown the world.
[http://qz.com/651615/a-melting-antartica-might-make-the-
seas...](http://qz.com/651615/a-melting-antartica-might-make-the-seas-rise-by-
much-much-more-than-we-thought/)

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musha68k
I didn't know about the Red List, just signed up with them - thanks for
sharing!

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sevenless
In the interests of conserving biodiversity, should it not also list the
different subspecies/ethnic groups, and report on their threatened status in
their native habitats?

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xenophonf
Technically, all living humans are of a single subspecies, Homo sapiens
sapiens.

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sevenless
I suspect that if we studied and classified humans in the same way we studied
a species of bird or beetle, we'd have no trouble identifying tens of
different subspecies based on fairly distinct phenotypes and geographic
distributions.

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xenophonf
I'm sure a proper taxonomist would be able to speak more authoritatively, but
I rather doubt it. Subspecies tend not to interbreed for whatever reason,
whether geographic isolation, sexual selection, or other factors, whereas
humans rather enthusiastically behave in the opposite fashion. I don't think
one could convincingly argue that humans are geographically isolated, either.
You might be able to make an argument that human races are akin to pet breeds,
but my understanding is that zoologists don't really consider pet breeds as
subspecies.

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jimmyk
>whereas humans rather enthusiastically behave in the opposite fashion.

What are the worldwide rates of interracial marriage? I see in the US (a
country where the majority race makes up about 60% of the population) that
it's now around 10% for new marriages, and has historically been much much
lower. If your statement were true, wouldn't we expect to see much higher
rates of interracial marriage than 10% in the US? Wouldn't we expect that the
historical rate was also much higher?

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bzbarsky
Please don't confuse interracial marriage (a social construct, and prevented
by law in many places in the US until 1967) with interracial breeding (the
thing that would matter for biological definitions). They can have very
different rates, and surely did in the US in the 18th and early 19th century.

~~~
jimmyk
I'm not suggesting they're the same thing at all. They're just the best
approximation I could quickly find any decent statistics for.

What were these higher rates you refer to? Were they as high as would be
expected if humans 'enthusiastically' interbred, or even as high as would be
expected if humans had no preference one way or the other?

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bzbarsky
OK, here's one sort of relevant statistic. 1910 census at
[http://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/36894832v1....](http://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/36894832v1.zip)
and you want 36894832v1ch02.pdf in there, page 5 in the PDF (which is page 129
of the actual census document). I got there via
[https://www.census.gov/prod/www/decennial.html](https://www.census.gov/prod/www/decennial.html)
if you want to look up other years.

According to that document, in 1890 (I chose that year because the document
actually clearly describes the classification criteria for that year, unlike
other years it mentions), the "Negro population" was 7.5 million, of which 1.1
million were "Mulatto" and 6.3 million were "Black" (there are some rounding
errors here; see document for more exact numbers). The definition used in that
census was that "Mulatto" only included people with at least one white
grandparent; this would obviously include the ones with a white parent as
well. This doesn't directly tell you anything about interbreeding rates per se
because there may have been systematic differences in the numbers of children
different types of couples had. But it does indicate that even in the 19th
century a fair number of children who had at least one black parent also had a
white parent. Somewhere between 1/14 and 1/7, if I'm running the numbers right
(the former corresponds to a "mulatto" having one "white" grandparent and
three "black" ones, while the latter corresponds to having a "white" parent
and a "black" parent).

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jimmyk
1/7 to 1/14 is incredibly low for a race that had been in close proximity to
another for over a hundred years. If there were no preference, or if there
were a positive preference for interbreeding, you'd expect by that time nearly
all descendants of the initial minority race to trace most of their ancestry
back to the majority race. That 6/7 to 13/14 of the members of the race can
trace back the vast majority of their heritage to the initial minority race is
proof that not much interbreeding was taking place.

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galori
phew

