
What an Extinct Bird Re-Evolving Says About “Species” - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/what-an-extinct-bird-re_evolving-says-about-species
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throwaway13337
Convergent evolution is fascinating.

Environments produce animals in some way and a similar environment will cause
similar animals to evolve again given time.

New Zealand's kiwi is a bird version of a mouse because mice weren't around to
fill that niche.

There are many examples that are bafflingly similar yet share very distant
common ancestors:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_examples_of_converge...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_examples_of_convergent_evolution)

Makes you wonder if the sci fi with human looking aliens is not so far off.

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cortesoft
The difficulty of defining a ‘species’ reminds me of one of my favorite essays
about how we categorize things.

[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aMHq4mA2PHSM2TMoH/the-
catego...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aMHq4mA2PHSM2TMoH/the-categories-
were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories)

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mrec
See also:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevole...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolent_Knowledge)

(Which I also discovered via Scott, as it happens.)

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ChuckMcM
Just wait until the start re-evolving back into dinosaur form, then you are
really going to be in trouble :-). I believe there is probably a good
fictional short story involving a scheme to remove CO2 from the air to fight
climate change, having it go amok and instead result in a second "oxygenation
event"[1] making very large animals practical again from an energy conversion
standpoint.

[1]
[https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event)

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Something1234
If anyone finds a story like that I would be very interested.

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dmix
> This raises an interesting question: Can birds on different branches of the
> evolutionary tree really be part of the same species? The answer depends on
> what you mean by “species.” This is the species problem, one of philosophy
> of biology’s persistent demons. As it turns out, it is difficult (and some
> would argue, impossible) to conceptualize species in a way that fully, and
> without exception, captures what it is that makes a group of organisms one
> species and not another.

I’ve always found clicking through species pages on Wikipedia to see the
variations of different animals and the often surprising ways they are
interconnected.

It seems like an incredibly hard thing to get right as the categorization
constantly changes as more and more DNA analysis disrupts the old lines.

I’d be interested in reading the history of this labelling system and how it
evolved. There might be some connection to software and language itself.

