>The search for the red wolf's origins have led scientists to a new theory about how evolution actually works
A close reading of the (beautiful) story shows that while the red wolf presents a nice narrative, there is little truth in this statement. It may have caused much hand-wringing among environmentalists, hunters, and government officials — an important conversation and issue in its own right — but scientists remain quite unsurprised. This is just another in a long-line of cases where "species" is hard to define. The old chestnut of "can't breed" doesn't work in all mammals, much less bacteria where horizontal gene transfer is common.
In terms of sequence, it's not as fun to look at, but the best example is probably E. coli. Across all of the E. coli strains only around 40% of the genome is shared in a "core" genome.[1] At first glance that makes no sense and probably says just as much about our characterization of bacterial species as it does our definition of bacterial species.
But, really, who cares? The article quotes Darwin:
>I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other
Which is essentially how scientists use it now. It's very convenient for categorization when it is, but often has no valuable meaning. You can (and should) say the same thing about the definition of life. Are viruses alive? It's an interesting question, but does it change anything? It's okay for some of the edges to be a bit blurry. The fluidity of "species" is, I think, one of the cooler aspects of modern biology. What better way to start teaching kids about evolution and the DNA that connects us all?
A close reading of the (beautiful) story shows that while the red wolf presents a nice narrative, there is little truth in this statement. It may have caused much hand-wringing among environmentalists, hunters, and government officials — an important conversation and issue in its own right — but scientists remain quite unsurprised. This is just another in a long-line of cases where "species" is hard to define. The old chestnut of "can't breed" doesn't work in all mammals, much less bacteria where horizontal gene transfer is common.
In terms of sequence, it's not as fun to look at, but the best example is probably E. coli. Across all of the E. coli strains only around 40% of the genome is shared in a "core" genome.[1] At first glance that makes no sense and probably says just as much about our characterization of bacterial species as it does our definition of bacterial species.
But, really, who cares? The article quotes Darwin:
>I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other
Which is essentially how scientists use it now. It's very convenient for categorization when it is, but often has no valuable meaning. You can (and should) say the same thing about the definition of life. Are viruses alive? It's an interesting question, but does it change anything? It's okay for some of the edges to be a bit blurry. The fluidity of "species" is, I think, one of the cooler aspects of modern biology. What better way to start teaching kids about evolution and the DNA that connects us all?
1: http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/jou...