Comment on Mom they're fighting again
nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 22 hours agoAre there not distinctions between sepcies that can interbreed? I remember learning from an anthro professor there are horses for examples that literally have different amounts of chromosomes that can interbreed fine. I still don’t see how that’s not also and arbitrary distinction I guess.
runner_g@lemmy.blahaj.zone 21 hours ago
While a little arbitrary, we use “ability to produce viable offspring” as a metric of speciation. Two animals can bone and create an offspring, but that offspring has to have live gametes (egg/sperm) for the parents to be considered the same species.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 15 hours ago
it’s not that arbitrary as you might think. genetics is literally all about mutating, mixing and recombining genes, and producing viable offspring together is a huge part of that. that is why the concept of species is so important.