Comment on Mom they're fighting again
runner_g@lemmy.blahaj.zone 14 hours agoWhile 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 8 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.