100 extinctions per million species per year

Started by PopeyesPappy, September 04, 2014, 11:28:28 PM

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SGOS

I think part of the disagreement here is because taxonomy is not an easy thing.  Biological science as spent an inordinate amount of time classifying animals, only to reclassify them again and again.  A couple of times during the process, the system itself was redesigned, and the difficulty of classifying something still exists today.  As evolution speciates, it's a slow process and at first differences are not distinguishable.  Given time, the differences become more apparent.  Before we understood DNA, this was all done by observation, and identifying a species, or categorizing a living thing was pretty much nothing more than a judgment call.  This is why creationists consider it prudent to refer to "kinds" as taxonomic device. It still is a judgment call, although the rules are more widely accepted and agreed upon today.

So while we can quibble over whether two living things are in the same group or not, we are expected to accept a scientific consensus, which is much like agreeing on the definitions of words during debate.  Sure we can invent new meanings for the words, and we can arbitrarily announce that we don't separate bees into species of bees, but that would put ourselves on the idiosyncratic fringe, and out of touch by refusing to accept the common usage.  You can do this, sure, but it's kind of like being defiant or something.  Unless you believe you are right and everyone else is wrong, it doesn't offer much to the discussion.

Hydra009

Quote from: Solitary on September 08, 2014, 01:18:45 AMOK, so they are not the same species, and when someone talks about bees, then bees are a species when they can not interbreed unless it is with the same species?
Bees is a general term for thousands of species.

QuoteIt seems that bees are not a specific species, but more than one species that can't necessarily breed with each other. Right?
Yes.  In the same way that birds does not refer to a specific species but lots of different species.