Killer Whales Are Evolving Into Two Different Species

I have good teeth and I eat sushi.

Does that make me a member of the new species Homo übermenschus?

Nuka said:

Oh look, it's THIS **** again.

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You have to admit it's amusing though. It's like watching that scene from the Simpsons where Homer is up a telephone pole (to get free cable or something, I forget) and says 'maybe the green wire' and is electrocuted and then goes 'maybe the red one' and is electrocuted again. And then, after a pause...

'Maybe if I try the green wire again'.

Makes me laugh. If the Simpsons ever discuss this issue, Homer would have to be a creationist, otherwise he wouldn't be as funny.

BananaSlug: if you're still looking for it, the paper is in Molecular Ecology, here.

UnionJack said:

unless of course there were less species originally and they evolved into other species. if the whale keeps evolving into whales, and cats only evolve into cats, where did the other species that were non existent when the big bang occured come from?

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You don't seem to understand what a "species" is. And I'm not talking about the difficulty of defining a species - an informal "folk biological" understanding would be more than enough to see the point here. A "cat" is not a species. A house cat, or a lion, or a clouded leopard, is a species.

If you find the statement that cats only evolve into cats absurd, replace "cats" with "vertebrates". Presumably, you are more used to thinking of cats as vertebrates than, say, cats as lobe-finned fish, but technically, both are equally correct. Things never evolve out of their ancestry. (To be fair, Linnaeus's original system didn't work like that; but Linnaeus knew nothing of evolution.)

Now, it's different with species and genera, for two reasons related to the way we label and define things.

First, species. Imagine a tree of life. Names like "cat", "whale" or "vertebrate" denote lineages: branches with all the twigs growing off them. A species in the most commonly used sense (see biological species concept) is NOT a lineage. It is defined by an ability to interbreed. Interbreeding would be a crossing of branches/twigs, so the moment a twig splits off a species, they cease to be the same species by this definition. In short, species DO evolve into other species, but that's an artefact of the way we define species.

As for genera, that's a remnant of the old classification system, and I think it lingers for good practical reasons. For one thing, we don't know most ancestor-descendant relationships down to the genus level due to limitations of the fossil record. Implementing a system where genera must be monophyletic would also make little difference in practice, as we'd probably keep using just the least inclusive lineages to label an individual species - exactly the way it happens now. You wouldn't call humans [long list of ancestors] Ardipithecus Australopithecus Homo sapiens because that's clumsy and unnecessary. You'd just stick with the good old Homo sapiens.

Washington said:

Your linked article by Jerry James Stone is an example of "A little learning is a dangerous thing," or, corrupt reporting, or most likely, both.

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Huh, and I thought the BBC article on the same was misleading... That one only said that Type 2 whales were more closely related to Antarctic whales than to their own neighbours. The article claims that one of the authors said this, but I find that hard to believe given that the paper quite clearly concludes that cetacean-eating races evolved independently in these regions. Seems like killer whales may be evolving into more than two species.

Oh well. I guess that only reinforces my long-held opinion of popular science reporting.

SithDoughnut said:

Very important you pay attention to that word. What you call 'macroevolution' (a nonsense term in itself) is just evolution (or the other stupid term 'microevolution') over a series of generations. With a tiny difference in each new generation.

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Well... or maybe not. No one actually knows for sure (This book has an interesting chapter on big change - unfortunately, a few pages are missing from the preview)

And please don't call these terms stupid. It makes my little biologist's heart weep. *theatrical sob*

Agonaces of Susa said:

I just read this ridiculous article.

For those who haven't read it, which I assume is everyone because it's useless Darwinist drivel, the article makes the claim that whales with bad teeth are a separate species from whales with good teeth because they have a different diet.

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Yeah, the paper in Molecular Ecology is a bit more sophisticated than that

Agonaces of Susa said:

I just read this ridiculous article.

For those who haven't read it, which I assume is everyone because it's useless Darwinist drivel, the article makes the claim that whales with bad teeth are a separate species from whales with good teeth because they have a different diet.

I guess that makes people with bad teeth who don't eat fish nonhuman.

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It is called sympatric speciation. A species living within the same geographical area diverges due to behavioral differences. I don't think they will be speciating any time soon (we all have to remember this was not a research article), yet the data is still interesting.

Here is the abstract from the research paper:

Ecological divergence has a central role in speciation and is therefore an important source of biodiversity. Studying the micro-evolutionary processes of ecological diversification at its early stages provides an opportunity for investigating the causative mechanisms and ecological conditions promoting divergence. Here we use morphological traits, nitrogen stable isotope ratios and tooth wear to characterize two disparate types of North Atlantic killer whale. We find a highly specialist type, which reaches up to 8.5 m in length and a generalist type which reaches up to 6.6 m in length. There is a single fixed genetic difference in the mtDNA control region between these types, indicating integrity of groupings and a shallow divergence. Phylogenetic analysis indicates this divergence is independent of similar ecological divergences in the Pacific and Antarctic. Niche-width in the generalist type is more strongly influenced by between-individual variation rather than within-individual variation in the composition of the diet. This first step to divergent specialization on different ecological resources provides a rare example of the ecological conditions at the early stages of adaptive radiation.


(Thanks to Naraoia for the article)


Of course the link only provided the abstract but if you were to email any one of the researchers I guarantee they would email you a copy free of charge. From what I gather on the abstract, it seems that this is in fact evidence for early speciation, especially if the two groups do not interbreed (thereby remaining reproductively isolated). There is a genetic difference between the two populations of orcas, along with differences in physiology and behavior. I would like to see if they continue diverging or if there are any instances of interbreeding between the groups.

BananaSlug said:

It is called sympatric speciation. A species living within the same geographical area diverges due to behavioral differences. I don't think they will be speciating any time soon (we all have to remember this was not a research article), yet the data is still interesting.

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AKA racism.

For your information, just because Africans, Asians, and Central Americans have a different diet from you, doesn't mean they aren't Homo sapiens sapiens.

Nice and simple;

If we were not able to interbreed with those from another race, where the offspring were not viable then yes, we would be seperate species. That would not be racism, that would be pure and simple fact that however hard we tried to interbreed the offspring would simply not be viable, either sterile or unable to survive fullterm/to adulthood/in the "natural" environment. It is likely that had we not continued to interbreed with each other from far flung continents we may indeed of become seperate species relevent to our continents, however we did not. Instead we merely adapted to our relevent environments.

It is why there was some debate over Polar Bears and Grizzlies, they can interbreed, their offspring is viable, and yet we are all holding onto them being completely seperate when it may be slightly more accurate to describe them as subspecies of each other. It was a delightful discussion that I really should find the link to.

What is it about this that is so objectionable? I'm genuinely curious.

<staff edit>

BananaSlug said:

(Thanks to Naraoia for the article)

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Always happy to help

Agonaces of Susa said:

AKA racism.

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...

Agonaces of Susa said:

AKA racism.

For your information, just because Africans, Asians, and Central Americans have a different diet from you, doesn't mean they aren't Homo sapiens sapiens.

*IMAGE OF DARWIN AND HITLER

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Dear Christ!
You better lay off those ad hominens and straw men.

Agonaces of Susa said:

AKA racism.

For your information, just because Africans, Asians, and Central Americans have a different diet from you, doesn't mean they aren't Homo sapiens sapiens.

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I really hope you are a Poe. Even AV isn't this ignorant.

If the different subsets of humanity had remained separate for a few more hundred thousand years we probably would be different species. What is the problem with that?

BananaSlug said:

I really hope you are a Poe. Even AV isn't this ignorant.

If the different subsets of humanity had remained separate for a few more hundred thousand years we probably would be different species. What is the problem with that?

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Do you claim that Africans, Asians, and Central Americans are separate species from Homo sapiens sapiens?

Agonaces of Susa said:

Do you claim that Africans, Asians, and Central Americans are separate species from Homo sapiens sapiens?

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Are you sometimes trying to read what you comment on, or are you simply not understanding what you read?

BananaSlug explicitly said that a few hundred thousand years more would be needed to have different "species" ...

Agonaces of Susa said:

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No. All living humans are 99.9% genetically similar. Any other questions?

gipsy said:

Are you sometimes trying to read what you comment on, or are you simply not understanding what you read?

BananaSlug explicitly said that a few hundred thousand years more would be needed to have different "species" ...

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FYI people have been living in Africa and Mexico for the past few hundred thousand years.

Despite Darwinist claims to the contrary, the people living there are not separate species. I can assure you.

Agonaces of Susa said:

FYI people have been living in Africa and Mexico for the past few hundred thousand years.

Despite Darwinist claims to the contrary, the people living there are not separate species. I can assure you.

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I'm no expert here I just wanted to point you to your apparent text blindness: "more" != "past"

Agonaces of Susa said:

FYI people have been living in Africa and Mexico for the past few hundred thousand years.

Despite Darwinist claims to the contrary, the people living there are not separate species. I can assure you.

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Show us proof of darwins contrary. (Excluding the full title of his book that has nothing to do with humans races, you would expect the book to be the same fashion if this was the case.)

Agonances of Susa said:

Do you claim that Africans, Asians, and Central Americans are separate species from Homo sapiens sapiens?

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Just to bring you up to speed, or at least a little closer to it, Homo sapiens sapiens isn't a species, but a subspecies.

Despite Darwinist claims to the contrary, the people living there [Africa and Mexico] are not separate species. I can assure you.

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I'd ask you for a source for this "Darwinist claim," but knowing none exists, I'm curious as to what prompts you to come up with such a thing?

pgp_protector said:

Saw this on Diggs, Reading it now, but thought I'd still share it. Killer Whales Are Evolving Into Two Different Species

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Each kind of animal has enough information programed into it to evolve (change) into an altered version that will survive in a deteriorating world. It may even cross the holy "SPECIES" bar that man has invented.

You can't burn off the end of a lever, have it evolve into a cam, and then into a wheel. There are functional limits to DNA evolution with the same constraints .....it won't work half-ashed.

SithDoughnut said:

And what happens when you have lots and lots of tiny differences over generations?

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We call that inherent variation in a population.
And it's all there at the start, and it degrades over time.

Just like ANY other engineered system in the world, it has valves and engines and movements. But just like any other engineered system in the world, it has inherent constraints. Some valves (chemical) can only be opened so far. Some processes can only do so much. Within the engineered limits, change (evolution) can take place.

Your "the tiny bits add up" has NO parallel in the known world. Nothing follows the model you propose. Not atomic structure, not chemical processes, not the orbit of the stars, nothing in engineering, ....nothing in the real world follows the model you propose as the foundation of all life.

So it's a foundational model without a foundation to back it up. Actually it was based on a false model of geological gradualism popular at the time. If it weren't for non-gradual factors in geology, we'd only have firewood to heat our homes at night.

SkyWriting said:

Within the engineered limits, change (evolution) can take place.

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What "Engineered limits"?