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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   26489 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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Experts: "Demagogues whipping up distrust in us is irrational, unfair and disruptive to progress."

Also experts: "We can now admit we made up an entire species 50 years ago in a bid to stop construction of a dam."

Jimmy Carter signed a bill that exempted the Tellico Dam from the Endangered Species Act.

I remember seeing political cartoons about this from the 70s, but never heard about the resolution.

I wonder if articles like this are a sign that the green profiteering-through-subsidies wing has finally had enough of the green profiteering-through-lawfare wing. The Inflation Guarantee Act had more than enough billions for both teams: everyone could have been paid a respectable upper-middle-class wage to not build solar farms while filing EPA claims and counterclaims for eternity, never having to stoop to doing declasse productive work for money. And so far that's how it's gone, with all the money vanishing into a black hole.

Maybe a few people are actually interested in getting something done for once

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman

Anyone remember Red Wolves?

Pepperidge Farm remembers! Critically endangered, then died out, then reappeared because it's just what happens when a wolf fucks a coyote.

I was terrified as a kid when Ranger Rick magazine lead me to believe that their impending extinction would extend to all life on earth via the acid rain!

I just did a bunch of red wolf googling and the mainstream position is that red wolves are a separate species and not gray or eastern wolves mixed with coyotes. For one thing, red wolves predate gray wolves in North America.

Red wolves are part coyote and coyotes are part red wolf. There's some amount of mixing between them.

Much of my own skepticism about the evironmental movement comes from a childhood spent reading Ranger Rick, and a good enough memory to remember the predictions it made.

The Boy Who Cried (Endangered Species of) Wolf?

Is it a consensual situation between a wolf and a coyote bitch, or is it a stronger predator forcing himself on a weaker one?

Both wolves and coyotes raise their pups with high-paternal-investment models, so it seems unlikely the odd rape baby would result in a breeding population.

Uh, are you talking about the wrong animal? Red wolves were critically endangered, captured from the last remaining population in Louisiana, and then released in North Carolina after a captive breeding program. They're still critically endangered today. Whether this is a problem or not is a different matter, but the conventional story is basically accurate.

Coywolves are a different thing.

No, I'm not. And no, they're not.

The red wolf's taxonomic classification as being a separate species has been contentious for nearly a century, being classified either as a subspecies of the gray wolf Canis lupus rufus,[9][10] or a coywolf (a genetic admixture of wolf and coyote)

Uh, red wolves are definitely a coherent group in the wild.

I oftentimes wonder just how much microfauna taxonomy is fake. Like, this particular decision had major historical consequences, but the average guy doing minnow or crawfish taxonomy can probably get away with classifying whatever he finds in some obscure South American tributary as a new species without anyone calling him out on it. Are there actually 30,000 species of scarab beetle out there? All of the ones I ever see look the same.

At a broad guess, all of it.

I remember reading once about a particular 'species' of fish that was only found in a specific pond. Basically, it was an inbred version of another species that got stuck by the pond losing its connection to a larger body of water. The author noncritically repeated the argument by the researcher that it was important to save this species.

y tho

It seems arbitrary that we get to decide that all species must be preserved as they are now. Extinction and speciation are integral to how evolution functions. How can we justify trying to preserve the animal kingdom in aspic? Especially when the preservation mostly takes the form of preventing us from building anything.

That said, we obviously need to be preserving the cool ones. It would be a tragedy to lose any more charismatic megafauna.

The charismatic megafauna are the ones that most need to go! They make much more impressive trophies for humanity. We've accomplished so little in the "driving species to extinction" field in so long. We're close to getting some rhino species, but some others are still doing just fine.

Honestly, keeping them alive in an age of technology is the more impressive feat. We live in an age where we can fly into the air, destroy cities, or reduce a mountain to its raw materials. The live rhino is a more impressive trophy than a dead one.

It seems arbitrary that we get to decide that all species must be preserved as they are now. Extinction and speciation are integral to how evolution functions. How can we justify trying to preserve the animal kingdom in aspic? Especially when the preservation mostly takes the form of preventing us from building anything.

It feels remarkably similar in some ways to First Nations: whatever land a given tribe/confederation occupied at the time of contact with Europeans becomes permanently and historically theirs--like a game of Civ ending at an arbitrary cutoff year, then that save state being imported to the expansion/sequel. Doesn't matter when a people took possession of a given tract of land, or who might have been there prior.

I think the same. The old method of setting who owns what tended to resolve conflicts fairly quickly. Your lands are the ones you’re strong enough to keep. If you can’t they belong to whoever can. The reason so much of the world is stable is because their borders were formed before international busybodies could interfere in the natural order.

The problem with that method is that, as armaments technology advanced over the XIX and XX centuries, warfare became increasingly destructive to bystanders who had been minding their own business until their governments decided that they needed a distraction from their own inadequacies.

...are you implying that warfare was better for civilian bystanders in premodern times? I'm under quite the opposite impression.

From the perspective of 1945? Yes.

The upside is that such borders tend to be stable and since they fight to victory or defeat once the war ends the defeated are unlikely to continue rearming to retake territory that they lost substantial men attempting to defend or take. Once the war ends, it’s mostly over.

Like the war over Alsace-Lorraine was over in 1871?

Or Germany, in 1918?

Where exactly in the process of European development do you see that occurring?

Is it permanently and historically theirs, or do you just mean that sometimes people will say that this is “X group” land historically and then go about their business as normal?

The latter. Although I'm still hoping someone/a tribe files a formal lawsuit based on a Land Acknowledgement, preferably incorporating the phrase "put up or shut up."

What determines what a species is, turns out to be rather arbitrary and quite controversial within the field

Independently evolving metapopulation. Still a lot of grey area, but mostly because we can't really measure it very well. Ecological function is often more important anyway for conservation goals.

What's funny to me is that all the "splitters" magically become "lumpers" when we're talking about hominids

@The_Nybbler replied to you above:

Extant hominids, anyway. I don't think it affects the arguments over the Neanderthal or whether H. Habilis and H. Erectus are the same species.

I'm kind of replying to you both. West Africans (and other Sub-Saharan Africans) have an estimated 2%-19% of their genome derived from an archaic hominin ghost population, a population less related to modern humans than Neanderthals or Denisovans (both of whom have introgressed into modern humans, especially Eurasians). That is, this ghost population split from the modern human line prior to Neanderthals and Denisovans.

As this ghost population gets better characterized genetically (or maybe even fossily, but fossils are tough to get in Sub-Saharan Africa) and the admixture percentage in Sub-Saharan Africans is better ascertained, I suspect that there will be an increased push to consider this ghost population as a sapiens subspecies or population (and thus Neanderthals and Denisovans would get lumped in, as well), especially if the admixture percentage from this ghost population in Sub-Saharan Africans is in the mid-single digits or higher.

Can't have Sub-Saharan Africans with the most archaic non-sapiens admixture, especially from an even more distantly related member of Homo.

I mean, clearly all three of these species were capable of producing fertile offspring with H sapiens, that's how the genetics got into the populations. Calling everything one species is therefore following the actual definition of a species.

That's a definition of species (or at least a variant of one), albeit arguably the most popular definition. I'd likely recite a similar definition if I got suddenly cold-called by God. However, see the Wikipedia article on Species I also linked to you elsewhere in the thread for more definitions. There are many cross-species hybrids that can produce fertile descendants, and sometimes even cross-genera hybrids as well.

Several feline taxa are capable of hybridization. The Chausie is fully fertile by the fourth generation, but the jungle cat and the domestic cat remain separate species.

The serval and the domestic cat are in different genera, but can hybridize to make the Savannah cat. Female hybrids are fertile right off the bat, and male hybrids can be fertile by the fifth generation.

Beefalo are fertile. Most Bison herds are actually partially descended from cattle. Yet not only do bison and cattle remain in separate species, they remain in different genera.

Grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) and polar bears (Ursus maritimus) can produce fertile female offspring; it has yet to be seen if they can produce fertile male offspring. Brown bears in general are also partially descended from polar bears.

Although hybrids can likely be had via IVF, it's doubtful if unadmixed Great Danes and Chihuahuas can mate due to the massive size and anatomical differences between them. Some on the internet claim that any photos of Great Dane-Chihuahua offspring are all—or at least mostly—hoaxes. Nonetheless, Great Danes and Chihuahuas are not only considered firmly within the same species, they're considered firmly within the same subspecies.

Speaking of canines, wolves produce fertile hybrids with species such as the coyote and golden jackal. Additionally:

In the distant past, there was gene flow between African wolves, golden jackals, and grey wolves. The African wolf is a descendant of a genetically admixed canid of 72% wolf and 28% Ethiopian wolf ancestry. One African wolf from the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula showed admixture with Middle Eastern grey wolves and dogs. There is evidence of gene flow between golden jackals and Middle Eastern wolves, less so with European and Asian wolves, and least with North American wolves.

Yet, grey wolves, golden jackals, and African wolves are all considered separate species.

And these were just examples using some more familiar animals. So producing fertile offspring does not appear to be a sufficient condition for being considered the same species (and perhaps for genus too); it may not even be a necessary one. To circle-back to the original Homo example, Neanderthals are still "generally regarded as a distinct species", thus likewise for Denisovans. Hence, if race can be dismissed as merely a social construct (except when justifying racial preferences and income/wealth transfers to benefit fashionable minorities at the expense of everyone else)—then so can species—where the social construction aspect is subject to fads, politics, convention, group-think, and outright invention (as in the case discussed by OP).

As a side note—it's funny how, at least within mammals, male hybrids look to have a much rougher go at reproducing than female hybrids. The male burden of performance is not unique to modern humans.

I know there are multigenational ligers. Just keep breeding the mixed females with pure tigers or lions. I don't know if someone is trying to make a stable fully fertile hybrid population.

I was thinking about including ligers/tigons, but I already had multiple examples so I de-prioritized ligers/tigons, and ended up not getting around to them for the reason you mentioned: males have been established to be sterile with a fair degree of certainty.

I went with the grizzly/polar bear example, since at least two female hybrids have been shown to be fertile (in the wild, no less!), it's merely unknown if male hybrids are fertile or not, and brown bears are partially descended from polar bears.

It also made me chuckle that you mentioned ligers but not tigons. Ligers (lion father, tiger mother [not that kind of tiger mother]) are more famous than tigons (lion mother, tiger father), likely due to the large body size of ligers (larger than both lions and tigers, whereas tigons aren't any larger [and may be smaller] than lions and tigers).

Life must be rough for male tigons. Small, infertile, and forgotten, while female tigons, ligers, lions, and tigers put in their Panthera dating profiles: "Don't bother if you're under 10' or 1,000 lbs."

However, it's noteworthy that lions and tigers are able to produce fertile female offspring as it is. They diverged about 4 million years ago. Lions are actually more closely related to leopard and jaguars than they are to tigers and snow leopards; tigers are more closely related to snow leopards than they are to lions + leopards + jaguars. Humans and chimpanzees split about 5.5 million years ago.

As a side note—it's funny how, at least within mammals, male hybrids look to have a much rougher go at reproducing than female hybrids. The male burden of performance is not unique to modern humans.

Not an expert, but I’d imagine this has to do with the male only having one copy of certain genes due to XY while the female has two.

It's indeed a thing called Haldane's Rule:

Haldane himself described the rule as:

"When in the F1 offspring of two different animal races one sex is absent, rare, or sterile, that sex is the heterozygous sex (heterogametic sex)."

Most mammals abide by the XX-XY system, where males with the XY are the heterogametic sex.

West Africans (and other Sub-Saharan Africans) have an estimated 2%-19% of their genome derived from an archaic hominin ghost population.

Really? Could you provide me with some further reading?

Neanderthals or Denisovans (both of whom have introgressed into modern humans, especially Eurasians)

IIRC, Denisovan admixture is only significant among Austronesians, though East Asians have a tiny amount.

Interbreeding between archaic and modern humans, summarizes Neanderthal, Denisovan, and African ghost population admixture.

Current state of affairs suggests Melanesians and some other populations in Australasia have about 4%-6% Denisovan DNA on top of the 1%-4% Neanderthal DNA of Eurasians in general.

This is not twitter/X, we are not looking for quick hot takes that dunk on the people you don't like. This is not a good top level post.

Add more context and add more of your personal interpretation.

Forgot mod hat?

Yes

Bonobos are a similarly fake species. They used to just be regarded as a subspecies of or geographically distinct group of chimps. They were invented to create a species of “woke” or “feminist” chimps that scientists could claim represent what human ancestors were like because chimps are too warlike and patriarchal. This is a redpill most simply aren’t ready for.

I don't know if this statement is true or not, but if you're going to post things this outside the mainstream thinking, you need to bring more evidence than name-calling.

This is a redpill most simply aren’t ready for.

As polite feedback, I think your post would be better without this sentence and that this is almost universally true about this sentence.

I interpreted it as an ironic joke, along the lines of 'billions must die'. Just casually throwing that in at the end.

Skimming the link, at least it seems like both the dam is there and the minnows aren't extinct.

This further undermines the environmental protection position, right? They invented a fake species to try to stop a dam from being built, the dam got build, and the fake species still lives there. At some point, it's more charitable to think that the "conservationists" here are a bunch of liars that just want to stop things from being built than the alternative, which is that they aren't capable of identifying species and have no idea whether the species they just invented will even be impacted.

At some point, it's more charitable to think that the "conservationists" here are a bunch of liars that just want to stop things from being built than the alternative, which is that they aren't capable of identifying species and have no idea whether the species they just invented will even be impacted.

It is never more charitable to call someone a liar than honestly mistaken. More accurate perhaps, but not more charitable.

Never?

I don't buy it. If I'm watching a football game with a huge fan of a team and they express some opinion about a call that's just super obviously wrong, I think it's more charitable to say, "dude, you're a homer" than it is to say, "you don't understand the basics of the rules here".

First, your example doesn't work because being a homer isn't lying. But yes, never. Being charitable is assuming the best of someone, and it is worse to be a liar than to be honest but wrong (or even honest but incompetent).

I think being a homer is pretty analogous to the snail darter situation. The person involved probably does intellectually realize that they're playing fast and loose with the facts, but they want it to be true and they're willing to sand off any rough edges around the facts to get where they want to go.

Depending on the circumstance, there are definitely things where I would prefer that my interlocutor thinks I'm bullshitting them for personal gain than that they think I'm just such a simpleton that I don't grasp the facts. I unironically think it's more of a show of respect to say, "I think you don't really believe that and are making an instrumental argument" than saying, "I think you're incredibly stupid".

I definitely disagree on that, but I think that this simply comes down to a difference in values. Your conclusion follows reasonably from your premises, I just can't agree with your premises at all.

Yep, just an expensive and futile deceit.

We can now admit we made up an entire species 50 years ago in a bid to stop construction of a dam.

What is the actual definition of a species? Like we all learned in middle school biology that it’s two individuals can produce fertile offspring, but there’s tons and tons of fertile hybrids. By that definition a ton of genera would actually be species instead. Declaring this one population of fish a separate species is like the 10,000th most arbitrary decision in that regard. It’s not any worse to make it up so a dam doesn’t get built than that so you can name something after yourself, and these stupid fish aren’t inherently more valuable than some other stupid fish that happens to be part of a different species. They’re slightly different shades of minnows either way.

If anything, I react to this story less with ‘we should trust experts less, because they change the definition of species for political reasons’ and more with ‘we should introduce every species everywhere in the world simultaneously because species don’t matter for biodiversity. Τωι Κρατιστωι!’

*τωι. I guess I now know that you're one of the people who pronounces the ι sub/adscripts.

The Greek extension on my keyboard doesn’t allow subscripts. Edited for the omega.

A breed with an army and a navy, or so it is said.

And Yiddish is just German with https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/XtremeKoolLetterz.

A joke. I do agree with your statement.

No joke, I once saw an “In this house we believe…” sign that said (among other left-ish takes) “German is a Yiddish dialect”

From my memories of school long ago: it's actually really ambiguous. There are populations of birds where subgroup A produces fertile offspring with subgroup B. And B with C. And C with D. A and D can not or almost always can not produce fertile offspring. Are A and D members of the same species? By a simple definition of species: no. But they sometimes breed with birds that could breed with the opposite group. So this group of birds is more of a spectrum than a set of objective species.

Anyways, sure, someone could maliciously declare these to be a number of distinct species and then try to block construction and development efforts because of the rare "species".

There are populations of birds where subgroup A produces fertile offspring with subgroup B. And B with C. And C with D. A and D can not or almost always can not produce fertile offspring.

Ring Species.

The one you remember from school is probably the Larus gull (that’s the first example I can recall hearing about), but apparently has since been disputed. Among birds, the… great tit… is another alleged but disputed example.

I wonder if there are populations where A can breed with B, ..., Y can with Z, and Z can with A, but A can't breed with M. In theory it seems possible.

In some sense, every species is a ring species, except through the temporal dimension instead of spatial ones. Leaves in the present can't interbreed, but there's a continuum through time connecting the leaves.

For it to be a true ring, though, some future iteration of the species would have to be able to interbreed with one of the past ones.

What is the actual definition of a species?

There are a lot of definitions of species. I just looked up the Species article on Wikipedia and it's even longer and more muddled than my recollection of the last time I looked it up.

Blank slatists love to claim that race is a social construct. As I mentioned before, species are a social construct, just as race is. In that comment, I also discussed conservationists as isolated fans of splitting.

species are a social construct

To nitpick, the granularity of borders is, but different levels of differentiation is clearly natural, not just social.

The same is true about race.

If you keep talking to a constructivist, eventually they'll admit that all "X is a social construct" means is that it's a human-created category. There being something natural / physical behind a classification doesn't diminish it's social-constructivenesss. The term has no meaning beyond that, but they love that the way it's formulated implies that you could reshape physical reality by changing enough peoples' minds.

Which is a shame, because there are actually valid insights and applications of constructivism in its more limited forms. In the international relations context, constructivism is one of the few 'major' IR theories that recognizes the role of actors as individuals acting according to individual perspectives, and thus able to analyze/predict why key actors would go against a realist/institutionalist paradigm. Things like the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea make considerably more sense from a cultural analysis of a warlord than a state-interest approach.

The prescriptions may be, well, prescriptive- we can change people's perceptions if we do Y so they no longer feel it right to do undesirable thing X- but it also serves as an often much-needed counterpoint to the theories that kindly gloss over individuals as existing at all (realism, institutionalism, etc.) in the name of simplifying the model. People exist. People make crucial decisions. How they make decisions is shaped by what they value in subjective contexts, and those subjective perspectives can change. There's nothing particularly controversial about such limited claims.

It's just that it is as prone to misuse / taken to its absurdist extremes as any other. 'Reshape physical reality by changing enough people's minds' is a fair critique, as is the 'your attempts of social engineering don't necessarily convey the new cultural norm you want them to'- like how the cultural norm of making exceptions to standard values in favor of the favored groups is less 'it is right to favor the favored group' and more 'those standard values aren't actually standards.'

The same is true about race.

Of course.

I suppose I would point to a difference between this (drawing boundaries) and something that seems to be a bit more radically a social construct, like literature or law.

It gets even worse once you start speculating things that adapt quickly and/or perform direct DNA transfer without reproduction, like bacteria.

The definition of species should probably be restricted to animals, plants, and fungi; it's impossible to draw clear boundaries around bacteria and viruses.

Yikes, how uninclusive. Bigot and eukaryote supremacist detected.

It's kind of wild that animals and fungi being more closely related to each other than to plants apparently wasn't determined until the early to mid 90s.

It’s not any worse to make it up so a dam doesn’t get built than that so you can name something after yourself

What?

Preventing a dam getting built prevents thousands of people from having jobs, megawatts of power generation from being built, etc. Naming something after yourself adds a little bit of extra work for encyclopedia and wikipedia editors and other academics. How are the teo actions remotely comparable?

It’s not actually any less stupid.

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