Quote: Eileen Whitehead Erlanson defining taxonomic inflation
I was reading today to find the origin of the term “taxonomic inflation”. This is a common idea today from people who criticize an overzealous attention to d...
I was reading today to find the origin of the term “taxonomic inflation”. This is a common idea today from people who criticize an overzealous attention to d...
In 2001, the Australian zoologist Colin Groves published an essay in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology giving his perspective on classification in primat...
Nature has a news feature by Matthew Warren that provides a nice background to recent work on proteomics of fossil hominins: “Move over, DNA: ancient protein...
There is much that could be said about Charles Darwin’s discussion of human races in Descent of Man. In Chapter 7 he embarked on a long discussion of whether...
The University of Michigan has done a release for a new paper studying speciation between black and mantled howler monkeys, by Marcella Baiz and coworkers: “...
I ran across a news article from the BBC by Paul Rincon, about a proposed taxonomic revision to patas monkeys in northeastern Africa: “Moustached monkey is s...
For some people who follow human evolution news, recognizing “species” is really just about whether you’re a lumper or a splitter. Many people assume that th...
W. W. Howells, in the conclusion of the 1980 review, “Homo erectus–Who, When and Where: A Survey”:
Ernst Mayr (1951):
Theodosius Dobzhansky, in his essay, “On species and races of living and fossil man” (1944):
Hendrik Poinar and colleagues have a new paper in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution that reports new mitochondrial genomes from 67 North American mammoth sp...
Again from Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind today, Don Johanson describes his thoughts upon the question of whether to place the Hadar jaw remains (later at...
From Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind by Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey, p. 288, a very good concise description of why Johanson and White did not choose...
In an earlier post, I looked at descriptions of new hominin species during the last 25 years, to see how long they took from submission to acceptance in the ...
In 2015, two new hominin species were published: Australopithecus deyiremeda and Homo naledi. One of the criticisms I’ve seen of both discoveries is the idea...
Ann Gibbons is a science writer specializing in paleoanthropology for the journal, Science. Her 2006 book, The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest...
From Roland Kays in The Conversation: “Yes, eastern coyotes are hybrids, but the ‘coywolf’ is not a thing”.
The Madison “Blue Sky Science” series of Q and A got me to answer a reader’s question: “How do we identify new species from fossils?”
This is a footnote in Theodosius Dobzhansky’s notable 1944 paper, “On species and races of living and fossil man”:
Hello Dr. Hawks, I understand your a busy man so my question will be brief. I learned in my biology class that two different species can not interbreed and p...
The region just north of Johannesburg, South Africa, is a formation of ancient limestone in which groundwater has formed numerous caves and sinkholes. Some o...
Last week, Science ran a couple of items by Ann Gibbons that give further perspective on the discoveries last year that Neandertals and Denisovans both contr...
Darren Naish has written a nice discussion of the taxonomic difficulties of Iguanodon. It’s a guest post at the Scientific American blog. Dinosaurs and homin...
John Wilkins is an expert on species concepts in biology; he has written a short piece for wide circulation on the topic which is archived at his blog: “How ...
A-HA! We all lecture in our classes about the perils of naming too many species, but now the facts have been statistically proven! Well, at least for dinosau...
Franz Weidenreich, in his 1945 article, “The Puzzle of Pithecanthropus”:
A key issue (at least for some paleo folks) is whether the term "introgression" gives aid and comfort to the idea that Neandertals were a distinct species f...
A new population that results from a speciation event is called a species. But although species result from a simple process, recognizing species in nature ...