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...
All posts tagged with species
Quote: Colin Groves on primate species
In 2001, the Australian zoologist Colin Groves published an essay in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology giving his perspective on classification in primat...
How will ancient proteins change paleoanthropology?
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...
Quote: Darwin on human variation
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...
Quote: ‘The modern view of species’
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: “...
Are these moustached monkeys a species unto themselves?
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...
Arguing about species: Is it evidence, or ego?
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...
Quote: W. W. Howells on naming Homo erectus
W. W. Howells, in the conclusion of the 1980 review, “Homo erectus–Who, When and Where: A Survey”:
Quote: Mayr and Neanderthals
Ernst Mayr (1951):
Quote: Dobzhansky on borderline cases of species and races
Theodosius Dobzhansky, in his essay, “On species and races of living and fossil man” (1944):
Mitochondrial evidence of introgression among North American mammoths
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...
Quote: Johanson on the thread of ancestry of Homo
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...
Quote: Johanson and Edey on why Lucy was not the holotype of Au. afarensis
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...
How long does it take to publish new hominin species after discovery?
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 ...
Hominin species and time in peer review
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...
When Australopithecus ramidus was the missing link
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...
Link: The variable genetic mixes of the coywolf
From Roland Kays in The Conversation: “Yes, eastern coyotes are hybrids, but the ‘coywolf’ is not a thing”.
Video: How do we identify new species from fossils
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?”
Quote: Dobzhansky on the taxonomic abuse of hominin systematists
This is a footnote in Theodosius Dobzhansky’s notable 1944 paper, “On species and races of living and fossil man”:
Mailbag: The Neandertal species question
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...
Meet Australopithecus robustus
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...
Is the Biological Species Concept a "minority view"?
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...
Iguanodoubt
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...
Species concept overview
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 ...
The failures of dinosaur splitters
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...
Weidenreich on species
Franz Weidenreich, in his 1945 article, “The Puzzle of Pithecanthropus”:
Introgression, Neandertals, and species concepts
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...
Species concepts
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 ...