this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

That is the the definition of species as laid out by Ernst Mayr, and it does have merit. It is a good definition but it gets a bit murkier at times, for example when polar and grizzly bears have fertile offspring, despite the polar being U. maritimus and the brown bear being U. arctos, commonly defined as different species of bear. As such, modern homo sapiens sometimes carry genes from H. neanderthalensis, but they are described as a different species to sapiens.

One issue that arises is that not all offspring between napiens and neanderthalsis were fertile.. The definition comes into question when only half the offspring between 2 ""species"" are fertile, are they different species or not?