THE MORNING LIST
The journalists from the weekly “Science & Medicine” supplement have read and chosen Books that will help you discover how delicate naming species is – even for a specialist in the discipline! -, to what extent prehistory should give us some complexes, to what extent, also, the study of the stars has punctuated the lives of men throughout the ages and regions of the world.
An ethnobiologist's view on the classification of living things
On page 66 of the book What is a species?Meredith Root-Bernstein makes a confusing admission: in the same way that she has the greatest difficulty in naming the different models of automobiles whose shapes she can perfectly distinguish, she constantly cannot remember the name animals or plants that are familiar to him: “Knowledge and words mingle, but they are not the same thing. » This is not trivial, for someone whose profession is ethnobiology, that is to say “the study of names, forms of categorization and knowledge associated with species in different cultures or societies”.
It is first of all the way in which biologists have attempted to describe species that the CNRS researcher invites us to think about. To show that the standard definition – “two species are two populations without exchange of genes” – faces multiple objections.
-What should we do with these so-called “ring” species, whose populations are capable of reproducing step by step, but are infertile if we try to cross those located at the two ends of a geographical chain, for example? At what percentage of genetic divergence do we draw the border, when the red wolf and the coyote remain interfertile, even though their genomes differ by approximately 25%? How to classify lichens, a symbiosis of a fungus, an algae, and sometimes a yeast? And ourselves, what would we be without the multitude of micro-organisms which inhabit us and contribute to our most basic physiological functions, making us holobionts?
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