The list of the morning
The journalists of the weekly supplement “Science & Medicine” have read and chose books that will make you discover how delicate species is – even for a discipline specialist! -, how much complex should give us some complexes, how, too, the study of stars punctuated the lives of men through the ages and regions of the world.
The gaze of an ethnobiologist on the classification of the living
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 difficulties in named the different models of cars from which she perfectly distinguishes the forms, she constantly does not remember the name of animals or plants which are however familiar to him: “Knowledge and words mingle, but they are not the same thing. »» This is not banal, for someone who has ethnobiology for profession, 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 in the way biologists have set out to describe the species that the research manager at the CNRS invites us to think. To show that standard definition – “Two species are two populations without exchange of genes” – comes up against multiple objections.
-What to do with these so -called “annular” species, whose populations are capable of reproducing step by step, but are infertile if we try to meet those located at the two ends of a geographic chain, for example? From what percentage of genetic divergence do we trace the border, when the red wolf and the coyote remain interfered, while their genomes differ by around 25 %? How to classify lichens, symbiosis of a fungus, algae, and sometimes yeast? And ourselves, what would we be without the multitude of microorganisms that inhabit us and contribute to our most basic physiological functions, making us Holobiontes?
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