Species Porn

Hot Nun knows a species when she sees one. Obey the Sister.

After the smashing success of my Multiple Orcasms post which still brings considerable daily traffic to the blog from furries looking for orca and vore themed pornography, I couldn’t resist tiptoeing around cheeky references to bestiality once again; but this time the human interest in animal sex is strictly like-on-like and the link to pornography is in the tricky means of defining concepts that are both familiar and yet abstract.

Trying to define what is necessary and sufficient to designate a “species” is rather like the problem the US Supreme Court ran into when trying to define pornography.  In the decision for Jacobellis v. Ohio, Justice Stewart coined a now famous phrase when trying to draw a line between protected speech and unprotected obscenity:

In saying this, I imply no criticism of the Court, which in those cases was faced with the task of trying to define what may be indefinable… I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within [hardcore pornography]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

Many definitions, while concrete, are rather relative and not absolute. Darwin failed to define species in his Origin of Species:

Nor shall I here discuss the various definitions which have been given of the term species. No one definition has as yet satisfied all naturalists; yet every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when he speaks of a species.

He goes on to say just how blurred that line can be:

I was much struck how entirely vague and arbitrary is the distinction between species and varieties.

The “species debate” is a problem that existed before Darwin and which continues today.  The current tone of the debate has been most significantly influenced by evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr whose definition of a species graces most modern textbooks:

species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations, which are reproductively isolated from other such groups

I had a laugh when I read Ernst Mayr’s essay “What is a Species, and What is Not?” published in Philosophy of Science in 1996:

The term ‘species’ refers to a concrete phenomenon of nature and this fact severely constrains the number and kinds of possible definitions. The word ‘species’ is, like the words ‘planet’ or ‘moon,’ a technical term for a concrete phenomenon. One cannot propose a new definition of a planet as “a satellite of a sun that has its own satellite,” because this would exclude Venus, and some other planets without moons. A definition of any class of objects must be applicable to any member of this class and exclude reference to attributes not characteristic of this class.

It doesn’t help Mayr’s point that the International Astronomical Union had no formal definition for ‘planet’ at the time of his essay or for a complete decade after it. When they did finally vote on one in 2006, the former planet Pluto got downgraded to a dwarf planet leaving every science textbook published in the preceding 80 years obsolete and violating Mayr’s apparent rule that one can not propose a new definition that would exclude an existing member of a class. Pluto was declared a planet upon its discovery in 1930 and now it’s not even the largest “plutiod”–that honor falls to Eris, which was discovered in 2005 and found to be larger than Pluto which prompted Astronomers to actually look at the definition of what makes something a planet versus something else.

If you take a moment to look around the blogosphere this week, you’ll realize that the uncertainty of this issue is present just beneath the surface of numerous topics of conversation:

Retrieverman asks if the Island Fox is a valid species which must be understood within the context of the greater Canid complex several species of which would violate the basic Mayr definition of a species, but his post on the Polar Bear is also framed by the species debate as genetic analysis shows that Polar Bears can be considered a variety of Brown Bear and the two can and do form fertile hybrids.

The Dog Zombie looks at Canid DNA to question the recipe of different flavors of “Canid Soup.”

Jess at Desert Wind Hounds picks up on the food metaphor at Dog Zombie and asks what the recipe is for a “purebred” and how one goes about creating one.  This is ultimately just a more zoomed in analysis of the species debate: how much distance in time, space, genetics and niche constitutes a different breed, a different type, a different landrace, or a different species?

Stephen Bodio asks the same question with a simple image comparison of two dogs.

Razib Khan shows that the species debate is applicable to humans, and the notion that Neanderthals or Denisovians were somehow not human falls when you realize that their genes are still in us (Border Wars is written by a 2.7% certified Neanderthal):

In my post below I argue that it’s most useful to reconceptualize “human” as an ecological niche, rather than a descent group. All the confusion as to whether Neandertals, or any other group of divergent hominins, were, or weren’t, “humans like us,” exists in the context of the idea that “humans like us” are a very specific and sui generis  cladewith special traits. I think “we” need to get a little off our high horse here.

You’ll notice that the notion of “niche” becomes more and more important as we realize just how blurry the lines between interfertile species really is.  Niche is what separates Polar Bears from Brown Bears and it’s also what separates Dogs from Wolves:

The co-evolution between social canids and primates is I think not a random chance event. To some extent I think “man’s best friend” was a necessary outcome of evolutionary forces. Barring the total extermination of one lineage or the other, some sort of cooperative relationship is I suspect something that will naturally reoccur. Dogs are not simply a specific derived lineage of wolves, they’re an ecological niche created by the existence of hominins with social complexity.

Dave at Prick-Eared has a post which documents another canid rapidly invading the very niche that once brought man and wolf together to co-evolve.

There are no hard and fast answers here, no absolute definitions, no minimum standards or list of traits that are both necessary and sufficient to differentiate one “thing” from another “thing” in a meaningful way.  This is the place where the objectivity of science meets the subjectivity of philosophy and those questions like “what is a dog” start to look a lot like “what is an ideal Afghan Hound.”

There are some questions that are worth answering “I don’t know and I probably never will, but that won’t stop the investigation.”

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About Christopher

Christopher Landauer is a fifth generation Colorado native and second generation Border Collie enthusiast. Border Collies have been the Landauer family dogs since the 1960s and Christopher got his first one as a toddler. He began his own modest breeding program with the purchase of Dublin and Celeste in 2006 and currently shares his home with their children Mercury and Gemma as well. His interest in genetics began in AP Chemistry and AP Biology and was honed at Stanford University.