Doctor_Occupant said:Nice to see the board defeating ignorance (mine, for one) by actually answering questions, and at the same time raising new ones.
It occurs to me that hedgewizard must be wrong when he says that when two humans have a child the result has got to be human.
Think in terms of evolution: at some point in the evolution of a species a male and a female are going to breed something that crosses a line between them and something else. Clear as mud. Let's try that again.
On the way to Homo Sapiens Sapiens there's Homo Fred. Over successive generations, Homo Fred continues to evolve until one day a child is born that is less like its parents than any preceeding child. Looking back on the fossil record, we identify this as Homo Barney. Now, these are hominids not humans. But one day their distant descendants will be human - another line is crossed. So if this were to happen today, would we notice?
What if it already has?
Doesn't quite work like that.
If only there were clearly defined lines, it would make understanding evolution so much easier. The next step along will be generally backwards compatiable, so therefore still the same species, but might not be compatiable with twenty steps back, but all intervening steps will generally be able to mate with the one in front and the one behind (but may choose not to of course).
Richard Dawkins puts it a lot clearer than my own garbled attempts:
...The best-known case is herring gull versus lesser black-backed gull. In Britain these are clearly distinct species, quite different in colour. Anybody can tell them apart. But if you follow the population of herring gulls westward round the North Pole to North America, then via Alaska across Siberia and back to Europe again, you will notice a curious fact. The 'herring gulls' gradually become less and less like herring gulls and more and more like lesser black-backed gulls until it turns out that our European lesser black-backed gulls actually are the other end of a ring that started out as herring gulls. At every stage around the ring, the birds are sufficiently similar to their neighbours to interbreed with them. Until, that is, the ends of the continuum are reached, in Europe. At this point the herring gull and the lesser black-backed gull never interbreed, although they are linked by a continuous series of interbreeding colleagues all the way round the world. The only thing that is special about ring species like these gulls is that the intermediates are still alive. All pairs of related species are potentially ring species. The intermediates must have lived once. It is just that in most cases they are now dead...