Towle I. Clades, Grades, and the Genus Problem: A Case for Revising Hominin Taxonomy. Am J Biol Anthropol. 2026 Aug;190(4):e70344. doi: 10.1002/ajpa.70344. PMID: 42612121; PMCID: PMC13485234.
tokai 15 hours ago [-]
I know its petty, but I find it annoying you didn't link to the actual paper instead of the NLM copy.
To me, the choices of names for clades seem like madness:
All apes (superfamily): Hominoidea; great apes (family): Hominidae; African great apes (subfamily): Homininae; Pan‐Homo clade (tribe): Hominini; human clade (subtribe): Hominina. [0]
The potential for error seems enormous, and also imagine speaking those words without creating confusion, or try forming singulars and possessives that, in text and speech, unambiguously identify the clade.
Can anyone on the inside shed insight on why they do this to themselves, and to everyone else who has even less understanding? Is it self-hate? Imagine a large codebase that named variables like that - there would be a lynching late one night when the bug was found to be confusion.
Despite my reaction, I guess there is some good reason that all these smart, experienced people make this choice.
That's just the established naming convention. For brown bears, you have parvorder Ursida, superfamily Ursoidea, family Ursidae, subfamily Ursinae, tribe Ursini, genus Ursus, and finally species Ursus arctos. When there are millions of taxonomic names, you want to establish some kind of regular structure, because you are going to run out of useful distinctive names.
thaumasiotes 19 hours ago [-]
> and finally species Ursus arctos
What happened there? The normal thing would be for the species name to be identical with the genus name, but as far as I can tell Ursus ursus doesn't refer to anything. Why break into Greek?
jcranmer 16 hours ago [-]
Ask Linnaeus? Wikipedia has a picture of Linnaeus's 1735 taxonomy [1] giving what I think is Ursus ursus, Ursus coati, and Ursus wickhead, and the 10th edition in 1758 has Ursus arctos, Ursus luscus, Ursus meles, and Ursus lotor.
I don't know when it changed between the 1st and 10th editions, or why, and trying to read Latin taxonomical texts with many abbreviations makes my head hurt.
> I don't know when it changed between the 1st and 10th editions
If we're talking about Linnaeus's Systema Naturae, quite a bit: Binomial nomenclature wasn't included until the 10th edition, for example. And from an prominent 2015 paper [0]:
"In modern-day classifications, the starting point for botanical names is Linnaeus' Species Plantarum and for zoological names it is the tenth edition of the Systema Naturae."
I'm amused that Linnaeus put a joke into the table.
The characteres generum column entry for Homo is Nosce te ipsum, "know thyself".
The scan is at a very low resolution for such a significant document. :(
mmooss 15 hours ago [-]
> The normal thing would be for the species name to be identical with the genus name
What does this mean? Most species names differ from their genus name, for example Homo sapiens. But I suspect I misunderstand you.
Binomial nomenclature, the standard that was developed by Linnaeus (in the 10th edition cited by jcranmer), is Genus species, with the genus always capitalized and the species always plural - in case that is somehow relevant.
thaumasiotes 8 hours ago [-]
> Most species names differ from their genus name, for example Homo sapiens. But I suspect I misunderstand you.
A genus is typically named after a species. That species retains its name as the species name, and gets it again as the genus name.
So, for example, the Latin word for "toad" is bufo, and the name Bufo bufo went to the species that was considered the most standard, toadiest toad, which wikipedia still calls the "common toad" today. More exotic toads will be called Bufo [something weird].
Ursus arctos clearly has the same form; it's the Latin word for "bear" followed by... the Greek word for "bear". The normal thing would have been to name this species, the prototype for all bears, Ursus ursus.
Homo sapiens is a special case where we specifically wanted to say something nice about the species.
mmooss 3 hours ago [-]
Thanks for explaining the naming of protypical species, though I think terms like 'typically', 'weird' and 'special case' overstate the case significantly. Though I'm not an expert in the field (maybe you are?), I encounter many binomial names and few where genus and species match. How does that reconcile?
Here are a list of common animals, and then a comprehensive encylopedia; notice that very few names match genus and species:
And while I'm thinking of it, among the most common binomial names - and most typical species - in science are Escherichia coli, Drosophila melanogaster, Caenorhabditis elegans, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Danio rerio, ..., though there is Mus musculus! Homo sapiens doesn't seem like a special case.
AlotOfReading 18 hours ago [-]
Honestly, you get used to it. I find hierarchial binomial/trinomial naming system used in biology a lot more clear than the TLAs so common in engineering. Half of the terms are pretty uncommon as well.
applicative 22 hours ago [-]
I agree, but it is clear they got used to it. I suppose once you learn the endings, you can generate the higher genera from the name of a bottom level species familar to us like human-cat-dog / homo-felis-canis
Superfamily -oidea
Hominoidea | Feloidea | Canoidea |
Family -idae
Hominidae | Felidae | Canidae |
Subfamily -inae
Homininae | Felinae (Small cats) | Caninae |
Tribe -ini
Hominini | Felini | Canini |
Subtribe -ina
Hominina | Felina | Canina |
foxglacier 22 hours ago [-]
Homie, no idea.
[Sorry I never joke but surely the biologists were joking when they came up with that so it should be fair game]
ompogUe 19 hours ago [-]
If we're joking:
A Roman walks into a bar and says, "Can I have a martinus?"
The bartender asks, "Don't you mean a martini?"
The Roman responds, "If I wanted a double, I would have asked for it."
macintux 19 hours ago [-]
I become (irrationally?) annoyed when I find "cannoli" listed on a menu, especially at an Italian restaurant where they should know better, and it's a single cannolo.
mdp2021 8 hours ago [-]
In the list, 'cannoli' means they have cannoli; 'cannolo' means they serve a cannolo.
jjtheblunt 16 hours ago [-]
maybe the idea is you get one of the many prepared
contingencies 22 hours ago [-]
Clearly Homo idiotensis here is incapable of cultivating a factual ontology that would place it below the 'great apes' as the type species amongst amongst the 'asshole apes'.
21 hours ago [-]
bibimsz 3 days ago [-]
[flagged]
sokoloff 3 days ago [-]
On a chart section spanning around 5 million years, are you asking about the millions of years where there was “all this diversity and branching” as contrasted with the last ten thousand years or so where there is less observed branching?
Around 15 branches in 5,000,000 years and 0 in the last 10,000 years seems more likely statistical than ideological to me.
jsbisviewtiful 24 hours ago [-]
Totally agree. Unfortunately we are living in an age of mass stupidity’s volume overtaking critical thought and analysis by those who are truly educated. The amount of moon landing conspiracy theories I see online is deeply disturbing - some even going as far as suggesting space doesn’t even exist. Truly disturbing times.
trollbridge 1 days ago [-]
If a group of humans gets isolated in an island, the moon, etc., experiences a population bottleneck and bigtime selection pressures, a new species might emerge after 500 generations (about 10,000 years).
ThrowawayTestr 3 days ago [-]
Are you not aware of the multiple genetic bottlenecks homo sapiens have gone through?
3 days ago [-]
guywithahat 3 days ago [-]
[flagged]
ryoshoe 3 days ago [-]
I feel like you're conflating race/ethnicity with species when the two are completely separate concepts. There's a great amount of diversity between dog breeds, including wolves, but little disagreement that they are the same species. Variation between members of a certain species is expected
binaryturtle 24 hours ago [-]
Isn't the general separation between species that they no longer can cleanly interbreed (generate fertile offsprings)? I'm no biology expert though, but I always thought this is how to separate things.
Humans of all kinds can breed and make new humans easily. Same for dogs... easily can breed with each other and increase diversity. So in both cases same species. But humans and chimpanzees? Probably not (albeit there are rumours? :) ), so different species.
guywithahat 21 hours ago [-]
Yes, but the difference also has to do with geography/preference. Brown and Polar bears can and do produce viable offspring, but because they're generally geographically separated we consider them separate species. Same for birds; many could mate but they choose not to (different mating calls, etc), and for that reason combined with different looks we classify them as separate species. Neanderthal, who are accepted as being a different species of human, interbred with humans before going extinct.
It's my opinion that if aliens visited earth 30k years ago and used our definition of the word, they would classify us as different species. To be clear I'm not advocating that we should refer to humans as different species, just that because we're capable of such advanced thought we should abide by different rules than we hold other animals to.
3 days ago [-]
sokoloff 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
tsimionescu 24 hours ago [-]
A species is defined by one simple thing: if individuals can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. There are complications related to ring species and few others, but they're not applicable here.
All human beings from all over the world can interbreed and their children will be fertile themselves (with the same rate of accidental infertility they would find in their own populations). As such, it would be completely preposterous to claim that there is more than one species of human on the planet today.
avadodin 15 hours ago [-]
That is but one of the criteria to define a species.
Two populations definitely do not belong to the same species if they generally can't interbreed even if they are morphologically identical.
Many accepted species will interbreed in captivity or rarely in the wild.
*: not taking a position on human species
mono442 24 hours ago [-]
wolves are considered different species from dogs but they can produce offspring
tsimionescu 12 hours ago [-]
There is actually a substantial debate on whether wolves and dogs are the same species or separate, precisely because they produce fertile offspring so easily. While wolves are firmly identified as Canis lupus, you can find modern sources calling dogs both Canis familiaris (a separate species), and Canis lupus familiaris (a subspecies of wolf).
Probably the better example you could give is bears, where brown and polar bears are always considered separate species, but they do successfully interbreed, even in the wild occasionally.
The species concept is a little too vague, and essentially the difference between two closely related species and two distant varieties of the same species is fuzzy and often historically biased (if the two populations were considered separate species for a long time, there is large inertia against re-categorizing them as a single species when evidence of genetic similarity and interbreeding arises).
guywithahat 22 hours ago [-]
The definitional limit on interbreeding includes geography and preference; black/brown/polar bears can and do interbreed in captivity but because they live in different locations and they look sufficiently different/have different diets we consider them different species.
If Aliens landed on our earth 20k years ago and used our definition of the word there's no doubt in my mind they'd consider us different species, we'd be like bears. As far as I can tell the only reason we don't classify people as different species is for the sake of society, as people would naturally then try to determine differences and rank them, which has an obviously bad long-term outcome.
tsimionescu 11 hours ago [-]
There are much better arguments that brown/polar/black bears should be considered a single species, and that they perhaps would be if they were first discovered today. It is true that the distinction between "two closely related species that diverged recently" and "two distantly related varieties of the same species that are diverging more and more" is quite vague and subjective - especially when there are large phenotypic differences.
However, few of these arguments apply to human populations. With the exception of dogs, cats and other domesticated animals, few or no other mammal populations that have diverged as recently as humans are categorized as separate species (for example, brown and polar bears have diverged ~600k years ago, before our species even existed). Human populations only began spreading out of Africa some 150k years ago, which is not a lot of time in evolutionary terms at all, for a mammal that only reproduces around 1/year and needs more than a decade between generations.
Not to mention, the separation between all human populations is merely geographical. When different human populations came into contact, even ones that had been isolated from each other for tens of thousands of years, they virtually always interbreeded in significant numbers, contrary to, say, wolf and dog populations. This is also a strong argument against considering distant human cousins different species.
Additionally, morphological variation among isolated human populations is actually quite small, compared to intra-population variation. Skin color is the single biggest morphological difference, by far; followed by the size/hardness of our hairs, especially the ones on the head. Apart from these, virtually all other differences are more about statistical prevalence of certain traits (e.g. blue eyes are more or less common in various populations, body hairyness is more common in some populations than others, tallness is more common, etc).
mbmbn 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
OtomotO 1 days ago [-]
You don't seem to understand what species means and what race means, in biology
archonis 24 hours ago [-]
Please educate yourself about basic biological taxonomy before you accidentally and publically position yourself as a practitioner and champion of flawed race science.
m3047 3 days ago [-]
Research is coming out specifically regarding the COVID genome which suggests missing sequence data was routinely filled in from baseline reference sequences. In turn, the reference sequences suggest during later analysis constant reversion back to the baseline. These gaps are the (dot) product of limitations of PCR * computer processing algorithms. No reason to believe the problem is limited to COVID.
BigTTYGothGF 1 days ago [-]
I haven't heard anything about this, could you drop a couple references?
Does this explain the conspiracy theories about “insertions”? When I looked into it, many other virus species had similar “insertions” - the problem seeming to be the sequencing itself not being accurate (as opposed to every viral disease being cooked up in a lab for the last 5,000 years)
SubiculumCode 14 hours ago [-]
A conspiracy theorist misuse a term with no knowledge of it's context? Nahhh never /s
lolokbro 23 hours ago [-]
[dead]
gradus_ad 23 hours ago [-]
So you're saying dark skinned people reside in the south and lighter skinned people predominate in the north?
lolokbro 22 hours ago [-]
[dead]
messe 23 hours ago [-]
What does this have to do with the article?
ljsprague 18 hours ago [-]
It’s perhaps a bot.
lolokbro 23 hours ago [-]
[dead]
applicative 21 hours ago [-]
As if to head them off, as if she could not bear the implications of their threat, Babette said pleasantly, “Why is it these UFOs are mostly seen upstate? The best sightings are upstate. People get abducted and taken aboard. Farmers see burn marks where saucers landed. A woman gives birth to a UFO baby, so she says. Always upstate.”
“That’s where the mountains are,” Denise said. “Spaceships can hide from radar or whatever.”
“Why are the mountains upstate?” Steffie said.
“Mountains are always upstate,” Denise told her. “This way the snow melts as planned in the spring and flows downhill to the reservoirs near the cities, which are kept in the lower end of the state for exactly this reason.”
I thought, momentarily, she might be right. It made a curious kind of sense. Or did it? Or was it totally crazy? There had to be large cities in the northern part of some states. Or were they just north of the border in the southern part of states just to the north? What she said could not be true and yet I had trouble, momentarily, disproving it. I could not name cities or mountains to disprove it. There had to be mountains in the southern part of some states. Or did they tend to be below the state line, in the northern part of states to the south? I tried to name state capitals, governors. How could there be a north below a south? Is this what I found confusing? Was this the crux of Denise’s error? Or was she somehow, eerily, right?
The radio said: “Excesses of salt, phosphorus, magnesium.”
thaumasiotes 19 hours ago [-]
The protagonist seems to believe that "upstate" must mean "in the north of the state", which it doesn't. It's completely true that wherever possible, cities will not be located in mountains.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13485234/
Towle I. Clades, Grades, and the Genus Problem: A Case for Revising Hominin Taxonomy. Am J Biol Anthropol. 2026 Aug;190(4):e70344. doi: 10.1002/ajpa.70344. PMID: 42612121; PMCID: PMC13485234.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.70344
All apes (superfamily): Hominoidea; great apes (family): Hominidae; African great apes (subfamily): Homininae; Pan‐Homo clade (tribe): Hominini; human clade (subtribe): Hominina. [0]
The potential for error seems enormous, and also imagine speaking those words without creating confusion, or try forming singulars and possessives that, in text and speech, unambiguously identify the clade.
Can anyone on the inside shed insight on why they do this to themselves, and to everyone else who has even less understanding? Is it self-hate? Imagine a large codebase that named variables like that - there would be a lynching late one night when the bug was found to be confusion.
Despite my reaction, I guess there is some good reason that all these smart, experienced people make this choice.
[0] From the paper the OP describes: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13485234/
What happened there? The normal thing would be for the species name to be identical with the genus name, but as far as I can tell Ursus ursus doesn't refer to anything. Why break into Greek?
I don't know when it changed between the 1st and 10th editions, or why, and trying to read Latin taxonomical texts with many abbreviations makes my head hurt.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Linnaeus...
If we're talking about Linnaeus's Systema Naturae, quite a bit: Binomial nomenclature wasn't included until the 10th edition, for example. And from an prominent 2015 paper [0]:
"In modern-day classifications, the starting point for botanical names is Linnaeus' Species Plantarum and for zoological names it is the tenth edition of the Systema Naturae."
[0] Michael A. Ruggiero, Dennis P. Gordon, et al. A Higher Level Classification of All Living Organisms. PloS One. (April 2015) https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... (see also this correction: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... )
The characteres generum column entry for Homo is Nosce te ipsum, "know thyself".
The scan is at a very low resolution for such a significant document. :(
What does this mean? Most species names differ from their genus name, for example Homo sapiens. But I suspect I misunderstand you.
Binomial nomenclature, the standard that was developed by Linnaeus (in the 10th edition cited by jcranmer), is Genus species, with the genus always capitalized and the species always plural - in case that is somehow relevant.
A genus is typically named after a species. That species retains its name as the species name, and gets it again as the genus name.
So, for example, the Latin word for "toad" is bufo, and the name Bufo bufo went to the species that was considered the most standard, toadiest toad, which wikipedia still calls the "common toad" today. More exotic toads will be called Bufo [something weird].
Ursus arctos clearly has the same form; it's the Latin word for "bear" followed by... the Greek word for "bear". The normal thing would have been to name this species, the prototype for all bears, Ursus ursus.
Homo sapiens is a special case where we specifically wanted to say something nice about the species.
Here are a list of common animals, and then a comprehensive encylopedia; notice that very few names match genus and species:
https://byjus.com/biology/scientific-names-of-animals-and-pl...
https://a-z-animals.com/animals/scientific/
And while I'm thinking of it, among the most common binomial names - and most typical species - in science are Escherichia coli, Drosophila melanogaster, Caenorhabditis elegans, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Danio rerio, ..., though there is Mus musculus! Homo sapiens doesn't seem like a special case.
Superfamily -oidea
Family -idae Subfamily -inae Tribe -ini Subtribe -ina[Sorry I never joke but surely the biologists were joking when they came up with that so it should be fair game]
A Roman walks into a bar and says, "Can I have a martinus?"
The bartender asks, "Don't you mean a martini?"
The Roman responds, "If I wanted a double, I would have asked for it."
Around 15 branches in 5,000,000 years and 0 in the last 10,000 years seems more likely statistical than ideological to me.
Humans of all kinds can breed and make new humans easily. Same for dogs... easily can breed with each other and increase diversity. So in both cases same species. But humans and chimpanzees? Probably not (albeit there are rumours? :) ), so different species.
It's my opinion that if aliens visited earth 30k years ago and used our definition of the word, they would classify us as different species. To be clear I'm not advocating that we should refer to humans as different species, just that because we're capable of such advanced thought we should abide by different rules than we hold other animals to.
All human beings from all over the world can interbreed and their children will be fertile themselves (with the same rate of accidental infertility they would find in their own populations). As such, it would be completely preposterous to claim that there is more than one species of human on the planet today.
Two populations definitely do not belong to the same species if they generally can't interbreed even if they are morphologically identical.
Many accepted species will interbreed in captivity or rarely in the wild.
*: not taking a position on human species
Probably the better example you could give is bears, where brown and polar bears are always considered separate species, but they do successfully interbreed, even in the wild occasionally.
The species concept is a little too vague, and essentially the difference between two closely related species and two distant varieties of the same species is fuzzy and often historically biased (if the two populations were considered separate species for a long time, there is large inertia against re-categorizing them as a single species when evidence of genetic similarity and interbreeding arises).
If Aliens landed on our earth 20k years ago and used our definition of the word there's no doubt in my mind they'd consider us different species, we'd be like bears. As far as I can tell the only reason we don't classify people as different species is for the sake of society, as people would naturally then try to determine differences and rank them, which has an obviously bad long-term outcome.
However, few of these arguments apply to human populations. With the exception of dogs, cats and other domesticated animals, few or no other mammal populations that have diverged as recently as humans are categorized as separate species (for example, brown and polar bears have diverged ~600k years ago, before our species even existed). Human populations only began spreading out of Africa some 150k years ago, which is not a lot of time in evolutionary terms at all, for a mammal that only reproduces around 1/year and needs more than a decade between generations.
Not to mention, the separation between all human populations is merely geographical. When different human populations came into contact, even ones that had been isolated from each other for tens of thousands of years, they virtually always interbreeded in significant numbers, contrary to, say, wolf and dog populations. This is also a strong argument against considering distant human cousins different species.
Additionally, morphological variation among isolated human populations is actually quite small, compared to intra-population variation. Skin color is the single biggest morphological difference, by far; followed by the size/hardness of our hairs, especially the ones on the head. Apart from these, virtually all other differences are more about statistical prevalence of certain traits (e.g. blue eyes are more or less common in various populations, body hairyness is more common in some populations than others, tallness is more common, etc).
ChatGPT helped me identify likely articles: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6a8a7e1c82308191be82762907a607de
“That’s where the mountains are,” Denise said. “Spaceships can hide from radar or whatever.”
“Why are the mountains upstate?” Steffie said.
“Mountains are always upstate,” Denise told her. “This way the snow melts as planned in the spring and flows downhill to the reservoirs near the cities, which are kept in the lower end of the state for exactly this reason.”
I thought, momentarily, she might be right. It made a curious kind of sense. Or did it? Or was it totally crazy? There had to be large cities in the northern part of some states. Or were they just north of the border in the southern part of states just to the north? What she said could not be true and yet I had trouble, momentarily, disproving it. I could not name cities or mountains to disprove it. There had to be mountains in the southern part of some states. Or did they tend to be below the state line, in the northern part of states to the south? I tried to name state capitals, governors. How could there be a north below a south? Is this what I found confusing? Was this the crux of Denise’s error? Or was she somehow, eerily, right?
The radio said: “Excesses of salt, phosphorus, magnesium.”