🎓 Dr. Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@social.cleverlibre.org

@arteteco

Fair points

No doubt the plant and fungi kingdom have many more exceptions than mammals would, but even then the trend largely follows the rule more often than to be an exception of it. But in the mammal kingdom at least the exceptions are well addressed.

Take an infertile human as an example. Since we would have to be talking about infertility brought on by genetics. This would be mirrored by the use case of a horse and a donkey producing a infertile mule, which is **not** considered its own species, there is no mule species, specifically due to their infertility.

So because the primary defining quality of a species is the ability to intermate successfully and produce viable offspring, any member of a group born infertile would not be considered a different species since it can not intermate with individuals of the same genotype as itself.

I'm not sure I agree with the notion that species are defined by how they look.. We have plenty of examples of species that look identical but are considered different species too.

though I think we may have a more productive conversation if we talk about specific edge cases and how they are handled.. the fertility question we addressed with the mule example and easily resolved.. but how about more obscure edge cases, I can think of a few.

Here are some of the more unusual exceptions I can think of that are **not** handled by the simple definition I presented for the animal kingdom, I'd be interested to hear some examples in the plant kingdom though (I can think of only a few im sure there are more):

* Ring species, in this case its hard to define species as singular things and it falls into more of a spectrum. Which muddies the definition
* parthenogenetic species, since they are asexual by nature they cant be defined via intermating. for mammals, like the whip-tail lizard, these are actually easy to handle since they arise from normal sexual species that when interspecies breeding occurs the offspring become asexual and clones of themselves. As clones its easy to define the species line without mating. This also includes species that can clone themselves by discading part of their body, such as tapeworms.
* Species whose fertility depends on a third different species as a vector. such as parasitic wasps and tapeworms

In my mind all these edge cases are reasonable reasoned through though and still in the spirit of the original definition I offered.

@TradeMinister @mystik @amerika @manarock

@awlt Thanks,, it started as plain old gothic but as I tried to find forms that could be mirrored this was pretty much the only form I could come up with. I wanted to do one that was copperplate like but I couldnt come up with one.

@jkn

Mine arent much better, took me many tried to get that :)

@calligraphy

@arteteco

There is a big difference between what we can experimentally test for, vs what "is".. The most commonly held definition of a species is "a group of individuals that, in nature, are able to mate and produce viable, fertile offspring." The ability to mate and produce viable offspring is pretty much the primary definition of a species. Yes there are some expectations, and it isnt the whole picture. But it is 90% of the picture, we just need a few definitions for edge cases.

Even if we agree that it may be impractical to test this by mating every individual with every other the practicality isnt really how we define what it is or isnt. We also can infer from the patterns we see when mating that we dont actually need to test every combination to be fairly certain. Generally we know that unless two creatures naturally breed on their own and are genetically and physically somewhat similar they arent going to be able to breed. I know if i mate with a piece of brocoli the brocoli wont get pregnant with a reasonable degree of certainty without testing it because we know there is significant genetic divergence there. However we dont necessarily know if a chimpanzee is a separate species from a human unless some attempt has been made to inseminate a chimp with human ejaculate, which has been done and thus ruled out any possibility of us being the same species.

@TradeMinister @mystik @amerika @manarock

@arteteco

Mostly true, there are exceptions to everything. But the whole "viable offspring" definition tends to hold true rather well for most mammals with only a small handful of exceptions.

@TradeMinister @mystik @amerika @manarock

@arteteco

hehehe I wonder why.

@math

@amerika

No breeds are not the same as subspecies. Again a breed is one level below a subspecies.

@mystik @TradeMinister @arteteco @manarock

@math

The ladies version of the classic ohms law cartoon.

#electronics #cartoon #drawing #EE

@amerika

Species arent defined that way... There are many aspects that are considered for a species but the most common one, at least among mammals, is their ability to mate and produce viable offspring.

As long as two people can have sex and their chance of having a viable child who is fertile is the same as the general population, then they are the same species.

For example Horse and Donkey are considered different species because if they mate and have a child the child (a mule) is less fertile than either of its parents.

Therefore the most obvious and glaring reason a cabbage and a brocoli are difference species is because they can not cross pollinate and mate.

@mystik @TradeMinister @arteteco @manarock

@amerika

No a variety from a cultivar is most certainly not a sub species and is explicitly recognized as a category that exists BELOW subspecies.

@mystik @TradeMinister @arteteco @manarock

@arteteco

Just to clarify this dude (who has been excessively racist with his comments earlier in this thread) uses words like "breed" and "subspecies" in a way that is completely ignorant of the scientific definition of those terms. Apparently he things black people are a different "subspecies" from humans and now he is calling them a different "breed"... I wouldnt really trust much of what he says considering he hasnt even come to a point where he understands the most basic terminology.

@TradeMinister @mystik @amerika @manarock

@arteteco

Hey, your always around and pop your head in, and responsive when I tag you. So your good, just hasnt been much to moderate lately is all.

The pending accounts wont show pending accounts right now. Since the mods seemed to get lax about it I found that even though i usually addressed pending accounts every few hours during the day if and when i would go away for a few days pending accounts wouldnt get handled. I didnt want users to wait multiple days to get approval, so until the mods became active again I solve it with a different approach.

We now have a rather aggressive captcha at signup that users need to go through to signup. So it eliminates nearly 100% of the bots (I havent had to ban a bot in a while). So it seems to mostly solve the problem. It doesn't prevent us from dealing with non-STEM people who people who are going to shit post, but with the rules in place I can just ban them after the fact if thats a problem anyway. So this solution seems to work better, at least until the moderators decide to be as dilligent as me with handling pending invites in which case I wouldnt mind switching back to approval. Either way the captcha seems to be doing the trick until then.

I recently upgraded nextcloud last night to the latest version, I think it may have been a major bump too. I also spent an hour or so writing up a ''healthcheck'' for it. What that does is every few minutes it connects to the webservers login page and checks to see if it serves up a webpage and if that webpage contains a login box. If the server cant be reached it will automatically restart after about 10 minutes or so. This should help the server remain live should it have a bug and go down. I added similar health checks to our other servers.

@design_RG

Yea gonna need a big cup for this one...

@valleyforge Enjoy!