Hominins are still having sex, caught in flagrante delicto
Assuming you haven’t been sleeping under a rock, you have probably heard that a Nature paper came out on an F1 Neanderthal-Denisovan hybrid. The major new science in my opinion from the results of the genome itself is to be found in the figure above. It confirms that there was a lot of population turnover among Neanderthals, […]
Don’t hate the hybrid!
There is a specter haunting the intersection of conservation biology and public policy, the specter of the biological species concept. Coyote-Wolf Hybrids Have Spread Across U.S. East: Scientists already knew that some coyotes, which have been gradually expanding their range eastward, mated with wolves in the Great Lakes (map) region. The pairings created viable hybrid […]
Neanderthal-human mating, months later….
Image credit:ICHTO
Recently something popped up into my Google news feed in regards to “Neanderthal-human mating.” If you are a regular reader you know that I’m wild for this particular combination of the “wild thing.” Bu…
Neandertal hybridization & Haldane’s rule
Mr. James Winters at A Replicated Typo pointed me to a short hypothesis paper, Neanderthal-human Hybrids. This paper argues that selective mating of Neandertal males with females of human populations which had left Africa more recently, combined with
Hybridization is like sex
One of the major issues which has loomed at the heart of biology since The Origin of Species is why species exist, as well as how species come about. Why isn’t there a perfect replicator which performs all the conversion of energy and matter into biomass on this planet? If there is a God the tree […]
Grizzly-Polar bear hybrids in the wild
Timely, Pizzly Bears: Scientists confirmed last week that a bear shot by an Inuvialuit hunter in the Northwest Territories is a second-generation grizzly-polar bear hybrid—a “pizzly” or “grolar” bear. Not that big of a deal. It is likely that polar bears are simply a recent derived variant of brown bear. The main issue not noted […]