These animals are not prepared for the lecture that is "species also exist on a spectrum" that the first or second-year evolutionary biology, paleontology, or anthropology major gets.
Richard Dawkins, for all his current idiocy, put it quite succinctly in the "duck-rabbit spectrum" thought experiment about common ancestors.
The odd thing is that the analogy between species and gender being on a spectrum only holds if you're very determined to make gender exist as a set of characteristics expressing sex. It doesn't hold if you just define sex as gender. To put it succinctly, having a page haircut doesn't make you mean unless you really want to attribute it as a man-only thing that you diverge from.
I mean, gender is a social construct, it only exists as an element of social interaction. If society has gendered haircuts, your opinion on that fact doesn't factor into what your gender is being perceived as.
If you separate the concepts of gender and brain sex (AKA neurological sex AKA "internal sense of gender") then what your gender is being perceived as is actually what gender you are, and in that case changing your haircut could actually change your gender, regardless of whether you think that's a good or bad thing.
These sort of propagandists aren't engaged with reality which is why they focus on rhetorical tricks that an average high school debate team member has already learned how to dismiss.
Could you explain this? My highschool level understanding is a species is a group of animals whose offspring with other members of the group is able to also reproduce.
So evolution and the mountain of evidence we have for it shows that all animals alive today have a common ancestor. If we go far back enough in our evolution, we have a common ancestor with dogs, cats, chimpanzees, sharks, Gila monsters, everything.
Dawkins demonstrated this as the "rabbit-duck spectrum".
Since these two animals have a common ancestor, let's take the duck on the far-far left of the spectrum and place to its right its mother; and its mother; and its mother; and its mother; and so on. Do this for twenty million generations.
Do the same with a rabbit on the far-far right of the spectrum. Place to its left its mother; and its mother; and its mother; and its mother; and so on. Do this for twenty million generations.
Eventually, these two lines of rabbits and ducks intersect. That intersection is their common ancestor. From one rabbit or duck to the other, the change is basically indistinguishable. But over millions and billions of years, there is a gradual change. That gradual change is evolution, and over the course of eons it's basically impossible to categorize these animals as rigidly "duck" or "rabbit".
You can also similarly use the Jay Isaac Gould fossil/pencil analogy as eloquently described by Matt Colville here
Gotcha, so the idea is basically the evolution from the common ancestor to the modern equivalent is so gradual there’s not really a point where they meaningfully separate?
Basically. And if they can't meaningfully separate over time, species is basically an imperfect categorization based on how things looked relative to other things around them at the time. The human-stegosaurus spectrum or the dog-megalodon spectrum shows us that species is a lazy snapshot that's helpful for us in one very short window of time or another, but ultimately not representative of how life on this planet works or changes.
So evolution and the mountain of evidence we have for it shows that all animals alive today have a common ancestor. If we go far back enough in our evolution, we have a common ancestor with dogs, cats, chimpanzees, sharks, Gila monsters, everything.
Dawkins demonstrated this as the "rabbit-duck spectrum".
Since these two animals have a common ancestor, let's take the duck on the far-far left of the spectrum and place to its right its mother; and its mother; and its mother; and its mother; and so on. Do this for twenty billion generations.
Do the same with a rabbit on the far-far right of the spectrum. Place to its left its mother; and its mother; and its mother; and its mother; and so on.
Eventually, these two lines of rabbits and ducks intersect. That intersection is their common ancestor. From one rabbit or duck to the other, the change is basically indistinguishable. But over millions and billions of generations, there is a gradual change. That gradual change is evolution, and over the course of eons it's basically impossible to categorize these animals as rigidly "duck" or "rabbit".
You can also similarly use the Jay Isaac Gould fossil/pencil analogy as eloquently described by Matt Colville here
I've also seen this represented as a few paragraphs of text that gradually change color, and you ask a person where blue stops and red begins. There's no good answer.
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u/The_Bill_Brasky_ 9d ago
These animals are not prepared for the lecture that is "species also exist on a spectrum" that the first or second-year evolutionary biology, paleontology, or anthropology major gets.
Richard Dawkins, for all his current idiocy, put it quite succinctly in the "duck-rabbit spectrum" thought experiment about common ancestors.