I believe Richard Dawkins touched on this topic and I will give my reply
giving him credit for his influence.
Evolution by natural selection should be a common process in any life
form that has inheritence and differential survival and reproduction due
to phenotypic variation due to genotypic variation. As a consequence of
evolution by natural selection, we would expect species to arise for the
same reasons they arise here on earth. The word "species" should not be
conflated with other uses of the word - in biology we all know what we
mean, more or less. (humor) - but a chemical species has nothing to do
with the biological concept of species. In fact, the word species can
also mean any class of objects with something in common, so we don't
want that other usage to confuse what we mean when we speak of
biological species (not necessarily the biological species concept, what
I mean are species that are biological entitites).
So, sure, species would be exactly WHAT we call those organisms on other
planets.
But, of course, it is a moot point - we will never see any.
Jim
Martin Meiss wrote on 07-May-10 18:46:
I think someone is being to bio-centric with the word species. It
does not apply only to the living world. Chemists can refer to a molecule
as being of a certain chemical species.
It seems to me that if the alien beings are not all identical, they
must be amenable of classification, which is to say, a taxonomy. If a
taxonomy is not to be purely mathematical, their must be taxa, and these
taxa must have names. Would we want to come up with a whole new set to
replace "Kindom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species" for each
planet with lifeforms? Indeed, perhaps all we need to is add a taxon above
kingdom representing the planet of origin, although this could be tricky if
a planet had more than one system of life, each without any ancestry in
common with the others.
Martin M. Meiss
2010/5/7 Shelly Thomas<[email protected]>
Dear Colleagues,
This is outside the normal ecological questions we post here, but I am very
interested in your opinions on this.
I was having an armchair philosophical discussion with a colleague and some
students the other day, trying to figure out if we (ecologists / scientists)
would use the word "species" to describe an extra-terrestrial life form
(supposing that someday we find one - or one finds us [c.f. Hawking]).
Here is why we were unsure of the proper term to use.
-The discussion over the basic definition of the word "species"
-We seem to be leaning more toward the phylogenetic definition (although
there is much discussion still going on about this and others may disagree);
this definition uses the ancestor/lineage model.
-If a life form is outside of our planet's big-picture evolutionary
lineage, do we then use a different term than "species"? If so, what might
we use?
Would love to hear your ideas about this!
Thanks,
Shelly
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