From Todd Wood:
Beyond that, it was incredibly refreshing to hear the talks in this symposium. Hybridization has been a passing interest of mine for a long time (thanks to Frank Marsh), and long ago, I came to the conclusion that hybridization was not remotely rare (like I had been taught) and that the biological species concept didn’t really explain what we were seeing in the real world of hybridizing species. Sure enough, Rebecca Ackermann of the University of Cape Town said that the Biological Species Concept is basically dead. That was in the first talk of the day. In the second, Mike Arnold of the University of Georgia said that introgressive hybridization is the rule in eukaryotes, plants and animals.
Now that might not mean much to you, but it means a lot to me. The biological species concept was an explicitly evolutionary idea, that species would be distinguished by their inability to breed with each other.
Too many lecterns splintered over too few facts.
See also: Neanderthal Man: The long-lost relative turns up again, this time with documents
and
Life continues to ignore what evolution experts say
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