Homocentric Universe

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS SPECIES:

Princeton Study Maps 200,000 Years of Human–Neanderthal Interbreeding (Princeton University Science Daily, 7/14/25)

Now, a group of researchers made up of geneticists and artificial intelligence specialists is uncovering new layers of that shared history. Led by Joshua Akey, a professor at Princeton’s Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, the team has found strong evidence of genetic exchange between early human groups, pointing to a much deeper and more complex relationship than previously understood.

“This is the first time that geneticists have identified multiple waves of modern human-Neanderthal admixture,” said Liming Li, a professor in the Department of Medical Genetics and Developmental Biology at Southeast University in Nanjing, China, who performed this work as an associate research scholar in Akey’s lab.

IT’S JUST VIBES:

If it looks like a dire wolf, is it a dire wolf? How to define a species is a scientific and philosophical question (Elay Shech, 5/30/25, The Conversation)

This gap between appearance and biological identity raises a deeper question: What exactly is a species, and how do you decide whether something belongs to one species rather than another?

Biologists call the answer a species concept – a theory about what a species is and how researchers sort organisms into different groups.

There’s no such thing as species.

DARWINISM JUST PROVIDED A JUSTIFICATION FOR THE EMPIRE:

Prehistory’s Original Sin: a review of The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins by Stefanos Geroulanos (Connor Grubaugh, 5/07/25, The Hedgehog Review)

Geroulanos’s portraits of major thinkers and movements in fields such as paleontology, evolutionary biology, anthropology, archaeology, historical linguistics, psychology, and religious studies are well-drawn and often devastating. He is right to argue that these disciplines emerged together as the authority of Christianity declined in the eighteenth century, becoming bearers of a modern faith that the origins of humanity and the meaning of human existence can be explained in naturalistic terms alone.

Beginning with the Enlightenment ideal of the noble savage and the Romantic lore of the untamed Indo-Aryan, then proceeding at a clip through stadial theories of prehistorical “deep time,” the diffusion of innumerable rival Darwinisms, the savage Id and collective unconscious, and more, Geroulanos demonstrates how speculation—and projection—have always run rife in these arenas of purportedly scientific research. Academic disagreements about the deep past and their popular representation have always tracked with the dominant ideologies of the times. “The story of human origins has never really been about the past,” he writes. “Prehistory is about the present day; it always has been.” And every generation gets the Neanderthals it deserves.

DARWINISM WAS JUST AN EXCUSE FOR COLONIALISM:

‘Biological reality’: What genetics has taught us about race (Adam Rutherford, 4/20/25, BBC)

When scientists unveiled the first draft of the Human Genome Project 25 years ago, it seemed to deliver the final word on some antiquated myths about race. It provided definitive evidence that racial groupings have no biological basis. In fact, there is more genetic variation within racial groups than between them. Race, it showed, is a social construct.

But despite that fundamental finding, which has only been reinforced as work on human genomes has continued, race and ethnicity are still often deployed to categorise human populations as distinct biological groups. These are views that can be found circulating in the pseudoscience on social media, but they also still creep into scientific research and healthcare systems.

There’s no such thing as species.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS SPECIES:

Dire wolf debate raises concerns on scientific overhype: Even de-extinction advocates say that Colossal Biosciences’ claims are misleading (Max Barnhart, April 11, 2025, C&EN)

“It’s not a dire wolf. It’s misleading to call it that,” says Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo. “I can’t explain how pissed off it made me, because they’re still saying this stuff, and they know it to not be true.”

David Shiffman, an environmental scientist and independent policy consultant, agrees. “This is not a dire wolf by any reasonable definition of a dire wolf,” he says. “This is a gray wolf that has had a tiny fraction of its genes modified to look more like what they think a dire wolf looked like. That means these animals are still gray wolves.”