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RE: A new species of crocodile has been described for the first time in over 80 years!
That is interesting to read. In fact, it is more the division of a class of animals into 2 instead of the discovery of a totally new species. Just one naive question: how large should be the differences in genetic material before we would divide a specific into 2?
Yes, I guess that's true. Maybe I was a bit too sensationalizing in the title?
Unfortunately there is no agreed-upon number that everyone accepts, so it's a bit fluid, and dependent on the species in question. There's also a big different between different organisms, so a number that might work for mammals might not be good to use for bacteria, plants, or invertebrates. Right now genetic material is only one of several factors that helps determine if organisms belong to the same species, subspecies, or just are geographical variations.
It will be interesting to see if everyone can find a number to agree upon in the future, but I doubt it. Biologists still haven't even agreed upon a definition for what is a species yet, so I don't think taxonomists will not lose their job to geneticists just yet!
I would be very happy to a number that varies from classes of animals to classes of animals. If a common ground to all animal species can't be found (I actually agree this may be tricky to find), let's just make it simple enough but allowing some tuning.
Me too! I really hope we get to that point in the future, but I guess we need a lot more genetic data before we can really begin to decide where to draw the line. But whole genome sequencing is getting cheaper by the year, so we will soon enough have more genetic data than we know what to do with.