this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2025
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Are there not worthwhile distinctions between sepcies that can interbreed? I remember learning from an anthro professor there are horses for examples that literally have different amounts of chromosomes that can interbreed fine. I still don't see how ability to have viable offspring isn't also just an arbitrary distinction I guess, especially when there's whole classifications of life that break that rule into pieces.
While a little arbitrary, we use "ability to produce viable offspring" as a metric of speciation. Two animals can bone and create an offspring, but that offspring has to have live gametes (egg/sperm) for the parents to be considered the same species.
it's not that arbitrary as you might think. genetics is literally all about mutating, mixing and recombining genes, and producing viable offspring together is a huge part of that. that is why the concept of species is so important.