Earlier quoted context omitted.
Before the invention of radio this was a property of language as well. Famously you could walk from Paris to Rome and every village could speak comfortably and naturally with its neighbors, yet by the time you got to Rome they spoke a language essentially incomprehensible to Parisians.
30 yrs ago, I rode my bike from East Berlin to Amsterdam, hopping from tiny village to tiny village. I kept out of cities so I could sleep in the forest at night and it seemed as if the the local dialect drifted town by town from deutsch to dutch
The sparrow with four sexes (2016)
11–20 of 34 posts
Re: The sparrow with four sexes (2016)
#12Crazy-complicated sexes are extremely common in the plant world, probably an adaptation to sessile life and difficult seed propagation.
I.e., I would guess that plants that have easy seed propagation have less complicated sexes, but I don't know.
Re: The sparrow with four sexes (2016)
#13Then there's mushrooms...
Re: The sparrow with four sexes (2016)
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Before the invention of radio this was a property of language as well. Famously you could walk from Paris to Rome and every village could speak comfortably and naturally with its neighbors, yet by the time you got to Rome they spoke a language essentially incomprehensible to Parisians.
30 yrs ago, I rode my bike from East Berlin to Amsterdam, hopping from tiny village to tiny village. I kept out of cities so I could sleep in the forest at night and it seemed as if the the local dialect drifted town by town from deutsch to dutch
That’s a good example! I remember being on a train where a woman was reading a book in Dutch to her kids and my then 5 year old son (a German speaker) walked over to sit behind her and listen.
Re: The sparrow with four sexes (2016)
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
30 yrs ago, I rode my bike from East Berlin to Amsterdam, hopping from tiny village to tiny village. I kept out of cities so I could sleep in the forest at night and it seemed as if the the local dialect drifted town by town from deutsch to dutch
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German
And heading North: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisian_languages
Re: The sparrow with four sexes (2016)
#16It sounds like they're evolving into separate species. Indeed it's one definition of a species that it's a population that can mate within it's group. So if they can no longer breed with each other, are they same species or not?
I thought so at first, but no... The two different "species" only mate with each other.
Re: The sparrow with four sexes (2016)
#17Can someone explain what prevents birds of the same subtype from mating? The article mentions that the chromosome 2 cannot cross over in meiosis, but I just fail to understand the mechanics of the process and how that leads to disassortativity.
Re: The sparrow with four sexes (2016)
#18It sounds like they're evolving into separate species. Indeed it's one definition of a species that it's a population that can mate within it's group. So if they can no longer breed with each other, are they same species or not?
If the tan ones could only mate with the tan ones, that would work. As it is, though, no. A white male and tan female can have a tan chick that can go on to mate with a white bird (indeed must, if it mates at all). That’s not speciation.
Re: The sparrow with four sexes (2016)
#19Can someone explain what prevents birds of the same subtype from mating? The article mentions that the chromosome 2 cannot cross over in meiosis, but I just fail to understand the mechanics of the process and how that leads to disassortativity.
Having 2 copies of the mutated gene is probably deadly.
They are saying an individual can only mate with a quarter of the population, but it's obviously incorrect, as the pre-mutation birds can mate with both mutated and unmutated opposite sex.
The reason cross-morph pairs are observed more often as the mutated birds are more sexually aggressive and quickly round up unmutated opposite sex.
Re: The sparrow with four sexes (2016)
#20It sounds like they're evolving into separate species. Indeed it's one definition of a species that it's a population that can mate within it's group. So if they can no longer breed with each other, are they same species or not?
Just wait until you learn about the sex life of hexaploid species... an offspring needs parents of at least 3 different sexes.
a good book which discusses species with over a dozen sexes read Matt Ridley
The Red Queen