>>Well, same genus (smile). They can't interbreed, which defines a species.<<
Actually you could cross a toy dog with a wolf and get viable offspring. But there is the physical difficulties of them having intercourse. And domesticated dogs' offspring don't make good nurturing fathers, a socialized trait that wolves, coyotes and dingoes have. So there are more considerations than genomes and chromosome counts when we talk about inter-breeding (or intra-breeding). You could say just as the wheat genome is really the combined genome of 6 grasses and the wolf genome actually comprises wolf-coyote-dingo-domesticated dog, with a few exceptions. So as some have pointed out that is what makes the eastcoast US 'coy-dog' problematic. However, I think it is possible in the case of some sort of coyote-wolf-dog mix taking over new territory, considering how quickly dogs that go feral can form cooperative packs and how dingoes were domesticated dogs but are now more like wolves and coyotes. I don't think gnats are. I think the birds that come in to feed on a lot of the nuisance insects on large herbivores is, whatever the technical term, not contentious. The birds know the big juicy bugs will be near the herds. The animals know the birds will bring some relief. Speculation leads me to think of our out-of-Africa ancestors as domesticating with/co-evolving with a wolf-dog before they ever left Africa. That is a pretty nifty dialectic--a top-of-the-food chain socialized predator coming out of the North meeting up with a socialized omnivore learning to be a predator coming out of the South. Maybe it is just an accident that our ancestors had the capacity to both compete with but also co-evolve with the wolf while Neanderthal could only parasitize them (follow them around to find herds of animals to hunt, even eating wolves when they needed to). CJ -- ELT in Japan http://eltinjapan.blogspot.com/ Japan Higher Education Outlook http://japanheo.blogspot.com/ We are Feral Cats http://wearechikineko.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
