I was hoping if I was polite he would explain more of his insane “one animal, two species” point of view. Alas, I think he bumped his head on the logical contradiction and left.

You should check out the TV show extraordinary! It is about a bunch of 20 something losers in a world where everyone has a superpower. One guy uses time travel to avoid difficult conversations with his girlfriend, another person makes doubles of themself at work to get all the gossip, a main character’s mom has the power to control technology but doesn’t actually know how technology works so she is still pretty useless with it, etc.

So what species is the sub species then under your framework?

Your position is that something can be two species at once? I suppose that is one way to solve the problem of where to draw the line for speciation!

Completely out of line with the perspective of modern biology but fascinating and internally coherent none the less! It will take me years to fully digest this perspective. Thank you.

Saying that something can be two species at once is none the less not a compelling argument against the concept of a species being a social construct, as your perspective clashes with others’.

I say this with respect: your response looks as though you did not fully consider the impact of ring species as I had mentioned.

Please take a closer look and get back to me.

Eh, for the most part yes but really “species” is a social construct and sometimes two members of the same species can’t interbreed at all ; see ring species for example, where for a very brief example, a central population of salamanders can interbreed with northern and southern populations but the northern and southern populations can’t interbreed with each other, and if the northern population extends south west and the southern population extends north west they can overlap but still not interbreed but also still exchange genes by both breeding with the central population, super funky stuff!

But then you can also have clearly different species that mostly can’t produce viable offspring but sometimes can; rarely mule can produce offspring for example.

There are also different species that can regularly and reliably produce viable offspring such as various species of milksnake and kingsnake (see particularly the imperial pueblan milksnake hybrid of pueblan milksnakes and Californian king snakes), between horses and Przewalski’s horse (which even have different numbers of chromosomes), between American bison and domestic cattle, and camel hybrids (who readily and regularly backcross to produce 75% dromedaries or 75% bactrians).

Biology is so messy and interesting! I find it fascinating. I don’t mean to undermine your point about racists calling different modern humans different species being a bad thing; it might be an interesting biological discussion but racists poison the well so to speak. The utility of camel hybrids and backcrosses would be evidence enough to show a reasonable person why it wouldn’t be a bad thing. Alas, racists are dumb.