["Are lions and leopards different kinds?"]
It depends... Through 1,000 generations of breeding... can you take two lions and breed their offspring into a leopard?
If yes, then they are the same creature with some individuals expressing the traits of a lion and some expressing traits of a leopard (like how some people are white and some people are black... we're both people... but it would take a long time to breed a family of all white people until they get black offspring... it can happen though by selectively breeding the darker children with eachother.
26 comments
Once again, somebody's been skipping biology class.
Wow. In addition to what Papabear said, I'm pretty sure ligers and mules are sterile. So no, you fail.
Papabear, I'm pretty sure Ligers are mules, but female Tigons are fertile. That's the only fertile cross between tigers and lions, and they do not happen in the wild.
I think the comments so far are being a bit harsh. My understanding of what Gregorian is saying is that lion and leopards are the same biblical "kind" if both species could have descended from a common ancestor. He lacks a complete understanding of the concept and the vocabulary to express it, but he's on the right track (He talks about lions breeding into leopards when he should be talking about a common ancestor breeding into both). He's admitting the existence of evolution by natural selection within limits. He just doesn't understand that there is no reason for those limits to be inferred.
The problem with the fundie thinking behind kinds developing into all the species we know today, following the mythical Flood, is that it would required hyper-accelerated mutations to have occured in the short time span allotted to it (again according to YEC thinking).nothing in fossil record to indicate anything of the kind has ever occurred.
Look, mate, I'm a lion, but I'm no leopard.
Puistokemisti: That's definitely what he's saying, but fundies are not known for their English skills. Seems to me (and I could be wrong) that what Gregorian is suggesting is that lions and leopards could be closely related enough for both to have come from a common pair of ancestors on the arc. I think he says that leopards could come from "lions" in the same sense that he might say that evolution says humans came from "monkeys." Certainly he doesn't understand evolution very well, but I give him at least a little credit for admitting that it exists (albeit in limited fashion). I call it a start.
Maronan - I have some upsetting news for you. The Lion King is fiction. Mustapha does not look down on you from the sky or cause it to rain.
He kinda got ethnic evolution right at the end, though it wouldn't be a single family doing the evolving, and it wouldn't be selective either, it'd actually be natural
@Julian
Maronan - I have some upsetting news for you. The Lion King is fiction. Mustapha does not look down on you from the sky or cause it to rain.
I share a common ancestor with leopards, that doesn't mean I am one. You're related to your cousin, but you're not the same person.
Also, what's "rain?" You mean water falling from the sky? That doesn't happen much in the Outback. If you want "rain," go back to pommie land and take your monarchs with you.
It depends... Through 1,000 generations of breeding... can you take two lions and breed their offspring into a leopard?
In some ways, people here are being a little hard on The Gregorian. First of all, his very next sentence is: "If no, then they are different species. " So he's not claiming than lions and leopards are the same species - he's giving a test for if they are. He's looking on them the way you'd look at breeds of dogs - do enough selective breeding, and you can get all kinds of different body patterns, though they're still the same species. Using selective breeding to bring out different traits isn't done on humans, but if it were, I think you'd have to be a top notch genetic biologist to tell us now exactly what would and wouldn't be possible.
You're going to have to have a collection of mixed genes from different races to do that. It can happen even if your starting couple looks "whitish", though, but only if you start with the right genes in the mixture already.
Fine, you go do that. Get back to us in a thousand generations.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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