Speciation Topics in Depth
What is a Species?
Most people can look at a dog and a horse and guess that they are two different species. That is, unless it's a Great Dane. Those must be some kind of dog-horse hybrid, right? Just kidding. The spe...
Species Concepts
What are species, exactly? There are many definitions for the concept of species. There is no universal species concept—one that applies to all organisms. Instead, scientists have been proposing...
What's So Special About Speciation?
Now that we're armed with the BSC, we can finally explore Speciation—the evolutionary process that leads to the generation of multiple species from a single common ancestor. We have speciation to...
Reproductive Isolation
The Frogs Tell AllOne of the pillars of speciation, reproductive isolation starts it all. Speciation is not possible without some form of isolating barrier that disrupts gene flow. This isn't alway...
The Geography of Speciation
The where of speciation can often be really informative in answering the why's and how's that keep evolutionary biologists up at night. Here are a couple of the major geography-of-speciation terms,...
Bring in the Reinforcements
Imagine an allopatric speciation scenario; a continuous population of species gets divided, and as time goes on the two populations begin to diverge into separate species. What's to say that indivi...
The Tempo of Evolution
We've mentioned a few times that something occurs on "evolutionary timescales," but what exactly does that mean? It's sort of a convenient phrase to say it's slower than we can see or measure. Is t...
Adaptive Radiation
No, this is not the name of a tanning salon. It's an evolutionary phenomenon in which organisms rapidly speciate because of some new ecological opportunity. It's important to remember that evolutio...
Hybridization vs. Hybrid Speciation
Hybridization is the anti-speciation. Successful species exist by avoiding the formation of hybrids. At least that's what we've been saying all along. As it turns out, biologists love to make excep...
Common Mistakes
What is a SpeciesSometimes the difference between a subspecies and a species can seem a bit fuzzy, because there's really no clear biological delineation between them. A species is a group of indiv...
Test Your Knowledge!
What Is a Species? 1. What is HGT? 2. Do you have to understand modern Linnaean taxonomy in order to accurately identify and distinguish different species? 3. True or false: t...