Can Domestic Selection cause Macroevolution?

I don't think it is clear that all ring species are only reproductively isolated pre-zygotically, i.e. genetically incompatible. There is some evidence that members of the Ensatina complex are tending towards post-zygotic isolation (Alexandrino, et al., 2005).If one does accept speciation as macroevolution and also accepts a behavioural or gross morphological basis for pre-mating reproductive isolation as sufficient to define a species then you would probably have a good basis for claiming that diversification of domestic dogs was an example of 'domestic' selection producing macroevolution.There are probably a lot of biologists who might be cautious of describing such a thing as an example of macroevolution. Ring species are more often suggested to be examples of incipient speciation rather than speciation, although they elegantly demonstrate some important mechanisms for speciation.TTFN,WK

Do you have anything to support this claim, that 'speciation' is just a new name for 'variation'?TTFN,WK

Two apes, such as humans and chimps, that can't reproduce are still apes. Two eukaryotes which can't reproduce are still eukaryotes.Can you see how useless this argument is, it doesn't have any relevance to macroevolution.TTFN,WK

Oh yeah, thats a catchy phrase, can you see why people prefer using the word species? What you have used is of course somewhat ineffective as well since it fails to differentiate between such a population which can still breed with the parent population with one which can't. How would you make that distinction?TTFN,WK

Where? In the fictional land of make-believe? You would have to go back about 60 years to precede Mayr's definition of the Biological Species and another decade or so to precede Dobzhansky's stricter definition of species. You would have to go even farther back to actually proceed the concept of species.TTFN,WK

It is latin, its latin for 'kind'. TTFN,WK

I don't think Crash was contradicting himself.He was making a distinction between parasitism being the same as symbiosis and parasitism being a form of symbiosis. He didn't say it wasn't symbiotic, just that it wasn't the same as symbiosis. He further suggested that describing the symbiotic relationship between humans and maize as parasitic was incorrect and it should more correctly be described as mutualistic.TTFN,WK

None of these concepts or terms originated as late as the 60's or 70's. I have already suggested when and by who two of the most common definitons of species originated. Do you have anything other than your own subjective opinion to suggest that they werent extant biological terms in the 60's and 70's?TTFN,WK

I think you will find in fact that there are known cases of all of these species hybridising, see wikipedia's entry on Panthera genus hybrids for some more details, although I don't know what the fertility of such crosses has been.Despite that I don't see any reason why two more genetically distant species might no be interfertile when not interfertile with a third species more closely related to one of them.Interfertility is not a simple matter of genetic distance. There can be specific genes forming the basis of incompatibility and there is no need for them to be more distant just because two species are more genetically distant overall, although we might well expect this to be the case under a neutral evolution scenario for the divergence of the species.Similarly a large scale chromosomal change might cause a loss of fertility but would not necessarily result in the measurement of a further genetic distance between species depending on the metric being usedTTFN,WK