Je n’aime pas poser cette question, mais doit on parler de sous-espèces ou de formes régionales humaines ?
“I hate to ask this question, but should we talk about subspecies or regional forms of humans?”
Modern humans are all classified as H. sapiens sapiens but that probably would not be the case if we were a different sentient species looking at H. sapiens objectively and using the criteria we employ for other mammals.
That said, a lot of described mammal subspecies just do not withstand close scrutiny and are legacy taxa from the pre-molecular days of taxonomy. They often are discarded whenever someone gets around to examining them.
Edit: I should clarify that all modern humans are recognized at the subspecies level if extinct forms such as Neantherthal or Denisovans are recognized as conspecific with us, which they often are not. Otherwise, no subspecies are recognized.
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You can imagine the outrage if a group of people were told they are a subspecies. It would not be enough to explain it is a neutral taxonomic term and if one group of humans is a subspecies, we are all subspecies.
We get around that by referring to human races, but that itself is an imprecise term.
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Justement, taxonomiquement parlant, que doit-on dire ? Une personne provenant d’une région X peut se reproduire avec une personne venant d’une région Y, tout en ayant des différences morphologiques comme la couleur de peau. Leur descendance aurait des caractères spécifiques de l’ethnie de chaque parent, tout en étant capable de se reproduire par la suite. N’est-ce pas là la définition d’une sous-espèce ?
and then who claims the nominate subspecies.
Who is
Homo sapiens sapiens
twice intelligent with our record of destroying our planet??
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I’m not sure what point you are making as my French is not very good. To clarify what I meant: once one part of a species gains a subspecies name, all parts of that species need a subspecies name to distinguish them even if, as Diana says, it is only sapiens sapiens.
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I believe Linnaeus is the type specimen for Homo sapiens so Northern Europeans would presumably be the nominate subspecies if we were to recognize such taxonomy. But we don’t.
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Humans are not diverse enough to be considered separate subspecies by modern standards. For example, variation in domestic dogs is actually much higher than genetic variation between human populations. However, this statement is true:
So, the first statement is only true if the other sentient species is using pre-molecular methods, and maybe not even then.
The type specimen is the nominate subspecies since any subsequent subspecies are described as different from that original type.
Since the original thread went off-topic to a tangent involving subspecies of humans, I moved those posts to their own thread and closed it. Discussions of human subspecies and varieties are often closely related to scientific racism, which is a difficult topic for a forum such as this, and not central to iNat, which doesn’t have a focus on human observations. The first post itself suggests that this may not be a good topic. As such, I’ve closed. If anyone is interested in how Linnaeus treated human variation, which served as some of the foundations for scientific racism, they can check out this review from the Linnean Society: https://www.linnean.org/learning/who-was-linnaeus/linnaeus-and-race
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