Two articles from the National Geographic website remind us of the elegance of new species creation. In the first, a new DNA study suggests that human and chimpanzee lines split from apes much earlier than previously believed, and that interbreeding occurred much longer than previously acknowledged before the two species diverged. This is significant because hybridization hasn’t been considered a primary player in the evolutionary process in the past (for as logical as such a path might seem to the average person thinking about the problem). It’s also interesting to note that the study also suggests a male-biased mutation was at work. This fits nicely with those studies demonstrating that certain species of male animals have a less developed sense of self, as it were, than females. That is and for example, male ducks raised by females of a different species will attempt to mate with females of their adoptive mothers species when they reach sexual maturity whereas females will only respond to courting males of their own kind.
The second article describes a variation on the hybridization theme: the shooting of a polar-grizzly bear hybrid with photo of the same. This supports what some of the researchers noted in the previous article: that maybe the reason hybridization was discounted was because we never looked for it. And one might add, that we lacked the technology to recognize even if we did. In this particular case, it also might be that the compressed changes associated with global warming may be accelerating a hybridization process that normally occurred so slowly that it went unnoticed. Now that we have noticed it, the question becomes what do we do about it? Do we dismiss it as an anomaly or a harbinger of things to come?