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The Fuzziness of SpeciesMay 18, 2006 Another one from the notebook. Caveat: Even in my clerical days I was pretty much incapable of typing anything without changing it, mainly because my changes invariably made the writer look better. I had one boss for whom this wasn't true, but she also did most of her own typing. My changes usually make MY writing look better, but before a couple of months have passed I'm a pretty lousy judge of that. In between places -- fed at one horse-sit, fed and mucked three stalls at another, met the writers for breakfast, stopped at home en route back to barn #2 for midday chores, thence to barn #1 to clean stalls -- I downloaded e-mail mainly to make sure the incoming job was on schedule. Skimmed the news digests. Could not resist "Human Ancestors May Have Interbred with Chimpanzees" in the online Washington Post. Would like to report that my first thought was not "Let me guess which gender initiated the "interbreeding," which is to say "sex"; closely followed by "You mean it isn't happening now??" But that would be a big lie. The article is so sketchy in its explanation that it's hard to tell what was going on, but it's clear that the key is the chimp and human X chromosome, which is considerably younger (an estimated 1.2 million years younger but who's counting) than other shared human-chimp chromosomes. Tentative conclusion is that the human and chimp species diverged for good more recently than had been thought -- that the first divergence wasn't final. Commented James Mallet, a geneticist at University College, London: "This is contributing to the idea that species are kind of fuzzy. They become real over time, but it takes millions of years. We probably had a bit of a messy origin." I suspect I have a genetic propensity to see things in black and white, but that life (or maybe my crummy eyesight) has made everything fuzzy around the edges and several shades of gray in the middle. Confusion loves company, which is why I chortled when I read Mallet's words. Here's hoping the finding fuzzes up some people's certainty that blacks and whites shouldn't intermarry, or Protestants and Catholics, or Muslims and Jews. I haven't read any responses yet from the creationists. Maybe they won't bother to respond: this hypothetical miscegenation took place several million years before God created the universe, after all, and that particular god seems to have been a fan of sharp-edged categories, everything in its category and nothing in the fuzzy spaces between. One reason, by the way, that I wonder about the divinity of this god: my own experience is that the more I know, the fuzzier the categories get, so surely to an omniscient being most categories have more exceptions than members?
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