[HN Gopher] The Sparrow with Four Sexes (2016)
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       The Sparrow with Four Sexes (2016)
        
       Author : 0DHm2CxO7Lb3
       Score  : 34 points
       Date   : 2020-11-26 20:05 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
        
       | loa_in_ wrote:
       | It sounds like they're evolving into separate species.
       | 
       | Indeed it's one definition of a species that it's a population
       | that can mate within it's group. So if they can no longer breed
       | with each other, are they same species or not?
        
         | pcl wrote:
         | Ring species are a weird and fascinating corner case of that
         | definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species
        
           | gumby wrote:
           | Before the invention of radio this was a property of language
           | as well. Famously you could walk from Paris to Rome and every
           | village could speak comfortably and naturally with its
           | neighbors, yet by the time you got to Rome they spoke a
           | language essentially incomprehensible to Parisians.
        
             | monkeycantype wrote:
             | 30 yrs ago, I rode my bike from East Berlin to Amsterdam,
             | hopping from tiny village to tiny village. I kept out of
             | cities so I could sleep in the forest at night and it
             | seemed as if the the local dialect drifted town by town
             | from deutsch to dutch
        
               | jacquesm wrote:
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German
        
         | rcollyer wrote:
         | They do breed with each other: a-males mate with b-females, and
         | vice versa, where a/b is the new sex gene.
        
         | geofft wrote:
         | If I'm reading right, the two groups can _only_ breed with each
         | other. That is, white-striped males and tan-striped females can
         | breed, as can white-striped females and tan-striped males. (And
         | the offspring are about half white-striped and half tan-
         | striped.)
         | 
         | So it's not speciation, any more than sexes themselves are
         | speciation.
        
         | bregma wrote:
         | Just wait until you learn about the sex life of hexaploid
         | species... an offspring needs parents of at least 3 different
         | sexes.
        
       | mkl wrote:
       | (2016)
       | 
       | Discussion at the time:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13027132
        
       | ncmncm wrote:
       | Crazy-complicated sexes are extremely common in the plant world,
       | probably an adaptation to sessile life and difficult seed
       | propagation.
       | 
       | I.e., I would guess that plants that have easy seed propagation
       | have less complicated sexes, but I don't know.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | kleer001 wrote:
       | Then there's mushrooms...
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2020-11-26 23:00 UTC)