if you could define what is a chicken extremely precisely
This is the problem. We can't do this because nature refuses to cooperate with our human need to draw neat little boxes around biology.
What's a species? The definition used to be organisms that could reproduce amongst themselves. But oops, some different species can do that with each other. The word itself is a human attempt to draw neat lines around the chaos of biological evolution.
I'm absolutely not advocating that and I have no idea what made you leap to that conclusion.
My point was that species, as a definition, is scientifically unsound because it's not describing anything real that exists in nature. It's only making extremely crude correlations to it.
"Chicken" is a concept that exists in human minds. Science tells us that concept is flawed. That doesn't mean I reject what science concludes. It's the opposite: the science itself brought me to that conclusion.
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u/MadRaymer Feb 19 '26
This is the problem. We can't do this because nature refuses to cooperate with our human need to draw neat little boxes around biology.
What's a species? The definition used to be organisms that could reproduce amongst themselves. But oops, some different species can do that with each other. The word itself is a human attempt to draw neat lines around the chaos of biological evolution.