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Saturday, January 19, 2008

Never heard of a beefalo? Aw, don’t be shy.

It’s what happens when Buffalo bull meets Cow gal or versa vice. You probably don’t hang out in places like that, so to you it's just a dinner entree.

This is a cross between genera, not species.

Fertile hybrids of genus bos and genus bison, separated for many thousands of years, form the basis of an industry in Western North America. What does that mean for theories of how different species come to exist?

Jane Harris-Zsovan of The Design of Life team says,
The existence of the beefalo and its cousins, the dzo and zubron, show us that - after millennia of separation - the gene pool of individuals in the genus bison and genus bos has not changed enough to make interbreeding impossible. And, in the case of European bison and American bison, there is debate as to whether speciation has fully occurred.

Clearly, the Darwinian theory of speciation by natural selection is not the whole story. Maybe it’s not the true story at all.

Go here for more.

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