A tidbit from the news
The world-famous biologist Richard Dawkins has frequently claimed that “Every creature ever born belonged to the same species as its parents.”* In a short article from 2019, I gave a deductive argument for the conclusion that Dawkins must be wrong. My argument implies that, on countless occasions in the history of evolution, an animal must have been born that belonged to a different species from that of its parents. I couldn’t point to any particular generation of parents and offspring; I simply gave a proof that it had to be this way.
Today I was gratified to come across a news report announcing a present-day example: the Iberian harvester ant, whose queen often lays eggs belonging to a species different from her own. I wonder if Dawkins will retract his claim in light of this news.
* The quotation comes from Dawkins’s book The Magic of Reality (2012), p. 38. But he’s made the same claim in many different venues over the years.
