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Are Humans A Single Species? (What If We Categorized Humans Like Other Animals)
How Many Species of Humans Are There? In this thought-provoking episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive deep into the science and controversy behind human genetic diversity, species classification, and what it really means to be "human." From Neanderthals to modern populations, they explore evolutionary history, genetic divergence, and the social implications of speciation. Expect lively debate, fascinating facts, and a few spicy takes on science, society, and the future of humanity. If you enjoy challenging ideas and want to learn more about human evolution, genetics, and the boundaries of species, this episode is for you!
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today is almost certainly gonna stand among our most controversial episodes in which we will be arguing. And I'm not saying that, that, that, that I would argue this, but I'm going to say if humans weren't humans, right, we would likely categorize them as multiple different species.
Simone Collins: Oh no. Oh God.
Malcolm Collins: Oh no. And now you're coming into this and you're likely thinking, Malcolm, that's insane. Like you must be stretching the data here or something. Did you know that there are living human populations alive today that are more genetically distant from European populations than the Neanderthals were?
Simone Collins: Whoa. And they were considered a different species. Right? Like technically they're a different species. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Now, Neanderthals, it did split off much earlier, but that doesn't mean that they weren't more genetically similar to European populations in these populations. Well also 'cause
Simone Collins: there's a decent amount of Neanderthal in a lot of Europeans, right?
Malcolm Collins: No, [00:01:00] it's 1%. It's not enough to really fudge the numbers in their direction. Okay. So, so, okay. Okay. You might be thinking Okay. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let's go back here. Let's go back. We're gonna go back to okay. We're species. Where does species begins? Darwin's finches. Okay. Darwin's finches.
Okay. Darwin's finches evolutionarily diverged from each other and are less genetically different from each other than these humans are from Europeans.
Simone Collins: That's a good point.
Malcolm Collins: We haven't got yet. We're gonna get into a lot of data here. Oh gosh. It's, it's very uncomfortable data. And I'll at the end, just so you know, so nobody comes in here and says, Malcolm is saying that there are currently multiple species of humans.
I'm not saying that we are in the sliders timeline.
Speaker: What if you found a portal to a parallel universe? What if you could slide into a thousand different worlds [00:02:00]
Malcolm Collins: by the way, for those who didn't watch sliders in sliders, one of the core antagonists, because they could slide between dimensions, was a branch of humanity that evolved from Crow mags. Oh, I didn't
Simone Collins: know that. I didn't watch the show though. So,
Malcolm Collins: It's a great show.
People should watch it. But anyway one of those great classic sci-fi anyway but the, the, what I think they show in this show is this fundamental fear that if we admitted, like if there are multiple species of humanity around today, like why is that an issue? Right? And people will be like, oh no, no, no, no.
They can interbreed and have offspring. They can interbred. Well, you considered Neanderthal a different species, right? Yeah. And you know, just admitted we have Neanderthal DNA and we're gonna go over a lot of species that can I breed and have, and have. Children that inter breeded. So that's not ho
Published on 3 months, 2 weeks ago