re: #209 Glenn Beck’s Grand Unifying Theory of Obdicut

Okay, well, we have observed speciation, so I guess it’d just be proving to them that we’ve observed speciation.

The only nit to pick there is that we’ve observed speciation with regards to bacteria in a laboratory setting.

This lack of any clear species concept in microbiology has led to some authors arguing that the term “species” is not useful when studying bacterial evolution. Instead they see genes as moving freely between even distantly related bacteria, with the entire bacterial domain being a single gene pool. Nevertheless, a kind of rule of thumb has been established, saying that species of Bacteria or Archaea with 16S rRNA gene sequences more similar than 97% to each other need to be checked by DNA-DNA Hybridization if they belong to the same species or not.[19] This concept has been updated recently, saying that the border of 97% was too low and can be raised to 98.7%.[20]