This past Saturday we had the last monthly session for our Science Club members in the 4th through 8th grade on Charles Darwin. During that session I misspoke and created an error that, I am sure. led to a misunderstanding of my point about relatedness among species. My point was intended to be about the well-known cichlid fishes (Family: Cichlidae) of Lake Victoria in East Africa. Prior to the 1980's there were known to be several hundred species of small, mostly in-shore cichlids in the lake. By that time, however, the introduction of the Nile perch (Lates niloticus) had started to take a noticeable toll on the endemic fishes and their total numbers as well as the number of species began to drastically disappear.
This kicked in high gear a world-wide effort to stop the species loss, and the Victorial Species Survival Plan (VSSP) was instituted whereby zoos and aquariums and private individuals were to hold in captivity, for the purposes of captive breeding, select species whose offspring would them be reintroduced into the lake.
Studies of the genetics of a group of fourteen, obviously distinct, species of these colorful fishes led to the discovery that there were fewer genetic differents among those fourteen species than there were (are) between any two individual humans, and all humans are of the same species!
My error came about when I substituted the word more for the word fewer.
==JFK==
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