>>51550946Not him, but not being related in the context of familiarity doesn't mean we aren't still the same species. As a rule of thumb, two things that look very similar are of the same species if they can fuck and have offspring that ALSO can fuck and have offspring. If two things that look very similar can't fuck, can fuck but don't produce offspring, or can fuck and produce offspring but those offspring are sterile, then those things are from different species or are on the way to becoming different species diverging from a very recent (in biological time scales) ancestor. I'm gonna go ahead and say that for this rule of thumb your two things have to be compatible (one male and one female). Should be obvious but if I don't explicitly say it someone will ask
>but two male bears can't have offspring, does that mean they're not the same species? You and all other anons of different colors and shit belong to the same species. Dogs do too, even if a chihuahua and a great dane can't physically fuck, if you were to put their seed and eggs together, fertile pups would be achieved. Dogs are so fucked up in terms of variants only because of humans, and if humans were allowed to do the same breeding to other humans for fun we could have insane varieties too.
The isolated people from sentinel island are still humans presumably, not enough time has passed or selective pressure applied for them to evolve into something that's no longer human.
Bottom line here is that pokemon is making a mistake with rfakes. The average pokemon fan is not ready to grasp even the most entry higschool biology concepts, and they will not understand how wigletts are different from paldean or galarian forms. I'm not defending wiglett either, I don't particularly like its design, but as a whole this franchise with lamarckism and "egg groups" shouldn't try to dive into genuine biology and evolution, it's too late.
