Speciation and Branching

Ernst Mayr arrived in New Guinea in 1928, a twenty-four-year-old ornithologist. What he found in the mountains of the Arfak Peninsula dismantled his typological education. Bird populations at different elevations graded into one another — clearly distinct at the extremes but connected by intermediate forms that defied classification. He was encountering speciation in progress — not an event but a continuum, a gradual accumulation of differences that, given sufficient time and isolation, would eventually produce populations so different they could no longer interbreed. The framework that emerged — that speciation operates on a continuum of divergence, and that boundaries between species are maintained by the degree of isolation between populations — provides the conceptual apparatus for thinking about whether human and artificial intelligence will diverge or radiate.