If race doesn't exist, what about species?

Scientists now say the famous snail darter endangered species wasn't a species.

Remember the famous snail darter, the two-inch long minnow that turned the Endangered Species Act from a nice gesture to save some charismatic megafauna like the bald eagle into a juggernaut of NIMBYism?

Well, according to a new study by scientists, it’s never been a species. It’s just a a subpopulation, a race as it were, of the never endangered stargazing darter.

This is of interest both for what it says about the Endangered Species Act and about the current dogma that race doesn’t exist scientifically.

If scientists argue over questions of species all the time, is it surprising that racial categories within the human species aren’t always clear-cut?

From the New York Times science section:

This Tiny Fish’s Mistaken Identity Halted a Dam’s Construction

Scientists say the snail darter, whose endangered species status delayed the building of a dam in Tennessee in the 1970s, is a genetic match of a different fish.

By Jason Nark

Updated Jan. 4, 2025

For such a tiny fish, the snail darter has haunted Tennessee. It was the endangered species that swam its way to the Supreme Court in a vitriolic battle during the 1970s that temporarily blocked the construction of a dam.

On Friday, a team of researchers argued that the fish was a phantom all along.

“There is, technically, no snail darter,” said Thomas Near, curator of ichthyology at the Yale Peabody Museum.

Dr. Near, also a professor who leads a fish biology lab at Yale, and his colleagues report in the journal Current Biology that the snail darter, Percina tanasi, is neither a distinct species nor a subspecies. Rather, it is an eastern population of Percina uranidea, known also as the stargazing darter, which is not considered endangered.

Dr. Near contends that early researchers “squinted their eyes a bit” when describing the fish, because it represented a way to fight the Tennessee Valley Authority’s plan to build the Tellico Dam on the Little Tennessee River, about 20 miles southwest of Knoxville.

“I feel it was the first and probably the most famous example of what I would call the ‘conservation species concept,’ where people are going to decide a species should be distinct because it will have a downstream conservation implication,” Dr. Near said.

The T.V.A. began building the Tellico Dam in 1967. Environmentalists, lawyers, farmers and the Cherokee, whose archaeological sites faced flooding, were eager to halt the project. In August 1973, they stumbled upon a solution.

David Etnier, a dam opponent and a zoologist at the University of Tennessee, went snorkeling with students in the Little Tennessee River at Coytee Spring, not far from Tellico. There, they found a fish on the river bottom that Dr. Etnier said he had never seen before, and he named it the snail darter.

This brilliant ploy has become standard practice among NIMBYists, so let me describe it more clearly.

Paywall here. 2008 words after the break.