Hi SoSick

how does the ancestor mate with himself to get things going anyway?

If you look at the definition given in this thread so far you’ll see how speciation occurs. The ancestor of the wolf was not a wolf. It was however a wolf like creature. Evolutionary changes over time altered it till it became what we call a Wolf but each of those changes was simply the organisms maintaining their fitness in a changing environment. Once enough of these changes had accumulated the creatures which resulted were no longer the species they had been initially. They became wolves.

Evolution works gradually. At all times a given population will contain at least a viable breeding population with enough individuals to mate together to produce the next generation. If this was not the case, and it has often not been, those species will go extinct and so could not be the ancestor of a modern species. So for all current species we know that it has never been the case in their history that their line did not contain a viable breeding population.

So the last non wolf ancestor of the wolf would have looked a lot like a wolf and would have been genetically compatible with wolves, at least with wolves of it’s day, such that they could interbreed. If you only look at distant points in the history of a given species you see quite different creatures that possibly could not interbreed but if you looked at each successive generation along the path to their current form each generation would look a lot like the previous and the next and would be capable of interbreeding with both. It’s only if you take distant products of those lines from many generations apart that you will see reproductive incompatibility and so speciation but of course that is an artificial view.

In Reason

Russell