Locality data

Nhu Nguyen xerantheum@gmail.com
Tue, 30 Oct 2012 20:39:01 PDT
This is such a juicy subject that I have to join (just for a little).

It's always good remember that no one knows what a species truly is.
Taxonomy and the latest and fanciest science could not yet tell us that
yet. However, taxonomy has been pretty good at *recognizing* species. What
we humans recognize as species does not make something a species, but it
has its practical purposes.

On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 5:46 PM, Jim McKenney <jamesamckenney@verizon.net>wrote:

>  In my book, while  there is no interbreeding, they are different species.
> Should they return to interbreeding, they they become the same species again
>

Jim, your book follows the animal model pretty closely -- that is the
biological species concept. It only works with organisms that mate, and
there is a huge diversity out there that don't mate, and there are a number
of other species concepts that are used to recognize the asexual organisms.
It is also a problem with plants too since plants from different genera and
even families could hybridize, but I'm sure you meant no interbreeding in
the wild, not in our gardens.

Nhu



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