Keep in mind that while species seem to be nice little black and white boxes that we humans are taught in school to "bin" things into - the real world is much more complicated. Molecular data adds a new and powerful tool but there are rarely purely objective and quantitative robot like decisions in taxonomy. Some genes evolve faster than other, some cause changes in phenoptype that are clearly visible while others do not, some groups are studied by scientists that are more likely to split species while other groups are studied by lumpers - and most groups are vastly under studied. If you really want to be as objective as possible and to remove as much of the human factor form the decisions, you can go with purely quantitative models and drop the species names completely. Instead you could just use numbers representing how related or not species are (or are not). While this approach may be more accurate, it has some serious disadvantages, especially for hobbyists. For one, in its purest form, there are no species names to hang you hat on' that makes just talking to each other hard. Two, every time there is new data, or even old data weighted a different way, or any sort of change in the data from any scientist anywhere in the world, the model changes. . . The more I've learned about Taxonomy, the more I realize that it is a human invention and that molecular tools while powerful, do not solve the "what is a species?" questions. -- James B. Wood Ph.D. Webmaster of The Cephalopod Page Co-author: "Octopus - The Ocean's Intelligent Invertebrate" "Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled." Stevenson