Species Concept Question

[Ken Kinman]

Roger,
     This is basically what we did in Mammal Species of the World (1st Edition, by Honacki, Kinman, and Koeppl), with comments added on alternate viewpoints.  It provided a standard taxonomy against which others could "bounce" either their agreement or disagreement.  This eventually led to a 2nd Edition in 1993, and hopefully a 3rd Edition is in the works (or will be in the near future).  I think this approach works very well, although as I have remarked before, I would have liked to have included subspecies lists for polytypic species.

    Anyway, if we had adopted a phylogenetic species philosophy, I'm sure there would have been a lot more notes (comments) needed, and a lot more controversy.  I believe that our approach was balanced and minimized arbitrariness much better than a phylogenetic species criterion would have.
                ---- Cheers,
                         Ken Kinman
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Roger wrote:
    The best way to describe the diversity is to choose one nomenclatural solution (any one) and put notes in the margin as to what the relationships might be.  This means that for a significant proportion of diversity what we call things is going to be more or less arbitrary.  Most taxonomists don't like to think like this though.