[Taxacom] Are species real? Doesn't matter.

[Frederick W. Schueler]

pierre deleporte wrote:

> - species are not biological "individuals" from a materialist point of 
> view: they are definitely not consistent material systems (not even 
> populations, as frequently conceived) - they are materially "divided" 
> instead, into a lot of spatially, temporally and biologically disconnected 
> individuals
> - so-called "species as historical individuals" can't be anything but 
> classes, i.e. historically meaningful concepts for the evolutionary 
> biologist and the phylogenetic systematician
> - classes are concepts, "clusters" can be material systems (physically 
> connected aggregates of things) or concepts (pseudo classes of some kind)

* not to delve too deeply into the nuances of ontology, but surely the 
"type specimen" of the "individual" is the Human Person, which isn't an 
object of fixed material composition (as a dead object might be), but is 
a wave form of organization & historical memory imposed on a flux of 
metabolites.

fred (henceforth a cluster of anabolized food & air).
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