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

[Robin Leech]

I used to throw my biology students into big arguments when
I said: "I am male.  See that guy over there?  He, too, is male.
We are reproductively isolated.  Does that make us different
species?  Tell me why, yes or no."
Robin Leech
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Frederick W. Schueler" <bckcdb at istar.ca>
Cc: <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>
Sent: Friday, June 01, 2007 12:01 PM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Are species real? Doesn't matter.


> 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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