[Taxacom] Type of Homo sapiens (was: Are species real? Doesn't matter.)

[Laurent Raty]

Dick,

> Using this approach, then gold, as an atomic element, exists only in our
> minds and has no intrinsic reality (after all, humans are the ones who
> have described the properties of gold). From a pragmatic perspective, I
> reject both that and your insistence that species have no reality.  To the
> extent that anything can be real, species, thought of as products of
> biological evolutionary processes (just as gold is the product of cosmic
> evolutionary processes), are real. They are there to be discovered by us.

Not taking the materialist definition of "real" into account ("gold" is
indeed not a "real" material entity) - one main problem may be, exactly as
you write it, actually : "...species, thought of as..."

I agree that the products of evolutionary processes are out there to be
discovered. But species... are merely objects that are part of a (sometimes
strongly) simplificatory model - the taxonomic system - that is used to
describe these products and, indeed, communicate about them.

(Actually, I tend to see insistences that species need to be real as
symptomatic of a confusion between this model and the reality, which I think
can become problematic at times... But that's just my feeling...)

Best,
Laurent -

--
Laurent Raty
l.raty at skynet.be
Brussels, Belgium