[Taxacom] Why Australians are more real than Americans: implications for taxonomy!

[Stephen Thorpe]

>So... if I understand you correctly... you're under the delusi...err....impression that "real" species boundaries exist in nature outside of human imagination and convenience -- correct?

It is manifestly self-evidently so! To deny this is up there with Grehanian denial of the evidence that points to the human-chimp relationship!
Importantly, though, I am NOT saying that species boundaries are ALWAYS absolutely precise and clear, and indeed, there isn't an absolutely precise boundary between Australia and ocean either - the tide goes in and out and it is a fuzzy boundary. Nevertheless, Australia does have "real" boundaries in nature outside of human imagination and convenience -- correct?

To see the "real" species boundaries, you only have to imagine a world in which there were none. I hope you have the capacity for imagination! :) In such a world, every morphotype would grade imperceptibly into every other morphotype. Species boundaries would have to be imposed completely arbitrarily.

I repeat a previous analogy: there are heavy people and there are light people, but it is not a very useful classification because of the continuum between them. But if all people of a certain intermediate weight class died out, then we could classify people usefully by weight. It would not be a taxonomic classification, but it could be! Imagine a world with two extant species of Homo, morphologically identical except that one species were 30-60kg, and the other species 70-120kg as adults...

Stephen

________________________________________
From: Richard Pyle [deepreef at bishopmuseum.org]
Sent: Monday, 7 September 2009 9:36 a.m.
To: Stephen Thorpe; TAXACOM at mailman.nhm.ku.edu; 'Jim Croft'
Subject: RE: Why Australians are more real than Americans: implications for taxonomy!

> Yes, Richard, species ARE real entities in the world! They might
> not have existed in a world where there was an unbroken
> continuum between diverse morphologies, but in our world there
> are "gaps" which break the biotic realm up into species.

Please... for the sake of us all... don't get me started. :-)

So... if I understand you correctly... you're under the
delusi...err....impression that "real" species boundaries exist in nature
outside of human imagination and convenience -- correct?

If so, we are operating under fundamentally different presumptions about the
nature of biodiversity, so we will never arrive at a mutual understanding of
what is meant by a "taxon concept circumscription"*.

No sense cluttering the list again with this debate -- there are enough
iterations of it in the Taxacom archives.

Aloha,
Rich

*Note: My use of the elaborated term "taxon concept circumscription" is to
disguish it from "species concept" (in the sense of "biological species
concept", "phylogenetic species concept", etc.) -- which is an equally
contentious and very-much related debate, but still quite different from the
"species are real" debate.