Did I miss-uderstand this from messsage 96:
If you understood it to mean that I was saying that new species couldn't come from old ones, then indeed you did misunderstand me. My apologies; I'll try to be clearer.
Let me try to sum up succinctly what I believe speciation looks like - a subpopulation of organisms is set apart and begins to accrue mutations that will eventually separate it permanently from the "parent" population; a population of (for instance) red junglefowl gathers phenotypical changes, until the species as determined by morphology becomes more ambigously "red junglefowl", until it can't be determined precisely if they're the same species or not, it becomes less ambiguous that they're not of the "red junglefow" species, until it's so unambiguous that the new species "chicken" is coined and described and published in the literature.
There's a sort of "fuzzy" period in the middle where we're not sure we have a new species or not; you belive that there's a line that is crossed somewhere in there and I believe that no such line could exist; there's only differing opinions about what species these organisms belong to, until there's little ambiguity that they're not red junglefowl anymore.
I keep saying that evolution in the sense for individuals occurs when the sperm and egg meaning the one cell unfertilized entity in the female) meet. Based on that, the egg (meaning the laid spheriod) deserved the name chicked before an adult did.
I don't think it's possible to name an individual a certain species without naming that individual's entire population a species. That's my view but perhaps not the only one. I guess this is why this is such a contentious issue among biologists.
Regardless, this thread has gone on long enough. Thanks for some good thoughts.
Thank you, and likewise. Allow me to welcome your prodigious intellect to EvC if I haven't already.