Besides there not being either viruses or hosts in the situation the paper describes? I wonder if you even read the abstract.
Because a virus can do the same thing. Is it the same for the virus, in other words?
quote:
"... groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations which are reproductively isolated from other such groups."
So when an peripheral offshoot of the original becomes isolated from the dominant population, and they can no longer reproduce together, that is when they are officially a new "species?"
If a wolf and the common housedog can produce fertile offspring, is this evidence that one is the ancestral specie, while the other is a subspecie?
And conversely, is the mule, since it is not sterile, evidence of speciation between donkey's and horses?
How precise or imprecise a thing are we even dealing with? There is no scientific consensus concerning what constitutes a species, as opposed to a subspecies. Some allege that failure to interbreed is evidence of speciation, while others would contend that it is much more complicated. Do we have a clear archetype for describing exactly what a species and a subspecies is?
For as much as you say "dogs never beget cats" or whatever, the fact that it's somewhat ambiguous about what it means to be a cat or a dog is proof that we're not looking at separate, created "kinds," but rather organisms who share some characteristics and are divergent in other characteristics because they evolved separately from a single ancestor.
The word "kind" is equally as ambiguous as Darwin's conception of species, to which he said that, basically, if it looks the same, I just call it a species for convenience. Since no one really knows just what in the heck either of them constitute, I am searching for a little more clarity. Because as of now, I really don't see much difference, cladistically speaking, from a species from a subspecies.
The singular of "species" is "species", as we continually remind you. There's no such thing as "subspecie".
I beg to differ. What in the world do you think a Wolf next to a Husky is? It isn't different species; they are different subspecies. Its the same with cats, the same with horses, same with various insects, same with almost any organism.
The "species problem" seems alive and well. I enjoyed the quotations made even by notable scholars on it.
"I was much struck how entirely vague and arbitrary is the distinction between species and varieties"-- Charles Darwin
"
No term is more difficult to define than "species," and on no point are zoologists more divided than as to what should be understood by this word".-- Henry Nicholson
"
Of late, the futility of attempts to find a universally valid criterion for distinguishing species has come to be fairly generally, if reluctantly, recognized"-- Theodosius Dobzhansky
"
The concept of a species is a concession to our linguistic habits and neurological mechanisms"-- John Scott Haldane
"
The species problem is the long-standing failure of biologists to agree on how we should identify species and how we should define the word 'species'."-- Jody Hey
"
First, the species problem is not primarily an empirical one, but it is rather fraught with philosophical questions that require-but cannot be settled by-empirical evidence." --Massimo Pigliucci
“This life’s dim windows of the soul, distorts the heavens from pole to pole, and goads you to believe a lie, when you see with and not through the eye.” -William Blake
™ Version 4.2
