Originally posted by FearlessLeader2
FredLC-
Very nice pile of sound and fury, and like its literary predecessor, it too signifies nothing, except perhaps that you have NOT done a search on Biological Species Concept yet, or have and did not like what you found.
When you are willing to address this one point, and quit blowing smoke, I'll get back to you.
Fearlessleader2, despite it is impossible to irritate me over Internet
it is possible to provide some amusement of masochistic nature. You are being the most successful person I ever met in doing so.
I am the one that is piling insignificant fury? As I said before, your perception of reality is rather unique, specially considering the enormously arrogant nature of posts such as this one of yours, that not only attacks me personally and directly, but also arbitrarily refuses to try refuting the
several points I made, due to hiding behind a single one of the many, and one that happen to be quite secondary to all my line of arguing at that, since I never claimed to base myself in specialized biology, and in fact have being spontaneously claiming my lack of expertise in that discipline.
But I know that this sort of rationalization wont work with you. Once you found a safe spot my so called dodging of a subject you will stick to it like glue and refuse to talk about the many other unrelated points, in particular my very descriptive demonstration of a biblical contradiction.
Well, The only reason why I didnt perform a search for your proposed theme is because I really considered it quite unimportant in the big picture of my line of arguing. I had no intention in actually take the trouble to read about biology to debate here.
But since my masochistic amusement with your unbelievable posture has grown large enough, I actually took the time to do so. I performed a search in the yahoo engine. The terms I used were
Biological+Species+Concept. I invite you to repeat the experiment and check for my results.
Well, dozens of pages were made available. In yet another concession to your demands, I willfully ignored anything .com, .org, .gov, and I certainly did not look in your so hatred talkorigins. For the purposes of this research, I have limited my acceptance only to .edu websites.
Thus, you were successful in convincing me to give up all forms of compilation and convenience, and actually take the time to read papers that are designed for people that specialize in the discipline.
But I didnt stop at it. I myself filtered any paper whichs specific object is to support or analyze the theory of evolution, as they would undoubtedly be painted as biased, and accepted only the ones whichs focus is the conceptual analyses of the term species.
I really assume that even you will have to admit that I have being quite faithful to your own criteria of acceptance on this research, so we can really avoid arguments in the sense of those people are biased as they are part of the international evolution conspiracy.
That said, lets look at the links.
Here is the first one:
This one is very simple and only brings several approaches on the definition of species. Despite its not an exhaustive line of arguing, I think this one is nice as a starting point for my purposes. The major merit of this link is to easily and quite visually demonstrate that, unlike what you state, the notion that species can be defined as individuals capable of reproduction is not being really contested, but only being considered incomplete when we look ate the subject of study under the light of multidisciplinary rigor, being reasonably valid only when you approach it by a purely biological angle.
Now it's time for the second link:
This one is just a small explanation. I wouldnt have posted it to avoid being repetitive, but the matter about the difficulty in defining species through fossils in a short paragraph made me change my mind. I though that putting this to grab attention here would be interesting, and grow expectative for my later confrontation of the theme.
But my next links are actual analyses, not just small explanations. I really would like to comment all of them entirely but it would be too long and besides, they pretty much argue for themselves rather emphatically. Ill just comment a few selected pieces as I make the texts available through links.
Now in the 3th we can really beguin to have fun
The first that I found and the one that I find more interesting, as it follows a quite sequential line of arguing, I think this deserved more deep comments than the ones I plan to make, and certainly, to be fully commented, not only partially. Of course, however, that future debate on the other aspects of this link is rather welcome and will be gladly carried out as necessity presents itself.
The Species Concept
Biologists normally use what is called a "biological species concept". It is framed in different ways. At the organism level, it is defined as a set of actually or potentially interbreeding organisms: for example, all Homo sapiens can interbreed successfully with one another, but not with any other species.
At the genetic level, one talks of a gene pool: the set of genes that are contained within an interbreeding population. Thus all members of a species contribute to/are part of a common gene pool, which thus contains all the genetic diversity within the species.
However, in the real world, it is time-consuming and expensive to make the observations of organisms in their real habitat that would allow us to say with confidence that such-and-such a set of organisms really is a species. And in the fossil world, it is impossible.
So instead, most biologists and all paleontologists make a good-faith guess about the boundaries of the set of organisms they propose to name a species. Typically, the species is defined on the morphology it has, not on the genetics and behavior that is specified in the biological species concept. And when we use morphology, geologists and biologists are much on the same level, except that the biologists have soft parts as well as hard parts to work with. However, there are problems even for biologists working with living organisms:
Follow a series of cases that presents difficulties for the classical definition of species.
Basically, what is said here, and looking at the following examples, is that the classical definition of species is insufficient for two reasons:
1
The existence of forms of reproduction that does not match the necessity of intercourse, such as the asexual:
This sounds reasonable, as it is clearly an refinement of the previous affirmative, which was shortsighted by only considering superior animal forms of life when developing the concept.
I say refinement, because the mediate premise that the descendents will have a genetic material and general characteristics that are compatible with that of the ascendants, and able to reproduce in similar fashion. I can, however, gladly do as much as accept this as a complete correction, without having my stance threatened.
As anyone can see in this
post, the only reason why I was dragged to this tangential discussion is because FearlessLeader2 said that new species were being created only by a very contested definition of species.
Well, if instead of saying that species are the animals that can reproduce between themselves, we adopt the definition of this link that species are recognized by the morphological similarities between individuals than we still dont have a concept that dismiss the fact that evolution is happening, slowly, as we speak.
2
There are animals that cannot technically fit the most classical definition of species, but still are able of reproduce and generate descendents with variant levels of fertility:
Well, this is probably the greatest support for evolution that I ever read in a discussion. Species that have enough similarities to be compatible, and yet, enough differences to not fit static definitions. All the talk about missing links is completely comprehensible around these lines. The way species grow apart is by cumulative changes that will gradually set the variations apart, by diminishing their degree of compatibility.
For biologists, species and populations are frozen: they are either species or they are not, and the morphological, genetic, and geographic separation between species can almost always be seen as a sharp boundary, easy to establish. Biologists typically don't bother to worry about species through time: why should they? They deal with living things.
But in paleontology we deal with time, and since evolution has happened, taxonomic boundaries must somewhere be crossed as one species evolves into another. The first bird hatched out of a dinosaur's egg, though it obviously was not much different from its parents, and it found plenty of contemporaries as potential mates, at about the same level of morphology that it had.
What would we do with transitional forms if we found them? We would have to make some sort of arbitrary distinction that was never there in the original populations. Archaeopteryx was classified as a bird because it has feathers, but every other character is "dinosaurian". (And we have just found a new Australopithecus that appears to have been making and using tools, a behavior that we had always thought was a character of Homo.)
(...)
The spirit of this argument, and of what follows, as it can be easily attested by whoever takes the time to read it, is also a complete validation of evolutionary ideas (It was I that have made those bold highlights, just to make it even more visible at first glimpse).
It states, quite reasonably I must add, that as evolution is such a slow process, and as intermediary forms are, from its immediate antecessor, virtually indistinguishable, that to isolate determined type of animal in a determinate group called species X might be arbitrary, as in fact its not different enough from that antecessor to be classified as different.
It states, than that evolution process does not accept isolated compartments, and that the evolution follows a too linear path and that making that kind of classification can be arbitrary if not done very carefully.
to be continued in next post due to size
@ Curt
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