You did hit a few good key points.

The topic is argumentative... and will always be because as long as you have grey areas there is room for argument. In this particular topic the grey areas can sometimes be huge and you are trying to pidgeon hole these animals into specific catagories.

Keep in mind that this is the 'me' age. Cooperation seems to be a trait that is burried somewhere. There are groups trying to overcome this but they are small groups that really don't want to fight by nature... that helps the cause we are talking about but hurts the cause of getting to the point of cooperation for the grand scheme.

There is definately not a simple solution... actually there is and you did mention it and that is bringing all the different ideas together and forming one set of specific rules. (that last part is the hard part).

As far as the hobbyist helping... it doesn't really work because when you take an animal out of the wild you are altering it's behavior no matter how well you have it set up and I don't think this is very helpful when classifying an animal. Now, things outside of behavior might be useful but should be taken with a grain of salt because of the first point.

There's 2 points that I could never get a straight answer to... There does not seem to be a standard as to how long it takes to make a species (I've heard in viruses it can take one or so generations) and what is the standare for how much variance is required (if any at all) to determine a species.

(Yup, its all a matter of opinion)
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Ed
Tortoise_Keepers-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
Trying to keep the fun in Chelonian care

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