Yes I have heard of George Gaylord Simpson and his evolutionary species concept.



But the Evolutionary Species Concept of Simpson bears little resemblance to Frost and Hillis' (1990) species concept of the same name. The same is true of monophyly. The cladists have the unfortunate habit of hijacking an existing term and changeing its meaning. The cladists hijacked the name monophyletic and altered its definition beyond recognition. In fact Peter Ashlock attempted to right this wrong by renaming the cladist's concept holophyletic. Frost and Hillis' "ESC" is actually more like Hennig's "Phylogenetic Species Concept" in operation than Simpson’s real stuff. Hennig's PSC asserts that a new species has evolved if a population differs from its parental species by as little as a single character. Operationally, adherents to Frost and Hillis' "ESC" have attempted to name new taxa on the basis of a single character difference. For example, in J.T. Collins' ill fated attempt to name new species using Frost and Hillis' "ESC", Collins elevated two subspecies of Tantilla rubra to species status on the basis of the absence of the "distinctive nuchal collar ... (cucullata)" or the prsence of a complete nuchal collar (diabola), as van Devender and Lowe (1992, Herpetol. Rev.) pointed out.



Simpson would not recognize such slightly distinct populations as "evolutionary species." Simpson was more interested in "delimiting species taxa in the time dimension" with his ESC (Mayr 1997, This is Biology). So, don't be fooled by snake oil. Frost and Hillis' "ESC" is not the genuine stuff; it is snake oil. Those who claim that Frost and Hillis' "ESC" is the same as George Gaylord Simpson's Evolutionary Species Concept are promulgating snake oil.

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