Cking wrote (among other things):



"So, don't be fooled by snake oil."



Me: Ha! Ha! I will admit you crack me up. You are a clsssic example of "a little bit of knowledge is dangerous".



Anyway, E. O. Wiley modified Simpson's species concept but I am sure Frost and Hillis would be flattered by the accolades.



Simpson wrote, " an evolutionary species is a lineage (an ancestral-descendant sequence of populations) evolving separately from others and with its own unitary evolutionary role and tendencies."



Wiley wrote, "a species is a single lineage of ancestral descendant sequence of populations of organisms which maintains its identity from other such lineages and which has its own unitary evolutionary tendencies and historical fate." (Systematic Zoology 1978 27:17-26)



Now that my friend is what Frost and Hillis embraced. So how different are those two concepts? Not very, eh? I think you have been buying too much snake oil and have been trying to resell it to unwary customers. That is not very nice.



If you are interested in learning about the connection between the evolutionary species concept and the phylogenetic species concept I recommend you read Frost and Kluge, Cladistics 1994, 10:259-294. I know that is probably not your favorite journal (given your apparent repulsion to all things cladistic) but like the David Hull book I recommended (which R. wells so kindly supplied the reference to) you may find flaws in the reasoning that support your contentions or maybe, you may learn something positive about the concepts.



Cheers,



BIC

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