No Bob, there is no nice tidy definition that all of us taxonomists agree on
(I'm a fish taxonomist). Doubt there ever will be, given the wide range of
people working in systematics.
My palaeontology friends keep pointing out that what we see today are
micro-snapshots in time, and that species are always changing, some fast and
some very slowly. I wish I had a TARDIS so I could go back in time and check
out some of these tiny confusing little gobies and see who's mating with who
and who their direct ancestors were.
DNA analyses have muddied the picture in the sense that sometimes, broad
statements of kinship or species-groups are made on the basis of one or a few
genes, when there was a long-standing group defined by 10-20 morphological
characters. Arguments then abound. On a species-level, DNA can help show that
one population really is different - and with luck, when you re-examine the
specimens, you may find a feature that corroborates this.
We are at the very beginning of learning which bits of genetic material work
best - i.e. most helpfully. And how to run analyses so that they don't come out
how you want them to, or the results change very time a new species is added
into the kinship tree. But no matter how objective one tries to be, the desire
to put things in tidy pigeonholes is back there, knocking at the base of your
brain.
Birdos are lucky in that there is a huge group of people all watching and
studying birds at varying levels, so there is lots of information available.
Pity us poor ichthyologists, who can't breathe water and whose favourite
animals live in water, so we can only watch them for limited amounts of time.
I'm not a geneticist, but a traditional morphological taxonomist - looking at
the whole animal, its ecology and behaviour.
So a species is whatever you think it is......!
Helen
<')/////==<
________________________________
From: Robert Inglis <>
To: Birding-Aus <>
Sent: Thursday, 3 January 2013, 19:42
Subject: [Birding-Aus] Splits, lumps, taxonomies, check-lists, whatever.
From all this passionate discussion on taxonomies I am assuming that someone
(or some committee) has finally come up with a viable, scientifically based and
universally accepted definition of “a species”.
Would someone be so kind as to tell me what that definition is.
Bob Inglis
Sandstone Point
Qld
===============================
To unsubscribe from this mailing list,
send the message:
unsubscribe
(in the body of the message, with no Subject line)
to:
http://birding-aus.org
===============================
===============================
To unsubscribe from this mailing list,
send the message:
unsubscribe
(in the body of the message, with no Subject line)
to:
http://birding-aus.org
===============================
|
