FW: Platnick's recent lecture (URL link)

[Bill Shear]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Bill Shear <wshear at email.hsc.edu>
Date: Thu, 07 Mar 2002 16:13:58 -0500
To: Ken Kinman <kinman at HOTMAIL.COM>
Subject: Re: Platnick's recent lecture (URL link)

Norman's lecture, as usual, is incisive in its logic and right on target.  A
very effective deflation of the Phylocode balloon!  No need to worry about
that any more.

However, I did note one comment made in passing by my former student (Norm
was an undergraduate at Concord College in West Virginia whilst I taught
there, and followed me to Harvard and Herb Levi just one year after I
finished my PhD) that is a common misunderstanding of the Biological Species
Concept.  Norm states that the retention of the ability to interbreed is a
plesiomorphy and so could not be used to define a species.  However, the
ability to interbreed is not the criterion used in the BSC to define a
species--it is the reproductive isolation of that population from other such
populations, and that, surely, is an acquired apomorphy.

Bill Shear


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