-----Original Message----- From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu [mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Jason Mate > If it is impossible to work on live specimens then stick your neck out and make a call: > "a species is what a competent taxonomist says it is." This is also true when working on live specimens. > populations are hardly panmictic so even if it became instantly subdivided each resulting > population could potentially have differed from the get go and you could just be > reconstructing the ancestral metapopulational structure. Brilliant. I never knew that Jason was such a closet panbiogeographer! John Grehan _______________________________________________ Taxacom Mailing List Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/taxacom The Taxacom archive going back to 1992 may be searched with either of these methods: (1) by visiting http://taxacom.markmail.org (2) a Google search specified as: site:mailman.nhm.ku.edu/pipermail/taxacom your search terms here