Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven@HumboldtHerps
Some geneticists are speciating (breaking up subspecies into individual species statuses) garters, while others counter with a result that aims to lump all subspecies into one species. Who's right? If you want to know , become a genetecist! 'Tis the only way to solve this. Unfortunately there are too many self-righteous PhD's out there.
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In my humble opinion, they're both wrong. People have a tendency to try to sort everything into nice little drawers, but does anything at all suggest that it can be done with the natural world? Take the concept of a species, for example. The simple elementary school definition of a species includes that they can't produce fertile offspring with other species. Unfortunately that seems to apply better to genera than to species in a lot of cases.
With all the problems describing the relationships between species and the different methods of determining them, a simple binomial or trinomial name just seems
too clean-cut. There are too many exceptions to the rules.