Runlikethewind
Monk in Training
Since it seems that species is such a "wishy-washy" or arbitrary word perhaps the question should be whether species actually exist as a concrete 'kind'. What I'm trying to say is that it is difficult to cut distict lines between lifeforms especialy the more similarities that there are between them. It seems easy to seperate dogs from bats as distinct groups but when we star talking about different kinds of dogs and different kinds of bats the lines becoem blurry. Even the proffesionals have difficulty in this, some like to lump individuals into already existing categories while others like to split them and create whole new species, lumpers and splitters my geology teacher used to call them. If evolution is occuring then individuals are always changing, and all life on earth evolved from pretty much the same small group of simple organisms so we are all related anyway. I think that in this regard the term species is more of an arbitrary abstraction of the human intellect and desire to clasify things and that specise do not really exist in nature as a specific 'kind'. But then again maybe I'm wrong...