19 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
The Difficulty of Defining Species
The Platonist regards any change in rabbits
as a messy departure from the essential rabbit, and there will always be resistance to change - as if
all real rabbits were tethered by an invisible elastic cord to the Essential Rabbit in the Sky. The
evolutionary view of life is radically opposite. Descendants can depart indefinitely from the
ancestral form, and each departure becomes a potential ancestor to future variants. Indeed, Alfred
Russel Wallace, independent co-discoverer with Darwin of e... 1 
notes
notesThe Platonist view of species defines all members as imperfect examples of a perfect example of the species, when in reality, there is a bell curve of examples that blend into other species.
