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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jmorlan" data-source="post: 1810708" data-attributes="member: 1564">The reason the BSC is successful is that it maps onto a biological reality which is digital, not analog.  If there were no such thing as biological species, then all individuals would be able to reproduce with every other individual.  Elephants could hybridize with mushrooms.  What would such a world look like.  It's really absurd to deny that there are biological entities which prefer to mate with their own kind. Nor should the existence of positive assortative mating be taken for granted.  It is not something we humans made up so we could catalog birds the way we catalog rocks.  This is not to say that there are not cases of evolutionary intermediacy.  If speciation is an evolutionary process, that is not unexpected.  But to focus on the borderline cases at the expense of the vast array of unique biological entities is not particularly productive.I will admit that the BSC does not work all that well for asexually reproducing organisms and that other species concepts may do a better job at describing such situations.</blockquote>