Jason Persichetti's contention, "we all know what is meant by the idiom" is precisely false.
I routinely show audiences eight different maps purporting to represent the native range of _Pinus_ponderosa_, prepared for different purposes by different authorities. They can't all be correct AND mean the same thing. What "native species" denotes actually varies quite a bit, and no wonder, since it includes three explicit degrees of freedom (specifications of place, time, and taxon) at least two tacit ones (who counts as a human, and what counts as human agency) plus an authority claim. Authority claims alone entail ad hoc redefinitions of "native"; e.g., USGS NAS roils the waters by calling _Micropterus_salmoides_ a "native transplant" in the United States outside a particular set of hydrologic units. That is a political calculation. What "native species" connotes also varies, but recently, typically indicates the idiomist is making or ratifying a judgment that some organism has a moral claim to persisting in a specified place because no human is known to have physically moved it – or its forbears. But we relax various aspects of that as easily as we apply them. As is (remarkably) typical of ecology's idioms, we have no calibrated conception of this supposedly fundamental characteristic. Blaming the shortcomings of language for our failure to formulate a coherent concept is a red herring unless our consensus "native" really is an inarticulable intuition. If it is (and nothing I've read so far suggests otherwise) there's nothing to calibrate, much less recalibrate, and we're not doing science. Matthew K Chew Assistant Research Professor Arizona State University School of Life Sciences ASU Center for Biology & Society PO Box 873301 Tempe, AZ 85287-3301 USA Tel 480.965.8422 Fax 480.965.8330 mc...@asu.edu or anek...@gmail.com http://cbs.asu.edu/people/profiles/chew.php http://asu.academia.edu/MattChew
