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

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