Regarding Iris' comments on a species: >But once & for all, if you line-breed a pure species for a >thousand years, you still have a species, not a hybrid, no >matter what it looks like.
This is my view: Any definition of the word "species" worth its salt must contain the words "naturally-occurring", "interbreeding" and "population". No greenhouse plant can lay claim to these. I doubt whether 99% of the plants in cultivation that we call species ever breed at all. Perhaps, from a semantics point of view, the use of the word "species" here is totally erroneous, the plants rather being hopeless, expatriate derivatives of species DNA. My major problem arises because I cannot see that many of the plants that we grow and call "species" could be placed back into their "natural habitat" and still function; and if they cannot do that, then they are not part of a species. The exact definition of what a species is, must obviously affect ones view of this. To me, a species is an ecological thing, not just a state of having more or less the right DNA - particularly if this DNA only allows for growing under some strange artificial set of conditions. Regards, greig russell KOMMETJIE, Western Cape. http://www.geocities.com/pennypoint9/ http://tygerorchids.itgo.com PASSION IS THE ONLY REASON
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