Perhaps...
However, this is no reason to ignore his woo; non-experts (like me) can enjoy and benefit from reading (the often witty) responses that debunk his woo and/or clarify stuff - e.g. (
Simon's post on the first page (post #22))
Thank you for your kind words good sir.
A few things I'd like to mention, because it seems that not everybody understand (I mean, not all of the serious, posters, I purposefully exclude the ones that care only to confirm they misunderstandings).
Species as, of course, a pretty well accepted definition: two individuals that do not, in nature, mate and produce viable and fertile offspring are considered to belong to a different species.
This is a convenient definition but one that has a few limitations. It excludes rare pairings, such as that of a lion of a tiger that do not occur in the wild but it also does exclude pairing that has more to do with geographical isolation or difference in mating habits. As such, it is not always a good indicator of genetic diversity (although, such a diversity will rapidly develop if only due to genetic drift).
More importantly, this definition is pretty useless when dealing with asexual reproduction.
Apart from that, other steps in the classification process, the family, genus, order and such, are very arbitrary.
They are based on objective characteristics, but the choice of this characteristic is arbitrary... (which is not to say that the tree of life would change, just the way we label the branches).
More importantly, the current trend in classification as it toward 'monophyletic' groups.
Basically, a group include the first individual to present the defining characteristics and all its descendants.
It is somewhat of a newish development and not everybody likes it, but I personally find it useful as classification done that way is less arbitrary and reflect some actual evolutionary realities.
For example, the apes include the first individuals that'd be classified as an ape, and all its descendant. So, yes, we did descend from a proto-ape, but we also descended, a little bit further down the line, from a population of actual ape, and so does all the other apes.
This is one of the reason the term, 'fish', to give you an example, is not really useful as far as taxonomy is concerned. It is a paraphylatic term.
Now, the term '
Sarcopterygii' (the lobe-finned fish) is monophylatic and, somewhat, more useful.
It includes the first of these lobe-finned fish (sometime in the Devonian) and all its descendant, all the way to us.
Similarly, the term 'monkey' is generally considered paraphylatic (it excludes the apes even if they are closer from the old world monkeys than new world monkeys are). The closest monophylactic term would '
Simian (or 'higher primates')...
It is rather interesting, I think...
