Michael,

Well, the capacity of an organism for phenoplastic switching in a
changing environment is, of course, determined by the organism's
genome, and most species do show a range of normal plasticity during
development --sometimes even later. I will have to run down DeWitt et
al.'s papers on Physa gyrina, to be sure they had exposed their
mollusks during development to water that was screened from the
customary predator. Nevertheless, there are already enough examples of
the same organism being misidentified as different species in a
differing environment.

My point was that many biologists familiar with classical genetics have
generally been unaware of, or have dismissed the significance of,
phenoplastic switching, which is actually more commonplace than most
believe. Rather than theorizing, it would be more productive to take an
experimental approach in resolving species questions. This is not
necessarily a complicated thing to do. All three criteria that I
mentioned need to be satisfied, and interbreeding success is only one
determinative factor.

Regards,

Burt Vaughan


On Sunday, January 9, 2005, at 09:02 PM, Automatic digest processor
wrote:

>
> From: Michael Holling <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Sun Jan 9, 2005  8:29:59 AM US/Pacific
> Subject: AW: Homeobox Switches
>
>

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