Species are actual, not virtual

Species within the virtual mode—a reply to Monsch

“…We wish to further the dialogue on examining the nature of species, a dialogue begun by us (Maze & al., 2005a) and continued by Monsch (2005), in which our conclusions are rejected. We debate his reasons and shall clarify several points referred to by Monsch (2005). First, he refers to our use of the terms "mode" and "code" and questions our use of both rather than one in various papers.…”

“…There is a fourth point, an analytical one. Monsch (2005) claims our evidence in favor of species as a virtual code (his usage) is weak because "... there is an almost equally strong correlation in inter-lineage variation coefficients between species viewed as a collection of populations and species as viewed as a virtual code" (p. 1037). But he neglects to mention the specific correlations, 0.207 and 0.386 respectively, and that the correlation between within-lineage variation and species as a virtual code has a much lower p value than does the correlation between within-lineage variation in integration and species viewed as a collection of populations.…”

“…The second point is that Monsch (2005) asserts that our analytic frame is derived solely from the philosophies of Aristotle and Kant, and rejects these sources as containing "elements that are no longer recognized" (p. 1036). He selects only these two as sources, but, as he has perused other papers of all team members, he ought to know that our sources include references in physics, biology, semiotics and informational dynamics.…”

“…The third point is that Monsch (2005) is suggesting that we are rejecting natural selection and/or random mutation. This is mistaken; our point is that natural selection is only ONE of the mediative functions in evolution and is not adequate to, alone, drive or maintain evolution.…”

“…We did this to avoid any pitfalls of using a parametric test with its attendant assumptions, something we considered desirable because of the rather extensive numerical manipulations we had done; this was not mentioned, an oversight on the part of one of us (Maze). Monsch (2005) also states, "If they will publish the results of parametric tests that correlate well under the virtual code model, this view of species should be reconsidered". The results of that test are in Table 1.…”