Do you feel confident that you can apply an individual measure of meaning as to whether each of the 2 million + estimated species on Earth is "valuable"? If not, perhaps blanked statements might be of use. For example all species that produce food, perhaps useful. All species that are part of an ecosystem that decomposes dead things so that we are covered in filth - also useful. Species that cause viral death- extremely useful to know about. Species that produce oxygen for us to breath, I'm for them. Species that fix nitrogen so we can eat, count me. You get my drift, suggesting nothing matters/has meaning is a dead-end/non-starter argument.

You assume that these traits necessarily lie on the arbitrary lines men have drawn between so-called “species”.

My point is that they do not, and that the line between different species indeed can be quite arbitrary, and can very often differ from one specialist to the other.

Most of the earth's oxygen is produced by plankton, which is especially a place where some members of the same species produce said oxygen, and some do not.

Of course species are hypotheses, nobody is arguing that. Are you suggesting anything that is a hypothesis has no worth?

It's trivial to show traits delimit useful species concepts, and indeed ample envidence can be used to show that species can be very robustly defined according to well defined species concepts (of which there are various).

So I'm unclear as to what your point is. Are you suggesting that species concepts allow us to do no useful work?

> Of course species are hypotheses, nobody is arguing that. Are you suggesting anything that is a hypothesis has no worth?

I'm but merely arguing that your supposition of the value of a “species" is nonsensical.

Value does not run across species lines is what I am saying.

> It's trivial to show traits delimit useful species concepts, and indeed ample envidence can be used to show that species can be very robustly defined according to well defined species concepts (of which there are various).

Yes, one can come with multiple arbitrary proposals of line in the sand, and there is no argument to be made that any of these arbitrary places to draw lines is more sound than the other.

> So I'm unclear as to what your point is. Are you suggesting that species concepts allow us to do no useful work?

I'm suggesting that decisions are made based on arbitrary semantics issues.

I'm suggesting that a rose by any other name, still smelling as sweet, would be treated differently.

> I'm but merely arguing that your supposition of the value of a “species" is nonsensical.

But of course it's not. This is straightforward to demonstrate.

If you are to converve a set of traits, as you would like to think, (to me = proxy for species), so they will not disappear (= go extinct) how will you define this set?

You will gather the sets of traits (= species concepts), and figure out which set to preserve. The cutting edge way of doing this is to look at the evolutionary distance between species and weight those species (sorry, sets of traits), that contain unique evolutionary tradjectories higher. You'll look at what is actually possible, consider geographic and geopolitical constraints, and make a decision. Now, you can't preserve just one trait, because, and here's the problem with your "only traits matter" arguement ... they come bundled with others. Now you have an optimization problem, that can only really be tackled by understanding the sets, i.e. species concepts.

Use whatever words you want, semantics are that species concepts are extremely useful, because they are conceptual boundaries/limits that must be understood if we are to act in `some` useful ways. Note I do not say in `all` ways (you would coutner-point glowing fish with jellyfish genes), I only have to prove the `some` case.

At the end of the day definitions matter if they can be used to do meaningful work with them, regardless of wether other definitions can refute them, or point us in other directions towards other conceptual playgrounds. I hope you see that species definitions fall into the category of enabling meaningful work.

> If you are to converve a set of traits, as you would like to think, (to me = proxy for species), so they will not disappear (= go extinct) how will you define this set?

To you, perhaps, but my point is that this is not how species are defined in practice.

There is no consistent way to define species, whatever specialist working with it will define it however he sees fit at the moment with little consistency, and different specialists will come to different conclusions as to A) how many species there are among any population of organisms and B) what organisms should be placed under what species.

> The cutting edge way of doing this is to look at the evolutionary distance between species and weight those species (sorry, sets of traits), that contain unique evolutionary tradjectories higher.

Given the extremely common occurrence of horizontal gene transfer in actual reality, the concept of “evolutionary distance” itself is a nonsensical one.

Well, I'm 99% sure you're trolling at this point. So that this ad-hominen is allowed on this website I'll clarify to others why so that they might not fall into the same trap. Your argument comes down to "one counter example proves I'm right". For those of you who want to see a quintesential source of this type of argument go look at the evolution of the newsgroup talk.origins. There you can see a plethora of examples just like this.

> Your argument comes down to "one counter example proves I'm right".

Not only would that be a valid reasoning, but the number of counter examples is far from one.

Horizontal gene transfer is not something that happens only rarely, it is extremely common among bacteria and your model is based upon the assumption that it not happen.