[luckyme]

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This is a topic that always sticks in my craw. People make it out to be that there's no way to separate these groups into any legitimate categories and that just isn't true with the overwhelming majority of animals (ring-species aside).

Of course species breaks are impossible to locate if you go over the entire time. You're right that the point is that with all the die-off there are reproductively isolated groups in existence that have different selection pressures and evolutionary histories because of that isolation.
Without considering these groups different species we wouldn't have near the understanding of evolution we do.

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If a strange catastrophe hits earth and the only groups left are blond swedes and dark pygmies then we can legitimately talk about 'races'? If we slowly discover pockets of groups one at a time, at which point do we start to claim that race is a very arbitrary concept, perhaps not even that useful?

Erasing the connections between two trait groups shouldn't change are view of them if the distinction was solid, but if we find two 'species' on opposite sides of a mountain and years later discover they are part of a ring ... what changed? we knew they were part of an unseen ring before we discovered the other pieces.

luckyme