[luckyme]

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Or are you saying that 'ring species' means something like "a group of lifeforms that are closely related and all(?) the intermediate forms are concurrent?

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That's pretty close to what I'm getting at.

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I'm not following why the current or extinct status of the intermediates has any status on the relationship between two groups. We have group A and group B with all intermediates alive and we call it 'relationship R'. We sneak in one night and kill off all the intermediates ... why does R change?

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The difference with the existing intermediates is that it allows gene flow between the different groups. Once they are gone then the two groups are isolated and really begin diverging due to genetic drift, lack of stabilizing selection, etc. that gene flow reduces.
This is not a trivial point.

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That seems to be mixing issues of the past and present with issues of the future??
Killing off the aunts and uncles will make my cousins orphans and profoundly change the lives. It doesn't change anything about our relationship R.

You seem to be making the case that if we took a litter of puppies and totally isolated them into two groups on remote islands we have now created two species because they WILL diverge, drift, etc. Yet, in fact, nothing has changed, we still have 'a group of puppies from the same litter.' Grabbing two groups from a ring species ( which we are all temporally a member of) is an upscale version of that.

All life forms are related and flow seamlessly from one variation to another. 'Species' pretends there are natural joints where none exist. Dawkins thought experiment of backbreeding every 1000 years and never running into a 'new species' should erase all thoughts of boundaries as being 'real'.
Perhaps not.

luckyme