Species

I was reading about the concept of virus species in the intro to the Virus Taxonomy Online site and found a statement that sounds a bit the stupid when you think about it:

It is remarkable that a century and a half after Darwin, there is still no agreement about what a species is.

Er...no it's not...because if Darwin's right that means living organisms are constantly changing, which is precisely why it's hard to put them in a nice box.

Fuzzy logic. 'S all good. =)

Not to mention dead organisms...I was Googling "finch pox" and somehow ended up reading about a debate about Archaeopteryx's relationship to dinosaurs. Evolutionary biology is cool but evo biologists spend so much time arguing with each other, which I don't have the energy for. The kind of stuff I'm doing, something works or it doesn't work, finis.

Especially viruses. It's been several days since I found out about reticuloendotheliosis virus (an itsy-bitsy retrovirus) piggybacking on bigger DNA viruses like pox and herpes, and I still think it's cool. Viruses have viruses??? It's like in the Jonathan Swift couplet:

So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite ’em;
And so proceed ad infinitum.