The first thing I should say in response to your comments is that I am obviously much older than you I ll be 58 next Wednesday whereas you as an undergraduate unless you are an older student must be in the 20 2 range More than thirty years difference When I was your age I was majoring in math my undergraduate degree is a B S in mathematics But I switched to genetics in which I first got a masters and eventually a Ph D It seemed to me that there was a lot more to find out in biology than in mathematics also I ve been interested in evolution and human prehistory since I was in about the fourth grade which led me to focus on population genetics But it was about thirty years ago that I first really got into studying evolution in a formal setting In the time since of course I ve had innumerable conversations about evolution and evolutionary theory with friends colleagues and students I ve also read probably thousands of papers and books bearing on the topic I ve also spent a large part of those years thinking and writing about this subject Given all this you ll probably believe me when I say that very little of what you have said is in any inherent way new to me Perhaps the only thing that s new there is the way that you ve phrased your claims the exact sentences that you ve produced are new but the basic claims are things I ve heard many many times before Don t get me wrong I m not criticizing you You re young and it s not easy to come up with anything that s really new in the field of evolutionary biology There are plenty of brainy people who have tried for years to do that and failed Now given all this perhaps you can imagine simply because I have had far longer to study and think about these issues than you have that I might see what I think are flaws in your way of thinking about evolution So I ll just say that if you want I m perfectly happy to explain the problems that I see with your ideas But they ll have to be dealt with one at a time and in a certain order I can easily imagine too that you might just consider me arrogant to say all this and not be interested at all But if you want to do this then the logical place to start in my opinion would be a discussion of the term species In your last post you placed a lot of emphasis on this word but I notice also that even you yourself are aware that there are problems with defining species The first question I would ask you then is Do you think it s sensible for people to reason with each other using arguments that depend on terms that lack any clear and consistent meaning