Hi Russ, I would be very against any effort to tie endangered species legislation to a word that we have been unsuccessful in defining for the past 300 years. Whether or not two populations represent seperate spp is not the important point wrt their conservation.
Seperate populations have different structure to their respective eco-systems.
Diversity of ecological structure is important for the same reason that genetic diversity is important within populations. We certainly don't want to give the impression that speciation can be formulated. I'm not convinced this is true. This is not true. It's probably clear that I disagree, strongly, with the phylogenetic spp concept.