On evolutionary words

Over at my other weblog, Gene Expression "Classic", I addressed the polemics of one David Stove, author of Darwinian Fairytales. I won't go into the details of Stove and that book, but if you follow the comment thread you will see that sometimes shit can be a very good fertilizer and give rise to food for thought. The comment thread made more explicit in my mind a few issues I have in regards to evolution. First, I hold to the scale independence of evolution, that is, there is no fundamental difference between microevolution and macroevolution. Macroevolution is in reality simply a posterior observation about the nature of microevolutionary dynamics framed by particular subjective criteria. And those criteria relate to species. Not only do I believe in the scale independence of evolution, but I lean toward the continuity of the web of life and am skeptical of "rigorous" definitions of species. ...