"Obviously, naomi, jim360, nor mibn have not had the opportunity to sit in on debates between well qualified scientists..."
Not in the biology field, to be sure, but I think I can well imagine what it might be like! At least one discussion, such as it is, that I witnessed involved two of the leading experts in the field discussing some technical point about blah-blah who cares, but never quite advancing their counterarguments beyond "Yes it is." "No it isn't!" And so on.
As a non-expert in biology I'm not going to complain if you take what I say with a pinch of salt, but all the same my perspective is that the debate of what constitutes a species should not provide a distraction from the fact that the underlying theory has been accepted by pretty much every scientist for well over a century by now. I fear that those who do use it as such a distraction are, ironically, missing a point that the difficult over defining what makes a species arguably strengthens the case for evolutionary theory, rather than weakening it. After all, what more natural consequence can there be of an idea of life being constantly in flux, ever-changing and adapting to environmental pressures, than that it is very difficult to draw the well-defined lines required to differentiate two species? What point are you trying to make yourself, Clanad, by drawing attention to this debate?
Thanks for the link and I'd hope to read it at some point soon.