Speciation without Species: A Final Word.

Here I present the several models currently popular for understanding speciation in prokaryotes, in particular bacteria. I will argue that "speciation", as a process or collection of independent but interacting processes sometimes serving to form genotypic and/or phenotypic clusters, can be studied effectively without any definition of "species" or any requirement that all prokaryotic lineages match such a definition. This has always been so, but formal acknowledgement would have a freeing effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]