Thanks, pete. I have no intention of asking lawyers' have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife trick questions, just ones with simple straightforward answers, like that one.

Now, we can forget about the ark. We have two beetles of a single species (using another word like 'type' doesn't matter, its just a single beetle with whatever its genetic attributes happen to be) and we need to end up with some 350,000 species that cannot interbreed to give viable offspring. Your theory is that every ancestor of the beetles around contains the complete genetic code of all its decendents. That is, you consider that splitting into 350,000 parts to have happened entirely by loss of generic material.

Have I understood you correctly?