"As someone who knows a bit about crows, I'd be asking "What makes you think that?"

It's a simple example with a grammatical error, meant to illustrate a point. Your question, whilst interesting, would be addressed in the introduction to the paper, where we would be outlining the relevance of our research. But then you know that.


"But what is "Corvus corone"? Unless you explain precisely what this means, your statement is a tautology at best."

Of course it's not a tautology. By using the binomial a scientist knows what they are looking at; many of these things have common names. I refer you to the type specimen (where ever that is).

" Isn't the distinction between "C. corone" and all other so-called species quite arbitrary?"

Ah, now this is more interesting. The distinction between species isn't arbitrary at all because we name a particular example of an organism as a holotype and that represents their species. We list the characters and traits of these species so we can compare with other organisms to see if they share traits/DNA etc etc

But whilst not arbitrary, the concept of a 'species' is not universally accepted; in fact, it's widely regarded as being inadequate in many respects because it fixes the characters of an organism too rigidly, not allowing for intraspecific variation, ontogeny and other factors that cause the wide variety of morphotypes that make up a population of that species.

All that said, the use of species isn't going away any time soon; when identifying organisms and comparing them for the purposes of understanding their ecology and evolution species are still essential. In my experience palaeontologists (for whom this is a major issue) often talk in terms of morphotypes and this seems to make sense as it allows for the natural variation present within any given population of organisms.

Good stuff, I will talk more about this with my supervisors.