Molecular methods are widespread in modern zoology. And I'm not sure if they are universal enough to be applied in all scientific fields.
Are examples of failure of molecular diagnostic systems for identification in your work?
Molecular diagnostic systems has been identified as sensitive as well as specific for species identification by many researchers. But due to high cost, standardization, contamination of samples etc failure rate is also very common. .
Molecular diagnostic systems has been identified as sensitive as well as specific for species identification by many researchers. But due to high cost, standardization, contamination of samples etc failure rate is also very common. .
In theory, with a reasonably-complete understanding of the genome (and maybe proteome) of the relevant species and any similar-species it should be possible to develop an assay that would identify the species with essentially perfect specificity. Rare edge-cases such as hybrids and previously-unexamined and genetically-distint isolated populations might be challenging for such as assay.
You might consider the counter-example: If such an assay existed, and two specimens were reliably and repeatable identified as being of the same species by that assay, what might justify the decision to contradict the assay? Someone might claim that the specimens aren't of the same species on the basis of appearance or behavior, but those differences might just represent intra-species variability.
At that point, the difference becomes semantic. In truth the definition of species is far from rigorous. This is sometimes called the "species problem".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_concept
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