It does matter since one is purposely made from a Synthetic Source and had no natural biological evolutionary steps.
No, that doesn't matter on the level I'm talking about. The Coppelius synths are still descendants of Data and capable of reproduction, so they can be considered Data's species. And since they're descended from Soong's work, they can validly be called Soong-type androids. Yes, Maddox helped, but most inventions are collaborative processes. And yes, there are differences, but species evolve and change. A difference is not an impassable barrier -- that's the entire message of
Star Trek.
Is this Natural 'Evolution & Adaptation' or Man-Made Engineering?
You're taking my analogy way too literally. Obviously it's a synthetic species -- it's right there in the name. My point is that an advance or change in how that species is created does not make it a fundamentally separate species, any more than an evolutionary change in a biological species necessarily makes it separate.
Besides, I just said it's irrational to treat a difference as an impassable barrier. Different things can overlap. If a chid is conceived by in vitro fertilization, does that make the child less of a "real" person? The Coppelius synths are Data's offspring, and thus his species, regardless of the technique used for the procreation.
Yes... godlike powers would be a huge evolutionary advantage for most any race, so they should evolve independently fairly often. Just like humanoid eyes, hands, etc. So there's no need to link them together like the Gothos beings with Q when they're really not all that similar.
I'm not a fan of the assumption that "godlike powers" would evolve at all, since that's not how evolution works. It's not an "upward" drive like many people assume, just a statistical process wherein traits that improve reproductive success in a given environment are therefore reproduced more successfully. "Ascending" to an incorporeal state isn't something that evolution would ever select for, since how do you reproduce without a body? (Although I did my best to handwave an explanation for that when I wrote TNG:
The Buried Age two decades ago.)
Still, if I grit my teeth and stipulate to the fictional conceit of superpowered beings existing, it is true that traits that grant a survival advantage should be favored by evolution. Though that doesn't always mean greater power or strength, since different environments and survival strategies select for different kinds of advantage. Sometimes being small and weak is a survival advantage; look at mass extinctions on land, where it's always the biggest, most dominant species like non-avian dinosaurs that die out first, while the smaller species like birds, insects, and early mammals survive because they need less food and can procreate faster (so they evolve faster).
I've always been annoyed by sci-fi/fantasy stories that postulate that a tiny minority of humans has always had psychic abilities, or magical abilities or shapeshifting or whatever. Evolutionarily speaking, if such abilities existed, they would have granted such a survival advantage that they would have long ago become dominant traits, and now everyone would have them.
