Species problem

The species problem is the set of questions that arises when biologists attempt to define what a species is. Such a definition is called a species concept; there are at least 26 recognized species concepts. A species concept that works well for sexually reproducing organisms such as birds is useless for species that reproduce asexually, such as bacteria. The scientific study of the species problem has been called microtaxonomy.'The traditional view, which was developed by Cain, Mayr and Hull in the mid-twentieth century, claims that until the ‘Origin of species’ by Charles Darwin both philosophy and biology considered species as invariable natural kinds with essential features. This ‘essentialism story’ was adopted by many authors, but questioned from the beginning by a minority … when Aristotle and the early naturalists wrote about the essences of species, they meant essential ‘functions’, not essential ‘properties’. Richards pointed out that Linnaeus saw species as eternally fixed in his very first publication from 1735, but only a few years later he discovered hybridization as a modus for speciation.'I have always thought that there is no more devastating refutation of the nominalistic claims than the above mentioned fact that primitive natives in New Guinea, with a Stone Age culture, recognize as species exactly the same entities of nature as western taxonomists. If species were something purely arbitrary, it would be totally improbable for representatives of two drastically different cultures to arrive at the identical species delimitations.''The fact that independently observing humans see much the same species in nature does not show that species are real rather than nominal categories. The most it shows is that all human brains are wired up with a similar perceptual cluster statistic (Ridley, 1993). On this view we might have been ‘wired’ differently and different species might now be wired differently from us, so that no one wiring can be said to be ‘true’ or veridical.' The species problem is the set of questions that arises when biologists attempt to define what a species is. Such a definition is called a species concept; there are at least 26 recognized species concepts. A species concept that works well for sexually reproducing organisms such as birds is useless for species that reproduce asexually, such as bacteria. The scientific study of the species problem has been called microtaxonomy. One common, but sometimes difficult, question is how best to decide which species an organism belongs to, because reproductively isolated groups may not be readily recognizable, and cryptic species may be present. There is a continuum from reproductive isolation with no interbreeding, to panmixis, unlimited interbreeding. Populations can move forward or backwards along this continuum, at any point meeting the criteria for one or another species concept, and failing others. Many of the debates on species touch on philosophical issues, such as nominalism and realism, and on issues of language and cognition. The current meaning of the phrase 'species problem' is quite different from what Charles Darwin and others meant by it during the 19th and early 20th centuries. For Darwin, the species problem was the question of how new species arose. Darwin was however one of the first people to question how well-defined species are, given that they constantly change. The idea that an organism reproduces by giving birth to a similar organism, or producing seeds that grow to a similar organism, goes back to the earliest days of farming. While people tended to think of this as a relatively stable process, many thought that change was possible. The term species was just used as a term for a sort or kind of organism, until in 1686 John Ray introduced the biological concept that species were distinguished by always producing the same species, and this was fixed and permanent, though considerable variation was possible within a species. Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778) formalized the taxonomic rank of species, and devised the two part naming system of binomial nomenclature that we use today. However, this did not prevent disagreements on the best way to identify species. The history of definitions of the term 'species' reveal that the seeds of the modern species debate were alive and growing long before Darwin. Charles Darwin's famous book On the Origin of Species (1859) offered an explanation as to how species evolve, given enough time. Although Darwin did not provide details on how species can split into two, he viewed speciation as a gradual process. If Darwin was correct, then, when new incipient species are forming, there must be a period of time when they are not yet distinct enough to be recognized as species. Darwin's theory suggested that there was often not going to be an objective fact of the matter, on whether there were one or two species. Darwin's book triggered a crisis of uncertainty for some biologists over the objectivity of species, and some came to wonder whether individual species could be objectively real — i.e. have an existence that is independent of the human observer. In the 1920s and 1930s, Mendel's theory of inheritance and Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection were joined in what was called the modern synthesis. This conjunction of theories also had a large impact on how biologists think about species. Edward Poulton anticipated many ideas on species that today are well accepted, and that were later more fully developed by Theodosius Dobzhansky and Ernst Mayr, two of the architects of the modern synthesis. Dobzhansky's 1937 book articulated the genetic processes that occur when incipient species are beginning to diverge. In particular, Dobzhansky described the critical role, for the formation of new species, of the evolution of reproductive isolation.