Species and Speciation

In the context of the dynamical systems approach, species are of central importance as quantities of living matter with defined structural and kinetic characteristics. A brief review of the species concept is given, followed by quantitative treatment of mutation-selection equilibria that describe species as distributions in the genotype space. Different fitness landscapes are considered, including the master sequence landscape of the classical quasi-species theory, and existence of error thresholds in the maintenance of genetic distributions is analyzed. The static view of fitness landscapes is complemented by treatment of self-organization in genotype space that accompanies emergence of reproductive isolation in neutral sympatric speciation.