Abstract
There has been a huge debate over the definition of the species concept. In this paper, we take part in this debate and propose a definition that we claim is based on the theory of evolution as it is used today. We consider the set of all past, present and future organisms on Earth and call “species” the diverging branches (between two branching events or a branching event and an extinction) as species. Most of them are very difficult to discover. However, we claim that this definition provides biologists with a sound conceptual ground.
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Notes
- 1.
This citation has often been interpreted as indicating Darwin’s nominalism vis-à-vis species. However, Beatty (1985) and Stamos (2007) have shown that this is a reductive interpretation. Darwin’s dynamic conception of the history of life leads him to refuse his predecessors’ and contemporaries’ static definitions, but this does not mean that he rejects the existence of relatively stable species, at least within a certain time period, linked together as they are by the fundamental relationship of “common descent”.
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Published only in 1973, but the manuscript dates to 1960.
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- 7.
A formalization of this summary formulation is proposed in Barberousse and Samadi, Chap. 11, in this volume.
- 8.
See also Barriel, Chap. 7, in this volume.
- 9.
This is phenotypic plasticity. See for example, in plants, Kaplan (2002).
- 10.
Another spectacular case involves three families of deep-water Teleosteans (Johnson et al. 2009): the Cetominidae described in 1895 by Goode & Bean, today divided into 9 genera et 20 species; Mirapinnidae described in 1956 by Bertelsen & Marshall, divided into 3 genera and 5 species; Megalomycteridae described by Myers & Freihoferen in 1966 divided among 4 monotypic genera (i.e. only comprising on species). Among the some 600 specimens examined for Cetominidae, all collected at depths greater than 1,000 m, all those that were sexually mature were female. The larch jaws of these specimens allowed them to ingest large prey in a deep environment that offered little food. The 120 known specimens of Mirapinnidae have always been collected at depths less than 200 m and are all sexually immature. They feed on copepods (small crustaceans) that are abundant in the nutrient-rich water near the surface. Finally, the 65 specimens attributed to Megalomycteridae have all been harvested at depths greater than 1,000 m and are all male. These males do not have an esophagus or a stomach and seem to live only on reserves stockpiled in a large liver. New catches have allowed for the observation of juveniles’ transformation into adults and suggests a new interpretation of this diversity: the three families are in fact a single one! Molecular data support this interpretation. However, the data remain too fragmentary to coherently re-sort the males, females and juveniles and thus to propose a new way of dividing up the species within this unified family.
- 11.
For more details on the causes of phenotypic diversity within a species, See for example Rueffler et al. (2006).
- 12.
Contrary to a commonly spread idea, using “types” does not correspond to a typological approach but rather to a material means to name taxonomic hypotheses.
- 13.
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Samadi, S., Barberousse, A. (2015). Species. In: Heams, T., Huneman, P., Lecointre, G., Silberstein, M. (eds) Handbook of Evolutionary Thinking in the Sciences. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9014-7_8
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