Abstract
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.
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Maly, I. (2021). Species and Speciation. In: Quantitative Elements of General Biology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79146-9_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79146-9_3
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