Congeries of cross connected concepts
I was reading one of Orrin Judd’s screeds on Darwinism. While OJ is, as usual, a bit over the top, he does identify something that I would agree is a problem in evolutionary theory, the very definition of a species.
While Brothers Judd readers have been treated to a series of articles about the crossing of species boundaries, one cannot simply discard the concept because there are clearly boundaries somewhere — e.g. you can’t interbreed plankton and marmosets. Certainly these are different species. The problem seems to be that, unlike the standardly presented theory, species boundaries can be very fuzzy.
As one might expect, there is quite a bit of difference between the public version of the theory and what real practitioners do. It doesn’t take much research to discover that biologists themselves are keenly aware of this problem and the real definition of species is a matter of some debate. Ultimately, “species” is a conceptual tool and not something that describes a fundamental property of living creatures.
In this way it is much like labeling people with political parties or ideologies. While this is frequently problematic when dealing with specific individuals, in the large it is a useful tool for analysis.
