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What is a Species, and What is Not?
Abstract
I analyze a number of widespread misconceptions concerning species. The species category, defined by a concept, denotes the rank of a species taxon in the Linnaean hierarchy. Biological species are reproducing isolated from each other, which protects the integrity of their genotypes. Degree of morphological difference is not an appropriate species definition. Unequal rates of evolution of different characters and lack of information on the mating potential of isolated populations are the major difficulties in the demarcation of species taxa.
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Citations
Cited by
Dinsdale, A., Cook, L., Riginos, C., Buckley, Y. M., & Barro, P. D. (2010) · Annals of the Entomological Society of America · doi:10.1603/an09061 · Cited by 676
Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics
(2020) · doi:10.1093/oso/9780198801856.001.0001 · Cited by 482
On the failure of modern species concepts
HEY, J. (2006) · Trends in Ecology & Evolution · doi:10.1016/j.tree.2006.05.011 · Cited by 357
What makes biology unique?: considerations on the autonomy of a scientific discipline
(2005) · Choice Reviews Online · doi:10.5860/choice.42-3407 · Cited by 273
Cryptic species conservation: a review
Hending, D. (2025) · Biological Reviews · doi:10.1111/brv.13139 · Cited by 113
Metadata
- Authors
- Mayr, E.
- Venue
- Philosophy of Science
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 1996-06
- Volume
- 63
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 262-277
- ISSN
- 0031-8248 (ISSN-L)
- 1539-767X
- OpenAlex
- W2156875172
- Cited by
- 394
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 18.58
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Mayr, E. (1996). What is a Species, and What is Not? Philosophy of Science. https://doi.org/10.1086/289912
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
