Kind...species...

In a recentish Quadrant magazine (Nov 2007 10-14) an article appeared that discussed the problematic notion of species as it applied to the control of dingoes in Victoria (in Australia). The authors (a pair of dingo experts Coman and Jones), made a number of observations which are interesting as coming from working scientists dealing with practical problems.

They are also somewhat apropro of Gordon Chengs remarks of ages ago on Locke (more reading required Gordon).

quoting:

It is ironical that, beginning with John Locke, the empiricist attempt to make philosophy more "scientific" should have produced the exact opposite effect. Today, modern philosophy appears to be wandering around in the foetid swamps of subjectivity, while science marches on with its confident claims to objectivity, seemingly oblivious to all epistemological problems....Science itself employs concepts which are not at all self-evidently true although they may appear to be so at a superficial level. In the biological sciences, one of the best examples concerns the concept of the species. This of course is merely one small part of a much larger porblem which has occupied the minds of philosophers since the time of Plato--realism verses nominalism. Is the species a 'natural kind' or merely a mental abstraction invented by the human mind to group similar-looking things together?

[And a species, according to Ernest Mayr], consists of populations of organisms that can reproduce with one another and that are reproductively isolated from other such populations. ... There are other ways of defining mammalian species but the concept of shared reproduction is the most widely held and is, perhaps, the least subjective. Besides, it has a long history. In the biblical account of Noah's Ark each species was saved by taking in a reproductive pair.

[end quote.

Now, of course, they mistake species for kind, because Noah preserved 'kinds' not 'species' as we might know them today, even though there may be some definitional overlap between the concepts at an operational level.

What is interesting is that the idea of species, and an idea it is, not a 'fact' produces no end of areas of confusion when it comes to the article the "Loaded Dog" from which the quote is taken. It is not a simple idea, and Mayr's definition is itself problematical. Populations whose individuals might reproduce with each other, but are as populations reproductively separate, are regarded as species (e.g. Lions and Tigers), even though they may represent one Genesian kind, or even be genetially identical, but reproductively isolated. Now if species is so problematic in the here and now, we cannot be glib, I think in any discussion about species identified from fossils.

The certainty that is applied to the concept by lay boosters for evolution may not always be shared by practitioners in specialist fields.