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This shift in thinking would fundamentally reorient our approach to a great many questions concerning our relation to the natural world, from the current biodiversity crisis to conservation.Īnd, in a way, this kind of picture may be a natural progression in biological thought.

Rather, we should think of life as one immense interconnected web. It suggests that we should give up thinking about life as neatly segmented into discrete groups. The upshots of this new approach would be enormous, both for our scientific and philosophical view of life. Scrapping the idea of a species is an extreme idea: it implies that pretty much all of biology, from Aristotle right up to the modern age, has been thinking about life in completely the wrong way. Indeed, some contemporary biologists and philosophers of biology have taken up this idea, and suggested that biology would be much better off if it didn’t think about life in terms of species at all. He proposed that one day, biologists could pursue their studies without ever worrying about what a species is, or which animals belong to which species. It all comes, I believe, from trying to define the indefinable.ĭarwin even dreamt of a time when a revolution would come about in biology. It is really laughable to see what different ideas are prominent in various naturalists’ minds, when they speak of ‘species’ in some, resemblance is everything and descent of little weight - in some, resemblance seems to go for nothing, and Creation the reigning idea - in some, sterility an unfailing test, with others it is not worth a farthing. In an 1856 letter to his friend Joseph Hooker, he wrote: Frustration with the idea of a species goes back at least as far as Darwin. The mystery surrounding species is well-known in biology, and commonly referred to as “the species problem”. One 2006 article on the subject listed 26 separate definitions of species, all with their advocates and detractors. There is absolutely no agreement among biologists about how we should understand the species. This is only the tip of a deep and confusing iceberg. But surely we don’t want to say that every single animal in the world, from the humble sea slug, to top-of-the-range apes like human beings, are all one big single species? Enough of species? How far back should you go before you pick the ancestor in question? If you go back in history far enough, you’ll find that pretty much every animal on the planet shares an ancestor. Hennig’s insight was to suggest that this is how we should be thinking about species.īut this approach faces its own problems. Eventually, you will have the original organism (the ancestor) and all of its descendents. In simple terms, he suggested that we should find an organism, and then group it together with its children, and its children’s children, and its children’s children’s children. In the 1960s, another German biologist, Willi Hennig, suggested thinking about species in terms of their ancestry. So maybe we should forget about sex and look for a different approach to species. In order for any of this to make sense, we need to know how many species there are, and what a species even is.Įrnst Haeckel’s (1866) conception of the three kingdoms of life. Outside of biology, conservation programmes routinely put various species on “endangered” lists, and urge us to donate money to stop them dying out. The task of evolutionary biology is to track the evolution and development (and eventual extinction) of species. Of course, this job really matters, both inside biology and out. That is, we are members of the same species.īiological taxonomy’s core aim is to sort all of the organisms of the world into species. There is something that you and I have in common – we are both human beings. The basic idea is very simple: that certain groups of organisms have a special connection to each other. At the core of this area lies the notion of the species. They reflect an area of science known as biological taxonomy, the classification of organisms into different groups. But they are more than just ammunition for pub conversation. Hazelnuts and chestnuts are the exception: they are the elite, the “true” nuts. Peanuts, Brazil nuts, cashews, walnuts, pecans and almonds: none of them are really nuts (for the record, peanuts are legumes, Brazils and cashews are seeds, and the others are all drupes). Tomatoes aren’t vegetables, they’re fruit. A koala bear isn’t actually a bear, it’s a marsupial.