Species and systematics

Jim Griesemer is one of my favourite philosophers. Here he's discussing the work of Herbert Simon on dynamical boundaries. What Simon said was that subsystems are nearly decomposable - systems are hierarchical and their internal relations are stronger than their cross level relations - and that this is a criterion for the dynamic specification of such systems. He discusses the Hora and Tempus example. Jim asks, how do either of them make watches at all? He asserts that scaffolding - any structure or element that facilitates the development of a system's skills or capacities - is…
Monica Piotrowski (Utah) also is talking about DNA Barcoding. She starts with a child's coin sorter. Imagine that it's a bug-sorter, sorting by DNA samples. What does the child now have? She claims Barcoders must have a species concept to measure the success of their practice. They have none, and so they are in a two-horned dilemma neither option of which is a good option. COI is claimed to be 99.75% identical within, and <97.5% between species. Hence it can delimit, but not describe, species, according to Hebert and Strauss, the founders and promoters of Barcoding. So, what's the…
Brent Mishler is a very nice guy who is wrong on a few things - Phylocode, species, and so on - but he's absolutely right about barcoding. He's talking today about so-called DNA barcoding and species concepts. He says that species are just the least inclusive taxa for whatever view of taxa one has - there is no species problem per se. He thinks that species are just the smallest monophyletic group worth diagnosing. And more: since biology should be free of taxonomic ranks, species (as a rank) should be dropped. I can agree or not depending on what interpretation is given here. Brent…
I have just sat through one of the most teeth clenchingly bad philosophy talks, given on phylogenetics by a philosopher who has never read anything sensible on phylogenetics to phylogenetic systematists. One of the last mentioned leant over to me and asked "Does this guy know anything?" I had to say no. I am protecting the guilty for reasons of manners, but people: If you are going to lecture professionals about what they do as a philosopher, at least try to learn the science first. Whatever you do, don't think that because you've read a book by a critic of the topic that you understand the…
After a three day workshop on the future and nature of taxonomy (or systematics; I'm still unconvinced there's a difference) I am exhausted and enthused. The former because of the massive amounts of beer we drank, and the latter, well, because of the massive amounts of beer we drank, and the conversations that followed. In particular I am very impressed by Quentin Wheeler's International Institute for Species Exploration, and the outreach program, "Planet Bob", both of which stress the vital need to identify, describe and study the planet's biodiversity in detail before it is all gone (and…
... a female deer. Oops, sorry, wrong thread. Anyway, a medievalist, goblinpaladin, has tagged me with a meme. Now I don't' get tagged a lot with memes, possibly because folk know I have published on them, both for and more recently against, but you can't deny the buggers on the Interwubs. Here it is: 1) Link to the person who tagged you.2) List 7 random/weird things about your favorite historical figure.3) Tag seven more people at the end of your blog and link to theirs.4) Let the person know they have been tagged by leaving a note on their blog. It's hard work, because I don't…
In a recent paper on biological nomenclature in Zoologica Scripta, Michel Laurin makes the following comment about the stability of Linnean ranks: However, taxa of the rank of family, genus or species are not more stable. ... This sad situation should not surprise us because the ranks, on which the traditional (RN) codes are based, are purely artificial. As Ereshefsky (2002: 309) stated, ‘they are ontologically empty designations’. Ranks were initially thought to be objective because, for Linnaeus, each rank reflected the plan of the Creator and could be recognized on the basis of…
So, it seems that 44 is the median age of depression. Old news, or at least it is for me. Although for 44 to be the median age of depression for me, I'd have to live until my late 70s. Right now, after a week of working on a grant application and dealing with my son returning to school, I'm not a happy camper, let me tell you. So blogging has been a low priority, and is likely to remain so. But this caught my eye. Some researchers have reconstructed the ancestral DNA of bacteria and worked out that it is (physically) adapted to higher temperatures. Or have they? There is a mathematical…
Reacting to Jerry Coyne's guest blog on The Loom, Brian Switek at Laelaps discusses, among other things, the objection to Darwin's theories that Huxley put forward, both in personal correspondence and in print: The only objections that have occurred to me are 1st that you have loaded yourself with an unnecessary difficulty in adopting 'Natura non facit saltum' so unreservedly. I believe she does make small jumps--and 2nd. it is not clear to me why if external physical conditions are of so little moment as you suppose variation should occur at all-- Darwin indeed used that phrase, which…
In 1972, David Raup published an influential paper on taxonomic diversity during the Phanerozoic. In that paper, he estimated extinction rates based on the number of fossil families and genera for the period and before and after. The idea was to estimate the "kill rate" of major disruptions in earth's history. A new paper by Sarda Sahney and Michael J. Benton attempts to do this for the Permian extinction, arguably the biggest of all time. They attempt to reconstruct the "guilds", or ecological roles communities, of the Permian, and assess the biological diversity in terms of taxonomic…
Larry Arnhart has a post up on how Huck Finn's moral quandary about turning in Jim, the escaped slave, as good religion said he should (at the time), when he has come to know and admire Jim as a man, displays the evolved nature of morality. I tend to agree with this view. Huck decides, "Very well then, I'll go to hell". Here's the entire passage, one of the greatest in English literature. Once I said to myself it would be a thousand times better for Jim to be a slave at home where his family was, as long as he'd got to be a slave, and so I'd better write a letter to Tom Sawyer and tell…
...said Charles Darwin, more than any man ever has. He should have, too - he spent seven years of his life working up the first encyclopedic monograph on the group. But that pales into insignificance compared to Alan Southward, who died last year. The Other 95% has a very nice roundup post on Southward's work on barnacles, including a just-published paper, which you should immediately go read. And some nice pictures of my favourite historical invert, the Gooseneck Barnacle that gave rise to the myth of the Barnacle Goose.
It is the default opinion of those who accept evolution and those who deny it, that before Darwin, or Lamarck at any rate, everyone was a special creationist. Even Darwin implies in the Origin that if one is not a transformist with regards to species, one is a special creationist. Is it true, and what work does "special" do when affixed to "creation"? It's important to know if only because of those interminable canards creationists of today in which science is supposed to be based on the work of creationists like Newton because they Christians, and didn't believe in evolution. As if one…
A little while back I published an article on species concepts in Reports of the National Center for Science Education, and I just discovered that it is available on the web. This is actually abetter format than the published version, which has weird columns and layout. The citation is Wilkins, John S. 2006. Species, Kinds, and Evolution. Reports of the National Center for Science Education 26 (4): 36-45.
Sorry I haven't blogged for a bit - I've been on the road, err, sky for a while. So it turns out that Texas, which seems to be the source of much antiscience reaction these days, has yet another problem, and it turns on what a species is. Texas named the Guadalupe bass its state fish in 1989. Now it seems that overfishing, and restocking waterways with another species, has led to the probable extinction by interbreeding of the state icon. kxan is reporting that the restocked fish, the small mouthed bass, was assumed to be infertile with the Guadalupe bass because it was a different…
Forget about the season; virgin births can happen any time of year... and anywhere. So there is an Ask a Scienceblogger question about virgin births. In zoology this is called "parthenogenesis" (which means "virgin birth"), and in botany it is either called "vegetative reproduction" (think: cuttings) or "apomixis", in which unfertilised seeds germinate. I want to talk today about what that means for our taxonomies. A long-standing reaction to the notion of there being asexual reproduction is that every novel individual, or any individual who has a mutant gene, would necessarily be its…
The term "radical" is a very loose term. It basically means "something that differs wildly from the consensus" in ordinary usage. So I hope David Williams and Malte Ebach won't take offense if I say that they have a radical interpretation of the nature of classification. In a couple of recent posts - one on Adolf Naef, and one on Molecular Systematics - they have presented some views on classification that do, indeed, differ from the received consensus. So, I need to blather a bit... The nature of classification is highly contested in biology, let alone the ancillary philosophical…
... a book was published that changed the way we thought of biology.
So now, I think it's worth asking what we really can achieve by doing sociobiological investigations, and some of the traps in previous attempts. Humans are animals. They are vertebrates, mammals, primates, and apes. Like other animals, their behaviours are formed, constrained, and in most cases fully dependent upon their biology, but the confounding factor in doing sociobiology is the trap of taking one's own culture, the culture of the researcher, as being "normal" and treating all other cultures as less than normal, or primitive, or in some other manner less than worthy, treating biases…
This is the fourth of a series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 Wilson and Wilson (W&W) then continue on to employ some recent work on individuals as groups, and the "major transitions" literature. Ed Wilson is well known for his idea of "superorganisms", in which eusocial hives or colonies of insects (his speciality) are treated evolutionarily as single organisms, resolving a problem Darwin had with these species' evolution. In other words, an ant colony is a fitness bearer. Here, W&W appeal to Lynn Margulis' theory of the eukaryotic cell as a symbiosis between prokaryotic cells to…